Imagine you’re a writer for the New York Times, a newspaper that many people believe is politically and culturally out of touch with the South. Shouldn’t you try to avoid using words like “inbred” when writing about the region?

This new wave of historians, many of them young, believe that one cannot understand today’s housing, schooling, economic development or political patterns without understanding the mostly apolitical white Southerners of that era. None of these scholars play down the inbred racism of the region, but they argue that the focus on race can obscure broader economic and demographic changes, like the dizzying corporate growth, the migration of white Northerners to the South and the shifting emphasis on class interests after legal segregation ended.

Obviously, the writer (Patricia Cohen) is referring to historic patterns of racism among whites in the region, but it’s a regrettable word choice to say the least. If she had been writing about a minority group instead, there would have been an uproar.

Postscript: To complicate the picture, it’s worth noting that a recent Washington Post profile of pollster Mark Penn referred to his “deep roots in the national security wing of the Democratic Party, along with other centrist Democrats — some of them Jewish and pro-Israel, like Penn — who saw the merits of invading Iraq before the war began.” The cultural biases of the national media are more complex than most people recognize…