or two frantic weeks, Senator Trent Lott's remarks in praise of Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat past seemed to illuminate the nation's old ghosts of race, like a flashlight beaming into a dark attic.

The story — of the epic struggle in black and white to end segregation in the South — is vivid and wrenching, but it is one that left another question largely unasked: what about the rest of us? For some current experts on race in America, the outbursts of recrimination that led to Mr. Lott's decision on Friday to resign as Senate majority leader reflect a blind spot in the American view of race.

No one minimizes the evils of the segregated South. But, many historians and scholars say, when the rest of the nation sees racism, it looks at the South and particularly its past and proclaims, in effect: We have met the enemy and it is them.

"We don't seem to be able to talk about race unless it is something that happened in the past," said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "If it's in the present we like to shove it under the rug."

There are plenty of reasons why America's narrative of race often begins and ends in the South, but the South's racial history differs more in degree than in fundamental ways from the nation's.

Slavery died out in the North more for economic reasons than moral ones. When he made his journey across America in 1831 and 1832 Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than those where it still exists."

As historians have pointed out, Jim Crow was created in the North, not the South.

Legal segregation is long gone, but whites and blacks live apart much as they did in the South, and they more often live apart outside the South than inside it.

"Every time I come to New York, I say it's nice to be here in the heartland of segregation, because New York State ranks first in the school segregation level for blacks and Hispanics," said Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard. "If Northerners oppose school desegregation or the integration of the suburbs with affordable housing, that's not considered racism, though it has the effect of segregating blacks that is at least as damaging as it was in the South."

The latest study on school desegregation by Mr. Orfield's group found that 70 percent of black children attended predominantly minority schools in the 1989-99 school year, up from 66 percent in 1991-92 and 63 percent in 1980-81. More than a third were in schools almost as segregated as in the Old South, with 9 of 10 students black or Hispanic.

The study also found that minority students were most likely to go to schools with whites in the South and that, by two measures, the states with the most segregated schools were New York, Michigan, Illinois and California.

A recent census report, "Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregations in the United States: 1980-2000," found American housing still largely segregated, with the worst segregation in the Northeast and Midwest. It found that the most segregated metropolitan area is Detroit, followed by Milwaukee, New York, Newark and Chicago.

Some people said last week that they hoped the debate over Senator Lott's remarks could broaden to include today's racial issues, like enforcement of open housing laws.

OTHERS argue that issues like busing, exclusionary zoning and affirmative action are murkier and the remedies less certain than when the issue was the need to dismantle Jim Crow in the South. Similarly, many suburbanites, North and South, balk at the notion that wealthy suburbs segregated by income are equivalent to a society of white and black water fountains and schools segregated by color.

Whatever the cause, the focus remains on the South and the past.

"I suppose there's something deathless about the Southern white stereotype," said Jack Temple Kirby, a historian at Miami University of Ohio and author of "Media-Made Dixie," a study of popular depictions of the South. "And now this fool from Mississippi is bringing it back like a speeding bullet."

Fool or not, Mr. Lott will most likely become a far less conspicuous figure now. Professor Massey said that is not necessarily a good thing.

"The worst thing that could happen," he said, "would be if we just fire Trent Lott, say he's a relic from the past and just move on."