It took a week, but our nation's top leader finally mustered enough courage to smack the Senate's highest-ranking lawmaker on the knuckles.

President Bush scolded Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott last week, calling "offensive" Mr. Lott's glorification of our country's unjust and violent history of racial segregation.

"Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong," Mr. Bush told a multiracial audience in Philadelphia on Thursday. "Every day that our nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful to our founding ideals."

Mr. Lott had tried to praise Sen. Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party by saying the country would have been better off had he been elected president in 1948. Sen. Thurmond was a South Carolina segregationist at the time.

Sen. Lott has apologized repeatedly since. But if his statements don't reflect the spirit of our country, they certainly describe its prevailing attitude.

The pot meets kettle

Let's face it, our nation's leaders may claim segregation isn't the American Way, but it certainly is the way most Americans live.

The races - especially blacks and whites - remain divided and unequal on so many fronts it defies calculation. And while we've crossed galaxies in our progress toward fairness and equity in our laws, we've taken mere baby steps in our personal, professional and social lives.

I'm generalizing, of course. There are many exceptions to this rule. But so far, the rule is that laws don't change people's hearts and minds. Mr. Lott inadvertently held a mirror up to our hypocrisy.

For instance, despite our strong federal and state laws prohibiting housing discrimination, racial steering in real estate and mortgage and insurance redlining, we still find ways to keep our homefront racially homogeneous.

According to a recent Lewis Mumford Center report, the average white person lives in a neighborhood that is 80 percent white. The average black person lives in a neighborhood that is 33 percent white

Tiny steps to diversity

Now let's look at our schools.

The average white child attends a school that is more than 78 percent white, according to another Mumford study of the 1999-2000 school year.

The average black child's school is more than 57 percent black. Plus, the average black child's exposure to white children has declined. Ten years earlier, in 1989-90, 32 percent of a black child's schoolmates were white, but in 1999-2000, just 28 percent were white.

Ethnic isolation characterizes Hispanics and Asians, too, Mumford says. In 1999-2000, the average Hispanic child's school was 57 percent Hispanic, and the average Asian child attended a school that was 19 percent Asian. Asians are only 4 percent of the U.S. populace.

School resegregation grew substantially even as neighborhood segregation declined slightly in metro areas like Cincinnati's.One reason, the study says, is that courts have abandoned Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that nearly 50 years ago struck down racial segregation in schools.

It's not just our schools and homes. Racial and other kinds of segregation limit access to the upper and middle echelons of employment and to all levels of politics.

Which brings us back to Sen. Lott. Politicos on both sides are right to criticize him, but that won't be enough.

Our leaders need to do more to lead this nation toward greater racial equality. Last week our government was arguing before the Supreme Court in favor of cross burners in Virginia.

Are we sure we aren't the country that Mr. Lott paints us to be?

Email damos@enquirer.com or phone 768-8395.