Trent Lott is an idiot. I don't mean that in the traditional "Can you name all of the presidents in order of incompetence, beginning with Millard Fillmore?" sense. He's a bright enough guy. I think he's got a law degree or something.

I'm talking about common sense. Lott is still in hot water for comments he made at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. He tried to explain away his apparent endorsement of segregation as "trying to make an old man happy."

If we're talking about Senator Strom, five minutes with a ten-dollar hooker would've made him much happier than any senseless flattery. But that's another story completely.

During his press conference Friday, where he apologized once again in front of a hometown crowd, Lott talked himself into more trouble. I didn't write down the exact quote, but there was a point where he said something like "My daddy was a sharecropper, and we were poor."

Again, I can't quote directly, but I seem to recall the opening line to Steve Martin's movie The Jerk as being "I was born to poor black sharecroppers in Mississippi." Maybe it was Alabama. Doesn't matter. The fact is that Lott tried to buy sympathy from black Mississippians by saying he started out life like most blacks, in a sharecropper's family. Even if most blacks, even black Mississippians, aren't sharecroppers. Or poor (as defined by the poverty line), for that matter.

I'm not picking apart his speech for fun and games. I think statements like the sharecropper one and many others that he's made illustrate Lott's passive racism. That is, Lott probably isn't a racist in the sense of "Let's put on some white hoods, score us some crosses and creosote and have us a good ole time." But he's got this vision of the world where there are white people, and then there's everybody else, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice notwithstanding.

Spike Lee has often remarked that all white people are racist. While I think the word "all" is a bit excessive, he's probably not far off--at least when talking about this passive form of racism. Idiosyncratic world views are bad enough, but real problems emerge when people can't recognize bigotry when they commit it.

Let's try a thought experiment. You walk into a room. In it sit two young men. Both are equally well-dressed and coiffed. They both appear to be exceedingly nice young men. One is black and the other is white. You are then given the choice of speaking to one and not the other. Which one do you choose?

If you're being honest, chances are you chose the person whose race matches yours. I ran this same notion past my wife, with the difference between the people being one of gender and not race. You can see where this gets sticky quite quickly.

Like every other person around, I'm conscious of race. I would have answered that question by saying I would talk to the black guy. Every time. My rationale is that I don't like most well-dressed white people. Too many of them are whiny conservatives who think they know everything. I would guess that most people would have similarly disingenuous reasons for picking one or the other.

I have white guilt. While I don't happen to believe that many black people are poor solely because of the policies of white America, I do think there are a number of societal causes for a number of problems within the general black community. An example: For years newly-integrated schools hounded many blacks, particularly young men, out of their classrooms. This sort of thing happens less often these days, but the fact remains that there are still relatively few role models for black students who want an education. And the parents of today's children are often hostile to schooling precisely because of what they and their parents went through.

I'm sure Lott would defend his probable choice of the white man as simple "cultural affinity." And this is precisely the error that passive racists make. Race is not culture. Period.

When I was a kid, I lived in Kansas City for three years. In what might have been called the inner city, though our neighborhood wasn't as rough-and-tumble as most. I knew poor kids, middle-class kids and rich kids. During my two years of elementary school there, I identified with my fellow subsidized-lunch mates, be they black, white or whatever. There were a couple rich black kids in my classes, and they often looked down on me. I didn't have tickets to go see "Annie" when it came to town. I didn't have the money to buy the latest Star Wars figure on the day of its release. My dad didn't have the money to buy Royals season tickets. Of course, very few kids at my school could claim any of those things. But we knew our places, and that pecking order generally was determined by scholastic achievement and by family income. Race was not a particularly important factor.

I spent one year in junior high in Kansas City, and that experience was totally different. This junior high was the first magnet school in the district, and it was created in an attempt to comply with a desegregation order. I was there during the school's second year as "Lincoln Academy." The school wasn't divided by walls but rather by race. Before becoming a magnet, Lincoln was almost entirely black. In fact, Lincoln High School was the black high school back in segregation days. The idea behind "Lincoln Academy" (a name which applies to both the junior and senior high schools) was to attract as many whites as possible, which meant that just about any white student (regardless of academic achievement) in the district could get into the accelerated program, but if you were black you had next to no chance of acceptance. Despite being in a school that was 80 percent black, most of my classes were almost entirely white. The resentment against white students was palpable, especially from those who could've made the grade but were turned away from the "good classes" because of their race. Class meant nothing. Scholastic performance meant nothing. Race meant everything. Same city, same school district, completely different situation.

What I learned from this is how to examine my feelings, how to look at a situation and not immediately ascribe a cause to what I see. Situations (even those like Lott's racism) are always more complicated than they seem on the surface.

I now live in Durham, N.C., where race and education are huge issues. The fact is that black students consistently perform worse on standardized tests than white students, even when scores are broken down by social class. Does this mean black kids are dumber than white kids? Does this mean teachers don't work as hard to teach black kids? Does this mean black parents don't value education as much as white parents? Does this mean the test is somehow skewed against black kids?

I don't know--though I'm pretty sure that a particular quantity of melanin doesn't make one person smarter or dumber than another. The scholastic achievement gap is a complicated problem. There are no easy answers or quick fixes. Same goes for Trent Lott's racism. I'm sure he doesn't intentionally do things to hurt people who aren't white. He just doesn't see much to help them, either. And he surely doesn't recognize a racist act (say, voting against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday) when he commits it.

As Charles Krauthammer (a man whose columns I generally find to be ill-conceived and poorly-parsed) wrote in a brilliant op-ed piece last week, Lott has not only disqualified himself as a Republican leader, he has removed any reason for him to be an American leader of any sort. By ignoring the importance of the civil rights movement, by failing to acknowledge his own beliefs and by attempting to explain away his horrifying comments as "a poor choice of words," he's proven once again that he just doesn't get it. Trent Lott is a racist. He's got to stand up and admit it. His personal healing can begin only when he accepts that he has a problem.

That's just not going to happen. The sad fact of the matter is that our society will have to wait for Lott and people like him to die before it becomes more tolerant and inclusive.

It's a slow and halting process, but social progress is inevitable. Boneheads like Lott merely point out how far we have to go before we can say our society can truthfully be described as "We, the people," and not "We, the white and the black and the brown and the yellow and the red and the green and the purple and..."

Jon Worley knew Trent Lott was in trouble when the guys on ESPN's "Pardon the Interruption" referred to the soon-to-be Republican majority leader as "scum" and "pure trash."