It doesn’t take a sociologist to tell you that there’s nothing “post-racial” about our country. Take the death of Frederick Jermaine Carter, found last Dec. 3 hanging from a tree in a predominately white part of Mississippi. The death was ruled a suicide by the county coroner, who cited Carter’s history of mental illness. It’s difficult to take the official explanation seriously, given the region’s history and Carter’s purported choice of location and method.

Coroners are not infallible: The recent death of Michigan banker David Widlak hastily was ruled a suicide, as the initial autopsy failed to discover that he had been shot execution style in the back of the head.

You might have heard about the incendiary comments from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. In his best shot at revisionist history, Barbour praised the white supremacist White Citizens’ Councils, claiming that it helped bring about integration in Yazoo City, Miss.

The actual historical record suggests the opposite: The citizens’ councils were adamantly pro-segregation, publishing in newspapers the names of signatories to petitions for integration — an intimidation tactic that often weakened petitions enough to halt integration, as happened in Yazoo City.

School integration remains an issue today. In North Carolina, the recently elected Tea Party-backed school board of Wake County removed a busing policy aimed at school integration. The policy had been changed in 2000 to affect socioeconomic rather than racial integration, which wasn’t much of a drastic change given de facto segregation and racial economic disparities.

The district’s busing apparently had been academically effective: Most of its students’ reading and math scores improved last year, and in 2007 the district’s graduation rate was ranked 17th of the nation’s 50 largest districts. With only 10 percent of its students being bused and most of the rides no farther than five miles, the busing was hardly a major drain on county resources.

While it’s typical for inner city schools to do poorly compared to their suburban counterparts, Wake County — a large district with urban and suburban areas — has been an exception to the rule. It is likely impoverished students will now be concentrated in particular schools, a fact the new school board has spun in a way that would make Karl Rove blush.

“If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty,” boardmember John Tedesco said, “the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful.”

That’s exactly how it works — look at Detroit!

These anecdotes only are three of many. Also worth mentioning: Dr. Henry Louis Gates being arrested at his own home, the right-wing hatchet job on former federal employee Shirley Sherrod or the Center for Disease Control’s latest report on the racial disparities in health care (among other things, black infant mortality is one and a half to three times higher than that of whites). But the fact is that one doesn’t need anecdotes to see that the work of Dr. King is far from finished.

Statistics help complete the story: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of incarceration for black men is six times that of whites. Gross economic inequality abounds, as well as differences in life expectancy and virtually any measure of quality of life.

While some privileged members of our society whine about how oppressed they are by political correctness, and the politically correct crowd wastes time on misguided censorship of Mark Twain (an anti-racist if ever there was one), real racial injustice continues to undermine America’s prosperity and moral health.

Joel Reinstein is a State News guest columnist and a Residential College in the Arts and Humanities senior. Reach him at reinste5@msu.edu