If you didn’t know any better, you would be surprised to learn that Trump is from the northern, highly liberal city of New York. In school, we are taught about the depravities of the South that led to the Civil War, in spite of the fact that slaves were held all throughout the other colonies, too. If we’re lucky, we learn too about the Reconstruction, and maybe later about Jim Crow. But the narrative is the same: the South was bad, the North was good. Yet when Martin Luther King Jr. visited Chicago in 1966, he stepped out of his car only to be hit in the head with a rock. “I have never seen,” he told reporters, “even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”

The fact is that, despite having fought against slavery in the Civil War, when it came time to actually face the realities of racial integration, the Northern states balked. This might not seem so surprising given that even Northern abolitionists didn’t always consider black people equals despite opposing slavery on religious grounds — not because they considered black people fully human, but rather because slavery was a stain on the white man’s moral values. But these parts of the record are inconvenient and messy.

The point is that segregation became the norm. During the Great Migration, former slaves and their descendants found themselves in deeply segregated communities from Chicago to Boston, largely due to redlining. White flight made this segregation even more extreme, as white people left cities for the suburbs to escape their incoming black counterparts. After World War II, the GI Bill gave disbursement authority to state-level systems and banks, and rewarded white soldiers with nearly no-interest loans; black soldiers received nearly nothing. This resulted in some of the worst de facto segregation in the country, mostly in the North.

10 years after Dr. King was beaned with a rock, a junior senator from Delaware reversed his stance on busing and worked with segregationist politicians in the South to fight the policy. That Senator was Joe Biden. His earlier support of busing as a tool for enforcing Brown v. Board of Education was deeply unpopular with his constituents, who confronted him about it in town hall meetings back home. But Delaware wasn’t the only state up in arms about desegregation. Massachusetts, too, saw civil unrest that captured the nation’s attention from 1974 to 1976. There were white riots in the streets of Boston from anti-integration organizations like ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). People were injured and at least one black man was killed. The fighting eventually died down as anti-integration crusaders failed to reverse the city’s policy but the movement did not go away. They chipped away at court-ordered busing until, in 1987, they finally won local control over how to implement desegregation.

In state after state, mandatory busing was eliminated, and schools throughout the North became increasingly segregated. Today, the most racially segregated public school system is in New York state. In fact, as of 2012, only two of the 10 most segregated public school systems were in formerly Confederate states: Mississippi (seventh) and Tennessee (ninth).

My own hometown of Seattle, Washington (a liberal enclave if there ever was one) methodically dismantled the practice of busing and, more generally, true school integration over the course of about 20 years. In cases where white families could not fight busing, they sent their kids to private schools, moved out of the districts, or created “magnet” programs that effectively established small pockets of whiteness within schools that were otherwise majority minority students.

National elections aside, the North-South dichotomy is not quite as useful now. We understand that racists and racist practices exist everywhere. But a new dichotomy has been erected in its place: liberal-conservative. If Baldwin were alive today, he might have used this dichotomy to make his point, because the same misguided deflection holds true.

But what is more insidious and more difficult to address: a prejudice openly expressed, or one buried so deep that it cannot even be acknowledged?

White liberals believe in desegregation in principle — just as long as their children don’t have to go to the desegregated schools. Most of these Massachusetts, Delaware, and Washington parents would not call themselves racist. Their ire is nominally directed toward the onerousness of having to travel out of their neighborhood for schooling, and their assessments that the schools their children would be bused to are inferior. And this second point is in many cases certainly true. But it’s true because of the way those schools are funded, with property taxes from the area surrounding them which have been segregated for decades, the result of the reasons I cited above. In other words, racism is the root cause. These white parents are actively participating in and perpetuating a racist policy.

The story that conservatives are racist and liberals are not, as with the older story about Southern and Northern states, is the simpler story. It’s digestible and — along with the fact that since the ’60s, liberal sensibilities have held the moral high ground if not always the executive power — wraps up the cultural conversation with a tidy bow. But what is more insidious and more difficult to address: a prejudice openly expressed, or one buried so deeply that it cannot even be acknowledged?