In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court arguments over the Voting Rights Act, the geography of racism is once again a topic of debate. None other than Chief Justice John Roberts kicked things off when he asked the act’s defenders—that would be the U.S. government—a 20-word question that brilliantly framed the entire debate: “Is it the government’s submission that the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North?” Roberts asked, pinning a very ragged tail on a very ugly donkey.

Unlike most debates about this question, this one has real implications. The landmark act requires that areas of the country with a particularly virulent history of racial discrimination must receive federal approval before making changes in their voting laws. To no one’s surprise, the majority of the states covered by Section 5 are located in the South. If the answer is “yes,” then a reasonable case can be made for upholding the existing law.

But I can’t help thinking that no one is going to be convinced. People see the words “racism” and “South” and, whatever their level of social enlightenment or position on immigration reform, their view is already fixed. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from doctrinaire northern liberals convinced that the entire South is one federal restriction away from launching a wistful, slave days lynch-fest, or if it’s shouted from the ramparts by hayfoot rebel martyrs who know in their hearts that New York, Detroit, or Chicago are the true racist hellscapes and that everyone north of the Ohio River who ever opened a perfidious Yankee textbook has been tricked by a litany of briar patch falsehoods and trailer gentry stereotypes.

Last year, I wrote a book about the South. It was not what you’d call a warm, loving embrace. All the same, the portion of the book where I tried to study the subject of Roberts’s question was the hardest to write. I tried to find a magic formula, aggregate statistics, gather a collection of irrefutable facts to show that what I felt to be true, what many of us feel to be true, is in fact the truth—that Southerners really are more racist than the rest of us. But the truth about bigotry in Dixie is that, with one or two exceptions (we’ll get there in a minute), you cannot prove that racism is worse in the South than it is anywhere else in the country.

From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Roots to Django Unchained, a mountain of actual history and popular imagery would seem to support a view of Southerners as uncompromising bigots. From the Jena Six to Trayvon Martin, recent anecdotal evidence is as depressingly familiar as it is compelling. There are scholars who will talk to you for hours about the Southern centrality to racism. At Texas A&M University, Pulitzer Prize nominee, prolific author and sociology professor Joe Feagin told me a couple years ago that, “structural racism is much stronger in the South.”