In 1965, the year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, it did not take much detective work to discover how some of the South’s most powerful white politicians felt about their Black neighbors. Sen. James Eastland, D-Miss., who wanted to kill the landmark legislation, once openly stated that Black people were an “an inferior race.” During his 1963 inauguration speech, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, a Democrat, infamously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” These days, such racism, at least when directed at Black people, is rarely openly expressed by white Southern politicians, who consider it to be immoral, bad politics, bad manners — or all of the above. But a question central to the Southern experience lingers: Has anti-Black racism eased, or has discrimination against African Americans simply become more subtle, disguised as a web of rules embedded in regular partisan politics?…