In a recent analysis about the effect of the 2008 presidential race on the South, Newseek writer Christopher Dickey’s treatment of this much-maligned region of the country, like most leftist treatments of it, holds the fundamental assumption that Southern white inhabitants have been and continue to be just short of uniquely “racist.”

Though it is far too seldom remarked upon, there is no small number of Republican “rightists” who entertain this idea as well.

Yet in spite of its ubiquitous grip on the guardians of our “politically correct” orthodoxy, this is an idea that is at once thoroughly false and profoundly offensive.

When writers like Dickey make references to the “racism” of “Southerners,” it is to Southern whites that they allude. For example, when politicians, both Democrats and Republicans (like John McCain in 2000), attempt to make the Confederate flag a political issue, they seek to exploit this perception of the incorrigibly “racist” South, a perception that they themselves have labored tirelessly to impress upon the American psyche, so as to simultaneously advance their political ambitions while reaping the psychological and emotional benefits that accompany a belief in one’s own moral superiority.

It is indeed for the sake of cheap virtue that so many -- both black and white, Democrat and Republican -- have taken to castigating Southern whites. In deploring the “racism” of Southern whites, non-Southern whites style themselves “anti-racists” and, in so doing, ingratiate themselves to the agents of “political correctness.” Black critics of the South, by furthering the conventional narrative of perpetual black suffering and evil white oppression, succeed in deflecting attention from the outrageous levels of black-on-white crime and other pathological conduct of the black under- and lower-classes.

Yet this election season could substantially upset this racial melodrama that pop-culture phenomena like Roots and Amistad have done so much to reinforce in the American imagination.

Now that Barack Obama is about to secure a major national political party’s nomination for the highest office in the land, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain the poisonous fiction that (white) America is mired in “racism” (even though the race merchants will never stop trying). Since Obama has depicted himself as a “unifier,” and since he cannot win the national election unless he can pick up Southern states, belittled Southern whites finally have their opportunity to challenge him. For that matter, they have their opportunity to put McCain’s feet to the fire as well.

Southern whites ought to ask our two candidates flat out: “Do you believe that we are the bunch of ‘racist,’ ‘Bible-thumping,’ ‘gun-toting’,’ ‘truck driving,’ ‘tobacco chewing,’ red-necks that the peddlers of cheap virtue have construed us as being?”

Neither Obama nor McCain will answer such a direct question in the affirmative. Yet when they deny that this is an image of the white Southerner that they endorse, Southerners should not rest: “What do you think of us, then, and why? Furthermore, what have you done, and/or what do you plan on doing, to dismantle this hideously unfair caricature of us?”

Since neither Obama nor McCain has said or done anything in the past to show their support for white Southerners in this regard, it would be interesting indeed to hear their answers to these questions.

This election season is the South’s chance to prove once and for all that from this moment forward, assaults against it will come at a heavy price.