Lott's Love Affair With Racism
" Lott is above all else a politician, and his playing the race card, while periodically
impolitic, has been the consistent subtext of Republican campaigns for decades,
even in national races. Recall Lee Atwater's use of the Willie Horton scare
endorsed by the elder George Bush in his winning campaign against Michael
Dukakis or the intimidating attacks on black voting in Florida and elsewhere in the
2000 presidential election."
Robert Scheer
December 17, 2002
E-mail story
latimes.com
Did Trent Lott's mother, who once publicly
recommended that a bullet be put through the head of a
local editor who supported integration, raise the future
senator to be a bigot? Or was it his favorite uncle, Arnie
Watson, a leader of the White Citizens Council -- a
more respectable version of the Ku Klux Klan -- who
inspired the senator's lifelong love affair with race hate?
Other white Southerners, such as Jimmy Carter and Bill
Clinton, managed a bold break with the evil ways of
their elders, but not Lott. After a week of meandering
apologia, the best the Senate Republican leader could
muster for his recent, but not first, celebration of Strom
Thurmond as a representative of the good old days of
segregation is that he -- Lott -- is a hapless product of
the prevailing racism of his youth: "I grew up in an
environment that condoned policies and views that we
now know were wrong."
Now know were wrong? "Now," as in last week, when
Lott was roundly denounced, even by the president, for
views he'd held all his life? Or is it "now" as in this
week, when a Republican rival is publicly gunning for his
job as Senate majority leader? Or "now" as in his
keynote address in 1992 to the neo-segregationist
Council of Conservative Citizens, in which he was
quoted as saying: "The people in this room stand for the
right principles and the right philosophy."
In fact, race-baiting, though generally more subtle than
Lott's embrace of Thurmond's 1948 campaign for a
segregated nation, is what gave the GOP dominance in
the Deep South, and Lott has long been one of its main
practitioners. The so-called Southern strategy, given its
fullest support by Richard Nixon three decades ago,
successfully aimed at recruiting the white racist
Dixiecrats who had been uncomfortable with the
Democratic Party since President Truman's 1947 order
to desegregate the Navy.
When Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans
turned their backs on Lincoln and pro-civil rights Republican moderates like
Dwight Eisenhower and became the refuge of eternally aggrieved Southern
racists.
Lott was one of those recruits, leaving his job as top aide to a retiring
segregationist Democrat and running with his mentor's support and money as a
Republican, on Nixon's coattails, in 1972. In the Senate, Lott outdid Thurmond
himself when it came to being a racial reactionary, opposing establishment of a
Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and extension of the Voting Rights Act.
Lott is above all else a politician, and his playing the race card, while periodically
impolitic, has been the consistent subtext of Republican campaigns for decades,
even in national races. Recall Lee Atwater's use of the Willie Horton scare
endorsed by the elder George Bush in his winning campaign against Michael
Dukakis or the intimidating attacks on black voting in Florida and elsewhere in the
2000 presidential election.
Perhaps with President Bush's belated but forthright condemnation of Lott, this
vicious opportunism will be abandoned and the GOP again will become the party of
Eisenhower, who used federal troops to enforce school desegregation.
It is interesting to note that prominent African American Republicans Colin Powell
and Condoleezza Rice have ignored Lott's appeals for support in his current crisis.
What Republicans must realize is that despite Lott's various stabs at apology, what
he will not concede is that racism -- real, powerful, cancerous -- continues to haunt
the nation and that the destruction of the black family, in particular, is the direct
consequence of an organized system of slavery and segregation that aimed at
destroying not only equal opportunity but the very humanity of black people.
Though nearly every group of immigrants to the United States has been
discriminated against to some extent, none arrived en masse in shackles as African
Americans did. Nor was any other group kept in the bondage of legal segregation
for an additional century.
Racial prejudice continues to be the United States' Achilles heel, yet there has
been an increasing denial of the obligation to make good on its enduring debt to
black people. Even the mildest affirmative action programs are under attack.
Perhaps, thanks to Lott's most recent indiscretion, we may begin to more seriously
confront the ongoing duty to right racism. |
