There is no evidence to suggest Lott is a racist.
Huh? Have you been listening to Fox again?
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workingforchange.com
Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
12.18.02
Trent Lott fatigue
What's up next for Senator Trent Lott's Apology Tour? Now that he has done BET, will he be sniveling on Oprah, gettin' jiggy-wit’-it on MTV Jams, dropping by the Sean John Bad Boy bash, guest hosting Soul Train, or marching in the Grambling University band during halftime of the Grambling/Southern University football game?
Whatever it is, and wherever he may show up, I'm sorry, I've had it up to here with Trent Lott and the whole Trent Lott affair. Some are saying that Lott may not last until the January 6th meeting of the Republican caucus -- I'm assuming that the he won't "last" thing refers to his position as Senate Majority Leader, and not his existence. As to Lott's political fate, frankly my dears I'm approaching the "could care less" stage, having heard more than enough blather on this subject to keep a numbers of news networks going for days.
Yes, yes, yes, Sen. Trent Lott is a racist. And Barry Bonds hits home runs. And Robert DeNiro plays gangsters in the movies. And Al Gore is once and forever America's presidential candidate… whoops. (Here's a sobering thought: Maybe the press won't have Al Gore to kick around any more!) Anyway, I think you get my drift.
The only thing more shameful than Sen. Lott's racism is how well it's been hidden from the public over the past several decades. How did this man, with such a despicable voting record, rise to become the Republican Party's top dog in the Senate? How did it happen? With ease! Lott has been the living and breathing embodiment of the GOP's Southern Strategy. In fact, Lott, the dude with the funny hair-do, has been the smiley face with a nasty agenda.
As Cynthia Tucker pointed out in a recent column, the advent of the GOP's Southern strategy was traced by Earl and Merle Black in their book "The Rise of Southern Republicans," to the party's 1964 standard bearer, Barry Goldwater. His campaign, Tucker writes, was built on "a state's rights platform that rejected desegregation."
According to Earl and Merle Black, Republicans "attracted many racist Southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters... Gradually, a new Southern politics emerged in which blacks and liberal-to-moderate whites anchored the Democratic Party while many conservatives and some moderate whites formed as growing Republican Party that owed little to Abraham Lincoln but much to Goldwater."
And, sure enough, shortly after that historic realignment began, along came Trent Lott.
Lott & the CCC
Lott is fighting for his political life -- and his strange relationship with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a reincarnation of the racist White Citizen's Councils of the South, is not providing a lifeline. Writers in the group's newspaper, the Citizens Informer, have described interracial marriage as "an effort to destroy Western civilization," and on its website, Martin Luther King Jr. is considered a "liar" and "sex addict." Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on the other hand is seen one of history's great American patriots.
Back in 1999, after revelations about Lott's CCC relationship began to emerge in the press, he said that he didn't really know much about the group. Yet in 1992, Lott delivered a keynote address to the group, saying: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries."
Leonard Zeskind, a Kansas City author who has researched white supremacist groups for more than a quarter of a century, knows something about the history of the CCC. He told the Kansas City Star that the CCC had "a several-year track record of successfully marrying the white supremacist fringe types with local and state Republican politicians and thereby having an influence in the mainstream discourse."
Zeskind said the CCC plays the role of a "bridge group" that connects openly racist right-wing groups to pragmatic politics. Though there may be no evidence suggesting the CCC holds the violent views or intentions of racist groups such as the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation, its perspectives on race are much the same, Zeskind told reporter Scott Canon.
The Lott record
And the way those perspectives get realized is through the lifetime dedication of folks like Trent Lott. Lott is the Zelig-in-sheets of the civil rights era. He began his political career in 1968 as an administrative assistant to US Rep. William M. Colmer, a one-time Dixiecrat and staunch segregationist; before that he fought against blacks entering fraternities at his precious University of Mississippi; in 1978, he fought to restore the U.S. citizenship of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy; he lobbied long and hard against establishing a Martin Luther King national holiday in 1983; he voted against extending the Voting Rights Act in 1981 -- blah, blah, blah -- you know all this already and if you don't, check out Tim Dickinson's retrospective on Lott titled "A Lott to Answer For".
As author/columnist Earl Orfari Hutchinson pointed out on the Radio KPFA Morning Show on December 17, Lott's racism has played well in its various guises -- be it carrying out the Party's anti-affirmative action policies, its so-called welfare reform initiative, or environmental policies that adversely effect minority communities.
Now, because of his "intemperate" remarks -- not his lifelong history of racism -- says Hutchinson, Lott has become an "impediment to the Bush agenda." Once he was an ideal representative of the Party's benign neglect toward African Americans -- although some party operatives thought him not up to the task of pushing its agenda forward fast enough. Now the boil that has been Lott's record has been publicly lanced and the ooze we are witnessing is the accumulation of all he has fought for throughout his public life. Having a slimy record is one thing, getting the damned thing lanced in public is an embarrassment for the president.
And doesn't it strike you as strange that in all the interviews where Lott has talked of reconciliation and reinventing himself as a spokesperson for the human rights for all people, no one has thought to ask the Senator whether he stands by the bigoted and offensive remarks he made about gays and lesbians in 1998? The San Francisco Chronicle's Washington bureau chief claims that in a radio interview Lott "cast same-sex love as an affliction and a sin, comparable to alcoholism, kleptomania and sex addiction."
Carrying it on
So who will be the next Trent Lott? Some are saying it will be Oklahoma's Senator Don Nickles. Hutchinson pointed out that according to the NAACP, the good Senator Nickles had a worse voting record in the 106th Congress than Senator Lott.
Let me suggest that the scrutiny now given to Lott's record be replicated ten-fold by journalists investigating the record of President Bush's judicial and other appointees. Folks either missed or were all-too-willing to overlook the fact that in 1998, Attorney General John Ashcroft, then a U.S. Senator from Missouri, said in an interview with Southern Partisan magazine, a publication described by Cynthia Tucker as "the last redoubt of secessionism," that "Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis... We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."
African Americans know clearly what white Americans have such difficulty understanding; that racism is alive and well in America. Every time there's an incident that draws media heat, like the Rodney King beating, the torturing of Abner Louima, the murder of Amadou Diallo, and now the Lott affair, the media gets fired up for maybe a nanosecond. Rarely is attention paid to deeper questions about matters of race in this country.
It's time for Senator Lott to step down as Senate Majority Leader and relinquish his Senate seat as well. And it's time for the media to move on, but not to put the whole thing behind them. Lott's resignation should not end the story. Despite all the chest-thumping by conservatives, you can bet that the backrooms of the Washington, DC-based right-wing think tanks and state policy institutes are chock full of Lott-like clones readying initiatives detrimental to African Americans. You don't have to stand in the doorway or block up the halls to know that even though the sound bites they are a changing, racism in other guises and with other code words marches on. And that, my friends, is the aspect of the whole tiresome Lott affair that should be given a good airing. For more please see the Bill Berkowitz archive.
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right. |
