It's MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY, goddamn it!

Last night (ironically, the first Friday the 13th of the new year), the mayor of Biloxi put out a tweet that rather specifically did not call Monday's holiday "Martin Luther King Day."

It was a fascinatingly specific error (yes, let's just call it an "error," shall we?), but they left it up overnight, finally deleting it this morning, and a lot of the Twitterverse noticed. My personal favorite response was this.

when u see what @CityofBiloxi did for the day acknowledging you pic.twitter.com/C6PufnXECK

— Large ☀️☀️of Anarchy (@JumpinJackFlask) January 14, 2017

Let's remember that Biloxi, Mississippi was the site of the infamous "wade-ins" in 1960, to protest the fact that the miles of available beach in Biloxi were "whites only," with only tiny "colored" bits of beach available. (That one didn't end well for the protesters in Biloxi, by the way, although it did bring the city to national attention).

Of course, the whole state has a terrible history in the civil rights annals - they didn't call the movie "Alabama Burning," after all.

And let's add this little detail to that list of Mississippi's record on civil rights:

1. In 1910, the state passed a law to honor January 19 as Robert E Lee's birthday.


2. In 1983, Reagan made Martin Luther King's Day a federal holiday, observed on the third Monday in January


3. In 1987, calling it a "cost-saving measure," the state of Mississippi combined the two holidays, in a move that most people understand was a backhanded insult to King (MLK Day was already a Federal holiday - you want to lose a holiday? Accept that you probably shouldn't have a day honoring somebody who committed treason, and get rid of that one.)

And then, in 2017, the mayor of Biloxi decided that the combined holiday needed a name, since everybody was still referring to it by the name of that Negro. A move which he probably regrets, since he's been trying to walk it back all day.

Remember, as we enter the Trump Era, undercover racists are going to keep trying to do this kind of crap.

Are Democrats racist?

Wandering around the conservative end of the internet, every so often I'll slam up against the phrase "the Democrat Party is the most racist!" Usually misspelled, and often in all-caps.

It's easy to refute, but you end up knocking down the same arguments, over and over. For example:

The Democrats are the Party of the Klan

Now, it's true that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Democrat even before he set up the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (there have been three, if you're curious). And it's also true that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican when he was first elected.

(Fun fact: Lincoln left the Republican Party at the end of his first term. Republicans are rarely aware of that: for his second term, Lincoln created the National Union Party, a coalition party made up of both Republicans and Democrats.)

But here's the thing: at that point in time, the Republican Party was liberal, and the Democratic Party was conservative. (This fact particularly angers the Teabaggers, who've been brainwashed to think that liberalism is synonymous with "evil.") And from the Civil War to about 1950, the Southern Democrats (sometimes called "Dixiecrats") were among the most conservative (and usually racist) people in America.

In 1948, though, Truman, as the Democratic candidate, put forward a very mild civil rights platform, and that was too much for the Southern Democrats: 35 of them walked out of the Democratic National Convention, and they split off into their own political party, called the States Rights Democratic Party (a.k.a. "Dixiecrats," a term which has been used ever since for hyper-conservative Southern Democrats).

The Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond for president, and actually managed to carry four states (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina) along with one stray electoral vote from Tennessee. (Incidentally, that, plus the 39 electoral votes drained from Truman by Progressive Party nominee Henry A. Wallace, was expected to have produced a Republican victory, which is why we have the most famous newspaper flub of all time.)

The Dixiecrats never ran another presidential candidate, and eventually the party dissolved. And following that victory, the liberal Democrats became a stronger and stronger force in the party, eventually reversing the formerly conservative platforms, and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This same action, of course, drew the Republican Party to the right, in an effort to pick up the disillusioned Southern Democrats.

Following the 1964 Civil Rights act, LBJ famously said “I think we just lost the South,” which would prove to be remarkably prescient: in the late Sixties, Richard Nixon, with the help of his advisor Pat Buchanan, devised the "Southern Strategy," using dog-whistle racist terms (example: "states' rights" - the states would have the "right" to ignore these new civil rights laws).

In 1980, Ronald Reagan (working with Nixon's advisor Pat Buchanan) further honed the "Southern Strategy." In fact, it was another of his aides, Lee Atwater, who famously spilled the beans years later, thinking he was speaking off the record to a reporter.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

And that's where the Republican myth of the "racist Democrats" comes from: the Dixiecrats, and the changing face of the Democratic party. Back when Democrats were the conservative party, they were, in fact, racist; in swinging to the left, they also became the party of racial equality. To the point that, yes, the Ku Klux Klan may have been founded by Democrats, but these days, while not every Republican is in the KKK, almost every Klansman votes Republican.

__________________

Edit: (12/6/14) Corrected "North Carolina" to "South Carolina," with apologies to any North Carolinian in the audience.

Race and Politics in the 21st Century

It's somewhat jarring to be reading, say, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and stumble across the following exchange.

In gay conversation over our wine, after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much admir'd the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them. One of his friends, who sat next to me, says, "Franklin, why do you continue to side with these damn'd Quakers? Had not you better sell them? The proprietor would give you a good price."

"The governor," says I, "has not yet blacked them enough." He, indeed, had labored hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wip'd off his coloring as fast as he laid it on, and plac'd it, in return, thick upon his own face; so that, finding he was likely to be negrofied himself, he, as well as Mr. Hamilton, grew tir'd of the contest, and quitted the government.

This is not to say that Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, just that he was no more racist than other white people of the time.

People occasionally complain that the meaning of words has changed over time. But it's not just words, it's attitudes that evolve, as well. Ideas and terms that used to be completely acceptable are now things that you want to avoid.

But because it's hard to argue that racism doesn't exist, the right-wing now has to hide, disguise, and lie about their own bigotry in order to keep pushing us boldly backwards into the 19th Century.

Now, you should understand that I'm not trying to claim that all Republicans are racist. But when you're fishing for trout, you go to a river, not a sandbox.

It’s funny how often the right wing has to apologize for calling Obama "tar baby" or "boy, but for some reason, they keep using those very same terms. Why is that?

The answer, of course, is that it’s all about "dog whistle terminology" – the simple stereotypes that racists prefer; terms that they can slip into conversation or speeches to alert other racists that they've found a "fellow traveler."

Our friends at World Net Daily are fond of the stereotype of Obama as lazy. Last week, WND publisher Joseph Farah wrote a column where he said "You won't hear me complain that Obama is taking his 17th vacation in the last two-and-half years... We should be grateful the man has no work ethic. Just imagine the damage he would have done to the country if he did."

That's just another example of the Republican Party’s badly-hidden language of racism. Because, in reality, we know how lazy Obama is, right?



This strategy was explained in 1981 by Reagan advisor Lee Atwater.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Sometimes, racism comes with collateral damage. In New Jersey, for example, Assemblyman Pat Delaney resigned from his position representing the eighth district last July, when, not he, but his wife, sent an email to challenger (and former Olympic Gold medalist) Carl Lewis, which included the line "Imagine having dark skin and name recognition and the nerve to think that equalled (sic) knowing something about politics." (I wonder if it equalled knowing something about spellcheck?)

The right-wing efforts to keep race in the forefront of what we laughingly call "people's minds" take a relatively predictable course. They have to present Obama as different from "you and me," like he's somehow alien, and therefore dangerous.

One of the most infamous efforts of recent times would have to be Fox Nation's front page from two weeks ago, reprinting a story from Politico.



Have to give them points for accuracy: Obama's birthday party didn't create jobs. On the other hand, neither did John Boehner's golf game, Haley Barbour's Klan rally or Mitch McConnell masturbating to pictures of sea turtles. But since it was an unreasonable comparison, we'll ignore that part.

The primary slant to the story is the specific mention of "hip-hop" (with its connotations of "scary black thug"). Odd how Fox "News" zips past mention of hip-hop luminaries like Nancy Pelosi, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, and completely ignores things like a performance by all-white pop group OK Go.

As Chris Good put it in The Atlantic:

There doesn't seem to have been a whole lot of hip hop at this BBQ, based on Politico's account, except that a DJ played some of it, along with Motown and '70s and '80s R&B -- which sounds, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't go to a lot of these, kind of like the musical sampling at a contemporary bar mitzvah party.

Of course, that was Fox Nation, and Media Matters documented Fox Nation’s curiously high number of race-baiting headlines. But it's all part of the same strategy. It's why they kept talking about Obama going to a "black power" church (and why they're going to be talking about it again, coming into the 2012 election).

Because he's black. And therefore, he's a scary thug.

(Incidentally, do a quick google for "obama+thug" - you might be surprised at the number of hits you get).

It's actually an on-going strategy (as you might have guessed from fact that Lee Atwater explained it 30 years ago.) Pat Buchanan, for example, has a long history of making racially-questionable comments, but he recently wrote an article where he made the following curious turn of phrase.

Mocked by The Wall Street Journal and Sen. John McCain as the little people of the Lord of the Rings books, the Tea Party "Hobbits" are indeed returning to Middle Earth -- to nail the coonskin to the wall.

He didn’t just pull that particular word out of thin air – it doesn’t relate to anything else in the article.

Perhaps, if GOP members don’t want to be accused of racism, they should avoid passing around racist pictures. Especially if they've been caught doing the same thing before.


(Incidentally, please stop saying "I can't be racist! I have black friends!" That's not an excuse - that's an old joke.)

But as that great philosopher Lee Papa is wont to point out, the one thing we know about motherfuckers is that they will fuck their mothers.

Being the group of greasy lying assbags that they are, our friends on the right wing will open their eyes wide, wave their hands in distress, and say that their words are being taken out of context, that people are too sensitive (or "playing the race card"), and that liberals take an "innocent joke" and blow it all out of proportion.

And that might even be a valid point, if this only happened once in a while. But when it happens over and over on a continuous basis, that denial starts to stink worse than the decaying corpse of their collective conscience.

Are the Tea Parties racist?

You know, a lot of media time has been given to the teabaggers. And one question seems to be at the forefront of what passes for "minds" in the media. Are the Tea Parties racist?

Well, realistically, if you allow racist forces to link up with your movement, then you are (thanks to "guilt by association") going to be labeled racist. So, you know, live with it.

On the other hand, if studies are showing that you're much more likely to be racist than the average citizen, then... well, sorry. Once again, you've earned the label.

You'll find apologists trying to claim that it's all some kind of plot. ("See? It's the Man, tryin' to bring us down!")

Unfortunately for that argument, there's all kinds of evidence to tell you they might just be a little untrusting of the darker skin tones. But then, just to put the final nail in the coffin... just in case all the evidence from the rallies themselves aren't enough...

Here's David Duke, the Grand Wizard himself, telling you why the Teabagger movement fits right into his pocket.



Make of it what you will. We report, you decide.

Black President - White Power

Presidents-elect typically get hate-mail after they win an election. And disgruntled members of a losing political party are known for making inappropriate comments about their new, unwanted Commander-in-Chief. But Barack Obama is facing something that no other president has had to deal with: racial backlash.

The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials aware of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue of a president's security is so sensitive.

Incidents of racist graffiti have been cropping up around the country; nooses have been found in several locations; and internet threats have all increased in numbers which have caused concern (and significantly increased workload) among Secret Service agents.

One of the most popular white supremacist Web sites got more than 2,000 new members the day after the election, compared with 91 new members on Election Day, according to an AP count. The site, stormfront.org, was temporarily off-line Nov. 5 because of the overwhelming amount of activity it received after Election Day. On Saturday, one Stormfront poster, identified as Dalderian Germanicus, of North Las Vegas, said, "I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how 'messiahs' come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed."

More than merely strong upticks traffic on white supremacist sites, the Southern Poverty Law Center and police departments across the country have documented hundreds of race-related incidents since election day, from both individuals and groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other supremacist organizations. Two different assassination plots against Barack Obama have been foiled so far; admittedly, in both cases, these were low-end, inbred mouthbreathers without a chance of success (the second pair thought that they could kill 144 blacks before they got killed in a suicide attack on Obama: this isn't a plan; it's the plot of a direct-to-cable movie), but these are just the ones they've broken up so far.

All of the various racist organizations are hoping that Obama's election will increase their membership more than any other single incident in recent years. And they're certainly trying to take advantage of it by stepping up their recruiting drives. Flyers have been found in several places around the country, and they're even moving into digital recruiting.

There has been some judicial pushback, though. One teen who was beaten by Klan members just got a $2.5 million judgment, and the state appeals court has agreed to review an overturned conviction of a Klansman for the 1964 abduction of two murdered black teens.

And just because I find irony in it: aside from admitting that Obama's election will be an outstanding recruiting tool, Thomas Robb, the Klan's national director, was struggling to put a brave face on the election of a black man.

"I know that you have been hearing that Obama would be the first black president," Mr. Robb writes. "However, you and I both know this is not true. Obama is only half black. Not only is he only half black — he was not raised in a black environment. He was raised by his single mother," who was white, and abandoned by his African father, something "so common with black men that there are jokes about it."

Of course, that logic doesn't explain why Obama has been married to his wife Michelle for sixteen years, but we'll move past that.

My favorite Klan story recently would have to be this one: a lady takes a bus from Oklahoma to Louisiana to join the Klan, and after they shave her head and make her run around in the woods for several hours with a torch, she decides she wants to go home. So the "Grand Lordship" shot and killed her. (I'm not sure if that qualifies as Darwin at work, or justifiable homicide. Of course, since it was another racist who shot her, the "justifiable" excuse kind of goes away, doesn't it?)

Yes, by the way, he called himself "the Grand Lordship" - apparently, he didn't think Wizards or Dragons were serious enough for an important title like his.

Then his Lordship pulled out a knife and tried to dig out the bullet, figuring that he'd be able to cover up his dastardly deed. (I guess that they don't know much about forensics in the backwoods of Louisiana.) Then he has two other guys hide the body under some brush.

Sheriff's investigators said they received the initial tip from a convenience store clerk. Two of the group members went into the store and asked the clerk whether he knew how to get bloodstains out of their clothes, Strain said. The clerk told them no and called the sheriff after they left.

Now, if you're going to run around the woods in white robes, shouldn't you already be pretty good at stain removal? It seems to me like you'd be getting a lot of practice at it already. But this is the high quality of racist we have to deal with for the next eight years.

We can only hope that having a visible black man as President of the United States will provide the children of racists with a role model - a better role model than the toothless hatemonger in charge of their family. I actually don't have much hope that this will happen, but it's always possible.

But it means that we have one more reason that Barack Obama needs to succeed.

This Election? The Choices Are Black and White...

There's a dark cloud rolling over the Right Wing, and forecasters suggest storms may be brewing.

Sarah Palin, with her support of creationism, her populist rhetoric and her continued references to "Joe Sixpack" is appealing to a continuing strain of anti-intellectualism that can be found very strongly in a certain class of American citizen: lower income, poorly educated, racist white people.

Sarah Palin speaks before crowds and whips them into a frenzy. Not by being inspiring, but by promoting hate:

Barack Obama, she told 8,000 fans at a rally here Monday afternoon, "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!" This followed her earlier accusation that the Democrat pals around with terrorists. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," she told the Clearwater crowd. "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country." The crowd replied with boos.

As she launches these attacks, the Republican campaign is trying to limit the access of reporters to Palin's followers.

Constantly under the watchful eyes of security, the media wasn't permitted to wander around inside Coachman Park to talk to Sarah Palin supporters. When reporters tried to leave the designated press area... an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, "Can I help you?" and turn the person around.

But even with these efforts, the reaction of Palin's followers is becoming public.

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Veiled racism has a long history in Republican election tactics.

Race was the blueprint for the Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater. They used it to create the “Southern Strategy” employed by neoconservatives and neo-Confederates today.

It's why presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in 1980 about "states’ rights" in Philadelphia, Miss. — the place where civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were killed and buried in the ’60s.

It’s why then-Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and campaign strategist Dick Morris ran in 1990 their notorious ad with the white hands of an actor crumpling up an application for a job that he lost because of “racial quotas.”

It’s what then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was conveying in 2002 when he told a Thurmond birthday gathering, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either.”

And the racist meme has spread widely thoughout the Republican party during this election as well. GOP politicians keep using racially loaded words like “uppity,” whether referring to Obama and his wife, or a black reporter. (The first recorded use of “uppity,” incidentally, is found in Uncle Remus, in case you were wondering.) And the direct line between “elitist” and uppity isn't hard to draw at all.

The racially loaded terms are everywhere: a Palin ad talked about Obama not being “respectful” enough to her; Geoff Davis (R-Kentucky) saying of Obama “That boy's finger does not need to be on the button.” A College Republican leader had to quit after saying that Obama has“a pair of lips so large he could float half of Cuba to the shores of Miami (and probably would).” At a conservative political forum, boxes of “Obama Waffles” were sold with a caricature of Obama obviously referencing Aunt Jemima.

People working for the Obama campaign report repeated racist comments and threats. There have long been reports of vandalism, but obervers are now fearing outbreaks of violence.

And now, it seems that McCain has lost control of his own followers. McCain and Palin are both interrupted when they mention Obama by cries of “terrorist,” and occasionally, “kill him!” And in one of his own town hall rallies, as people kept asking about Obama being a terrorist, a Muslim or an “Arab,” McCain found himself being booed simply for suggesting that Obama was an honorable man with whom McCain disagreed (video for that here).

Andrew Sullivan, in the Atlantic, put it this way:

McCain and Palin have decided to stoke this rage, to foment it, to encourage paranoid notions that somehow Obama is a "secret" terrorist or Islamist or foreigner. These are base emotions in both sense of the word.

But they are also very very dangerous. This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies - not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.

As Obama said in an Ohio rally, “nothing's easier than riling up a crowd by stoking anger and division.” But it seems that anger and divisiveness are the only weapons that the Republican campaign has left.

__________

Update: And as if someone were trying to support my charges of racism in the Palin camp, we find this:

As the crowd cheered at a Sarah Palin rally this morning in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a man in the audience grinned as he held up a stuffed monkey doll with a Barack Obama bumper sticker wrapped across its forehead...

After Palin finished her remarks this morning, the man holding the stuffed monkey seemed to notice that a video camera was pointed at him, at which point he removed the Obama sticker from the doll’s head and crumpling it up in his hand. He then handed the doll to a young boy who was watching the rally from his father’s shoulders. The boy’s parents later told CBS News that they weren’t acquainted with the man who gave their son the stuffed monkey.

Check out the link - they even have video. Of course, you could probably have seen this coming months ago, if you'd looked. This is simply a mirror of the Obama sock monkeys.

Jesse Helms, 1921-2008 - no great loss

How's that old joke go? "You should only say good things about the dead. Well, he's dead. Good."

Jesse Helms died on July 4. Some people might say that's fitting, since he was sincerely patriotic. I'm willing to say right now that those people are racist by default.

You have to appreciate that Jesse Helms was a man who stuck to his principles. Sick, twisted, evil principles, but still...

He was so openly racist that people apparently gave him a pass based on... hell, I don't know, entertainment value? They couldn't believe he'd actually said it? He once referred to the University of North Carolina (UNC) as the "University of Negroes and Communists".

He said things like, "To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing."

"The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."

When a caller to CNN's Larry King Live show praised guest Jesse Helms for "everything you've done to help keep down the niggers," Helms' response was to salute the camera and say, "Well, thank you, I think."

When there were political protests in Mexico, where he was investigating as to whether or not there might be communists in Central America (because he was so talented that he could just sniff them out, apparently), he said "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction." (My grandmother used to call them "Latins," too)

Probably his signature quote would have to be "I've been portrayed as a caveman by some. That's not true. I'm a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners or niggers."

But it didn't have to be skin color. He'd cheerfully hate a man for loving another man. "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."

"I've never heard once in this chamber anybody say to the homosexuals, 'stop what you're doing.' If they would stop what they're doing there would not be one additional case of AIDS in the United State."

"The New York Times and the Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves." He went on to say that the Washington Post "caters to homosexual groups. Just about every person down there is homosexual or lesbian."

He only liked other politicians if they were conservative, and not even all of them. "I didn't come to Washington to be a yes man for any president, Democrat or Republican," he said in an interview in 1989. "I didn't come to Washington to get along and win any popularity contests."

His run-ins with Ted Kennedy were legendary: "Let me adjust my hearing aid. It could not accommodate the decibels of the Senator from Massachusetts. I can't match him in decibels or Jezebels, or anything else apparently."

He once passive-aggressively threatened Bill Clinton, saying that the military hated him (a charge that the military refuted, incidentally). He said that Bill Clinton "better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard."

But he also once said, "...in the l8 years and 5 months I've been in the senate, none, none have been more capable than Dan Quayle." Which shows how polarized his thinking was; Quayle was only marginally more literate than George Bush.

About democracy: "Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands." (Presumably the hands of slants, beaners, niggers and homosexuals)

He even had room to hate the little things in life: "If God had wanted us to use the metric system, Jesus would have had 10 apostles."

He once sent out a mailer to his constituents that said "Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING, and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior." (I bet nobody slept through that class.)

I've actually heard the statement "Well, he was racist, but that's a sign of when he was born. He gave up all that later in life." Crap. He just hid it better. He learned not to use racist labels in public, but he still had the philosophy.

He made a TV ad for his 1990 election campaign: it showed a pair of white hands tearing up a rejection letter; the voiceover said, "You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of racial quotas. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is." Harvey Gantt, in case it isn't obvious enough, is black.

When he was opposed by Gantt again in 1996, he paid for a series of ads that accused Gantt of taking advantage of minority privileges to get contracts for his business from the state.

In 1992, when Carol Moseley-Braun became the first black woman to sit in the Senate (and the only black senator at the time), Helms told Orrin Hatch, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing Dixie until she cries." Then he followed her onto an elevator, talked about how good things were before slavery was abolished, and started singing that great anthem to picking cotton on the plantation, Dixie.

The man was a classless act. I don't think that it's possible to say enough bad things about him. If there is an afterlife and a just God, Helms will hit the Pearly Gates and get handed a shoe-shine kit. And the first pair of shoes he'll shine will be Martin Luther King's. And then maybe Malcolm X.

And the Racism Continues...

Let's revisit racism. Yeah, it seems like just last month, I was babbling about our friends with ethnicity issues. (OK, it was just three weeks ago... and... uh... three weeks before that... man, I do go on sometimes, don't I?) But let's see what else has crawled out from under the rock since then.

Our boy Senator George Allen (R-VA) got in a little trouble a while back for displaying a noose in his office and a Confederate flag at home. Well, this time, he was caught on tape referring to S.R. Sidarth, a young man of Indian descent, as "Macaca." He clearly said the word twice, so at least nobody has tried to claim he was misunderstood. Well, nobody but Allen.

His exact words were:

"This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere. And it's just great... Let's give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

Allen's first answer, when asked about his use of the word "macaca," was the basic defensive response: "I don't know what it means." Then he tried to claim that it was a reference to the man's hair, as in "Mohawk" - oddly enough, a cut that is only barely related to the mullet sported by our cameraman, in that they both involve hair.

Now, blogger Jeffrey Feldman did a little research, and discovered that the word was used by white supremacists to refer to black men (mostly when "nigger" seems redundant, apparently). His links are a little hard to follow: in the face of the controversy, Stormfront seems to have scrubbed their pages, and I somehow didn't feel like logging in to Vanguard News Network.

Mr Feldman also wasn't as careful as he could have been: he was referring to one post in a thread, but gave the link for the mother post it was responding to.

But the word is out there, and it doesn't mean "I respect you and don't object to your skin tone."

Since Mr. Sidarth was born and raised in Fairfax County, Virginia, it seems a little unreasonable of Allen to have welcomed him to either America or Virginia. Perhaps having realized that, Allen met with a number of Indian-American leaders to apologize for being an ass. They weren't impressed. "We expect better from our leaders... We're working toward getting satisfied; it is a work in progress."

Racism seems to be rearing its ugly head everywhere lately. The President dismisses every Muslim in the world as an "islamofascist," and Michelle Malkin, the Queen Bee of pop-culture bigotry, chimes in with a theory that all Muslims are the same and the race war is on.

Where does it lead? Well, in Maryland, we get bigots standing outside the home of Saqib Ali, a candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates, wearing a T-shirt reading "this mind is an Allah-free zone" and holding up a hand-lettered "Islam sucks" sign. That's always a good way to spend your day, right?

In the UK, two Muslim men were forced off of a flight for “acting suspiciously” and “speaking Arabic.” That's all they did. They talked quietly to each other, possibly in Arabic (the news stories haven't established what language they were speaking), and they didn't proceed directly to their seat. So they were obviously terrorists, right?

A British man named Azar Iqbal, travelling to Disneyland with his wife and three children, was detained at the Atlanta airport, questioned about whether he knew anything about a terror plot, told that "we didn't ask you to come to America," and denied entry into the United States. Because, after all, nobody of Middle Eastern descent would take their children to "the Happiest Place on Earth," would they? Everybody knows that Arabs don't love their children. Even if they're British citizens.

Here's the way it works. If it's OK to discriminate against one type of people based on their race or religion, then suddenly, it can become easier to discriminate against another race. So, what are we going to see next?

How about major movie stars getting in touch with their inner anti-Semite? (OK, let's get real, folks. Alcohol lowers inhibitions, it doesn't create new thought patterns. A drunk might blurt out things already in his mind, but he isn't likely to spontaneously create a new, original line of thought.)

How about Republican Congressional candidate's talking about how "blacks aren't the best swimmers or may not even know how to swim," or White House press secretaries using the term "tar baby" in a press conference?

Or you can do a Google news search on "Klan," and discover that they seem to be resurfacing, with rallies in Texas and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And showing up at a Harper's Ferry discussion of race relations. And even trying to gain a little press by adopting a Missouri highway. (You can even buy Klan and Nazi memorabilia at county fairs in Pennsylvania these days. Go figure.)

Keep an eye on this kind of thing. I think we'll be seeing more of it in the near future.

But one more thing about our friend George Felix Allen. Sidarth had introduced himself to Allen earlier in the week. Now, Allen had heard Sidarth's name and felt that it was appropriate to make fun of it, this could show that he doesn't respect people and their cultures. Or perhaps he just likes to give people of other races nonsense names (I wonder if he likes to call all Asians "Ching Chong" or all Middle Easterners "Abdul") - that's one of the marks of a racist.

Either way, it isn't something I'd want coming out of my Senator's mouth. Maybe it's a good thing I don't live in Virginia.

Racism in America

Quick disclaimer. I'm white.

I'm sorry. I can't help it. It's just the way I was born. And some people might think that this pigmentation deficiency of mine might make me unfit to comment on racism. But you know what? I don't care. I'm going to do that anyway...

You know, it's odd. I see things like (a few months ago) the controversy over a Spanish version of "the Star Spangled Banner," and I think "racism." After all, it's related to the argument over illegal aliens, which stems from a fear of people coming over and taking your job...

At least, if you happen to pick fruit for less than minimum wage, they'll be taking your job... Not that many of us do that...

But anyway, racism is alive and well in America. Four years ago, while I was still in the Air Force, I was involved in kicking a couple of Klan members out of the service, because their "personal beliefs" had started to interfere with their ability to operate in...

OK, let's just get real. We kicked them out because they were racist. Maybe soon I'll tell you why it all came to a head. But that's not the point I'm trying to get to. So let's move on.

I will be the first to admit that there are some people who see racism entirely too easily, of course. My sister's boyfriend (oh, yeah. By the way, he's black. Sorry, I'd have brought it up before, but it's not something I tend to think about. Not that he'd be willing to admit that. But that's also another story. Let's move on...)

Where was I? Oh, right. My sister's boyfriend. He thinks that the latest version of King Kong was a racist movie. See, the natives were black, and they were shown in a negative light. And the gorilla? Well, he's big and black, so he's the symbol of the strong black man. And when he dies in the end, it's symbolic of the white man triumphing over the black man. Makes it a happy ending, so all the little blond girls can sleep well...

Or something like that, anyway.

I can't agree. The natives were, if you look, painted black. Because they worshipped Kong, and wanted to be like him. And as for Kong himself, well, he's... um.... geez, how to put this delicately...

King Kong is a gorilla. They tend to be black.

There's a lot more I could say, about how this is a reimagining of a movie from the 30's, which stays fairly true to the socio-political realities of the 30's, but I don't feel like getting into that. Let's just put it this way: sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

But there's a wider point here. Let me turn this thing over to someone older and wiser than I am. New Mexico State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino.

The Race Card
by Jerry Ortiz y Pino

It is now apparently a given in American civic dialogue that racism no longer exists in America … if indeed it ever did.

If a minority group member asserts that racism still exists in this country, that incautious soul will immediately be lashed for "playing the race card" and all further rational discussion of the topic will cease.

In fact, the minority group member who rashly points to some tangible bit of evidence that a heck of a lot more than "vestigial" racism persists here will almost certainly get slapped upside the head and charged with being a "reverse racist" … whatever that means.

So vehement is the reflexive denunciation of anyone who dares to question our national record on race that it has succeeded in silencing much of the discussion on this issue. We are laboring under the impossible delusion that "race is not a factor" in our society, that we have become truly, monumentally "colorblind."

Don’t believe any of it. We continue to drag around an enormous ball and chain firmly attached to our collective ankle, the legacy of pervasive racism. It is still easier for a white ex-con in the United States today to get a job than it is for a black person without a criminal record. And when it comes to education, the notion of racial parity increasingly sounds like nothing more than a joke.

It wasn’t always that way. In fact, as recently as the early '80s, data showed we had made some amazing gains in closing the gap between white student achievement and that of minorities. Parity in literacy, high school graduation rates, college admission and even college graduation seemed tantalizingly within our grasp. We were close to having created a society with true equality of educational opportunity.

Then, maddeningly, it began slipping backward. With the Reagan administration, the two lines charting whites and non-whites in our schools, which had been converging slowly over a 20-year period, began drifting apart. They continue to diverge today, with nothing to indicate that the disparity has even made it onto the national radar, let alone sparked any outrage.

In a recent article, Jonathan Kozol notes that American public schools are today, in 2006, more racially segregated than they were at the time of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court Decision of the mid-'50s that supposedly ended our "separate but equal" public school systems. That’s an incredible indictment.

Worse, all the numbers are shocking. Minority students drop out of high school at a higher rate than whites, graduate at a lower rate, get suspended more often than whites (even for identical offenses), and have a harder time getting into college, especially the elite upper-echelon schools that for a time actively courted minority students.

What happened? For starters, the courts have backed away from affirmative action programs in university admissions, with the consequence that fewer blacks, Latinos or Native Americans are getting in.

And in a particularly insidious move, Congress has gradually but inexorably, ever since Ronald Reagan, been "trimming" social programs for the poor. "After all, the numbers were getting better all through the '60s and '70s," so the rationale went, "so we can afford to start paring back on the props that made those improved numbers possible."

Scholarship programs were turned into loans - or into nothing. Tutoring and mentoring supportive efforts were morphed into "volunteer faith-based initiatives" … or completely wiped out. Job programs like summer youth employment, Neighborhood Youth Corps, Youth Tutoring Youth—were all axed after being labeled "ineffective."

Democrats like Bill Clinton jumped on the bandwagon, too. The carnage created by his so-called Welfare Reform and Workforce Investment legislation cannot be ignored when you start totaling up the causes for our current malaise in minority education.

In exchange for losing billions of dollars in supportive assistance programs, minorities got a "No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law that has further widened the gap between the educational haves and have-nots. (In a future column, I’ll share some specific case studies that identify how NCLB is failing minority youth.)

Instead of the straight-forward traditional indicators of how we are doing educationally (drop-out and graduation rates; college admissions; literacy levels), NCLB has substituted a nightmarish complex of tests and comparisons that seem exquisitely designed to ensure that white student success will not be challenged in any way and that minority students will be kept in their place.

NCLB is up for re-authorization by Congress this year. It would be altogether appropriate for the issue of parity in public education to be raised during that crucial debate, but to do so would first require an acknowledgment that we still have a vast amount of work before us if we have any hope of converting this into a truly colorblind society.

Meanwhile, looming on the horizon, waiting its turn for our attention, is an even more difficult educational challenge: the assimilation and education of the 11 million predominately Spanish-speaking undocumented immigrants already in this country.

Healing the wounds of racism; assimilating and preparing undocumented workers and their families—these are not minor bumps in the road to be dealt with through casual indifference or as an afterthought. We need to get to work. Both Congress and the president should be digging in for some heavy lifting. Instead, they piddle around. I’m getting very worried.

So there you have it. Sometimes, a gorilla is just a gorilla. But sometimes, the gorilla is actually the elephant in the room that nobody is willing to talk about.

Louisiana and racist cops. And Cheesy Poofs, for that matter.

Tomorrow, there's going to be a news conference about the racist sheriff of St. Tammany Parish. But is it just an overreaction? Is the sheriff racist, or just misunderstood?

Well, first of all, crooksandliars.com has a lot to be proud of, since nobody was paying any attention to this story until they brought it to the attention of America. We have a video of the sheriff of St Tammany Parish, Jack Strain, making the following statement.

"Now I don’t get into calling people names and all that fact, but if you’re gonna walk the streets of St. Tammany Parish with dreadlocks and 'Chee Wee' hairstyles, then you can expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff’s deputy."

That seems pretty open. Obvious, even. The sheriff is planning to specifically target people based on their haircut. Haircuts mostly worn by black people.

Gee, I don't see how that could possibly be considered racist...

And after John Amato's blog (crooksandliars.com - pay attention, people!) brought this to America's short attention span (on the sixth of July), suddenly the story makes the Associated Press (on the eighth of July).

And now, Annie Spell, one of the only white branch presidents of the NAACP has a relatively high-profile press conference on the subject.

To be entirely honest, the sheriff managed to confuse me a little. Having lived in N'Awlins as a kid, I know that "Chee Wees" are a cheese snack, pretty much like Cheetos. Well, OK, Chee Wees are puffed, and Cheetos are... collapsed, I guess. But if I said that they're like Cheez Doodles or Cheese Curls, I wouldn't get nearly the universal understanding, would I?

OK, so I could have gone for the cheap pop-culture reference and said "Cheesy Poofs," but that would have been a cop-out, wouldn't it?

Anyway... (crap, I knew I had a point here... what the hell was it? Oh, right...) Anyway, I have absolutely no idea how the cheesy snack food became a slang term for a hairstyle, but there it is.

So Annie Spell will be holding a press conference in Covington, Louisiana, in front of the sarcastically-named "St Tammany Parish Justice Center." If you happen to be in the neighborhood, go there.

But this isn't the first time that we've had problems with law enforcement in Louisiana and their racist attitudes toward Katrina survivors. At this stage, very few people remember a little, almost ignored story from the days of Hurricane Katrina. But while the right wing was trying to blame New Orleans natives for not evacuating (despite the fact that 26% of New Orleans residents didn't own cars - yeah, I know, it's shocking in the dawn of the 21st Century, but it's true), nobody remembers that people who tried to evacuate on foot were stopped, threatened with guns, and forced to walk back into the flooded city.

If you have any questions on this incident, direct them to Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna Police Department. Perhaps he has an explanation for this unchristian behavior on the part of his officers.

Hey, I'm just being fair and balanced here. We report, you decide.