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CounterPunch
December
18, 2002
The Real Distractions
of Trent Lott
by KENDALL CLARK
Recently a very impoverished set of excuses and
defenses has been offered up on Trent Lott's behalf. According
to Lott's defenders and apologists, his critics are "overreacting"
and "hurting America"; they "prevent Americans
from focusing on important issues" and "obviously fail
to understand Southern culture" or fail to understand "the
informal context" of Lott's racist comments. Pat Buchanan
said that Lott's comments were "innocuous"; Senator
Shelby of Alabama even suggested that Lott shouldn't be "lynched".
Lott's critics would have been accused
of race baiting, too, if his comments hadn't been so plain and
so hateful. Lott's chief accomplishment so far is to have been
so insensitive and crude that it was impossible for his defenders
to accuse his critics of race baiting. Eventually, even President
Bush, who's never shown the least interest in opposing racism,
had to criticize Trent Lott's comments, all while continuing
to support Lott as the Senate majority leader.
What lies behind this maddening spasm
of unconvincing excuses and empty defenses is the idea that the
material conditions of racism have withered under the harsh sun
of racial reform. Lott and his defenders, indeed most Republicans
and Democrats, suggest that racism is largely, if not entirely
a thing of the past. Have you noticed that prominent white politicians
are comfortable criticizing racism harshly only insofar as everyone
consents to the idea that it's a thing of the past?
I cannot remember, nor can I imagine
a nationally prominent white politician suggesting that old-fashioned
racism (the kind in which white people enjoy the privileges of
discrimination against and social stigma of non-whites) continues
to be a problem in the US. There's plenty of talk from Lott and
his kind about reverse racism (the idea that non-white people
benefit from being stigmatized and discriminated against), but
the only time they talk about racism is during speeches opposing
affirmative action as outdated and unnecessary.
But the idea that racism has vanished
in the US is plainly and dangerously wrong. According to a New
York Times report last week by Alan Krueger, employers are
still very likely to discriminate against African American job
applicants, simply for seeming to be African American.
Researchers at MIT and the University
of Chicago made up fake job applicants and resumes, randomly
assigning to each one a name which skews toward African American
or white population groups. There were Kristens and Brads, together
with Tamikas and Tyrones, all of whom had equivalent resumes
and applied to the same jobs (in Boston and Chicago). From the
middle of 2001 to the middle of 2002, these researchers submitted
about 5,000 such applications and then tracked which of the phantom
applicants were called for interviews. The only way to distinguish
these applicants was by the presumed ethnicity of their names.
The results? Applicants with names which
skew white were more likely to be called for an interview: 50%
more likely, in fact. As Krueger says, "Interviews were
requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding
names and only 6.7 percent of those with black-sounding names."
This research suggests that being perceived as non-white in the
job market is a real disadvantage; or, put the other way round,
being perceived as white in the job market confers unmerited
privilege.
Whether or not one cares to connect the
politics and policies of Trent Lott and his cronies with the
attitudes and opinions which explain these research findings,
it's clear that, contrary to the wishful thinking of most white
people, including politicians, racism is alive and well in the
US, that it harms non-white people's lives every day, that it
benefits white people's real lives every day.
And so there's more than a little irony
in the fact that Lott's racist comments obscured a credible report
which demonstrates the vitality of racism and privilege. Strom
Thurmond, after all, to whom Lott is the authentic political
heir, made opposition to the Fair Employment Practices act a
cornerstone of his 1948 presidential campaign -- the one which
Lott suggested America would have been better off had it been
victorious. In his acceptance speech of the Dixiecrat nomination
for president, Thurmond specifically named antilynching and employment
discrimination laws as "communistic" and a "fundamental
threat to the American way of life". Any law which opposes
employment discrimination, Thurmond said in that speech, is
admirably suited to the Russian form
of government, where the thoughts, activities and ambitions of
the people are controlled from Moscow, and they live and move
at the whim and caprice of a dictator. It will not work in free
America or in any free country where the dignity and worth and
liberty of the individual is respected.
Thurmond tried to associate anti-employment
discrimination laws with "Joseph Stalin" who used,
or so Thurmond claimed, anti-discrimination laws "as a means
of advancing himself to supreme dictator of the Soviet Union".
Thurmond also tried to associate such laws with Nazi Germany:
From the point of view of the employee,
he or she will no longer have the right to choose his or her
associates, either on the job or in the labor organizations.
The employer is deprived of his right to employ people who will
best serve his business. He cannot promote and demote as his
judgment demands. From the point of view of all of us...the net
effect...will be to force all business and business relationships
in this country into a Washington pattern, guided and enforced
by a federal Gestapo, with dangerous powers over the lives of
all our people.
Perhaps Lott's defenders and apologists
are right to suggest that focusing on Lott's racist comments
distracts the American people from more important issues? Focusing
on Trent Lott's personal vices -- support of injustice, callousness,
insularity, insensitivity -- should not distract ordinary people
of good will from criticizing and opposing politics and policies
he represents.
Somehow I don't think that's what his
defenders had in mind.
Kendall Clark lives in Dallas
where he publishes and edits WhitePrivilege.com,
an antiracist resource on the Web. He can be reached at: kendall@monkeyfist.com
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