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CounterPunch
January
6, 2003
Lott's Sin:
He Was Sooo Old-School
Brand New Bag
by STEVE PERRY
As Christmas drew near, a bleeding Trent Lott
finally looked to the horizon and glimpsed the apparition of
Hooded Jesus coming for him. His demise as Senate majority leader
met with ample self-congratulation on the part of outraged libs
and relieved Republicans alike. It was left to Bill Clinton to
suggest that perhaps the gesture contained just a hint of cynicism:
"They try to suppress black voting, they ran on the Confederate
flag in Georgia and South Carolina, and from top to bottom the
Republicans supported it."
True enough, and yet not quite the point.
Lott's real trouble was that institutional racism changed and
he didn't. He was a square-jawed if usually circumspect segregationist,
an old schooler, and thus a hindrance and an embarrassment to
the practitioners of modern race-baiting. Under the new rules,
categorical bigotry is out and a more surreptitious class-driven
bigotry is in. Nowadays racism in politics is all about what
you can manage to say by euphemism and innuendo. Bill Clinton
understood this as well as anyone. His eight years in the White
House--and particularly the days leading up to his 1996 welfare
overhaul--were punctuated by carefully worded diatribes about
poverty, crime, family pathology, and responsibility, and we
all knew who he was talking about.
Granted, Clinton was not the one who
put a black face on poverty and welfare; that was bequeathed
to him. But he exploited the association with deftness and real
verve en route to his celebrated abolition of welfare. So it
won't do for Bill to protest too much at the Republicans' use
of the Confederate flag. The fact Clinton confined himself to
rhetorical figures did not make him any less a master of racist
symbolism. And before you ask: No, I don't mean that Bill Clinton
is a closet bigot. I'm sure he is not, at least as most people
would understand the word. I mean to say that question is irrelevant
for purposes of measuring the new racism of American politics.
Certain things have changed in the last
generation. Thirty years on, it's evident that one of the primary
accomplishments of the 1960s was to clear a path to the professional
classes for a comparatively small but much-photographed cadre
of black and brown people. And there you have the great irony
of the civil rights era: What started as a people's movement
in the Deep South became the vehicle for delivering up W.E.B.
DuBois's vision of a "Talented Tenth." "The Negro
Race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional
men," wrote DuBois. "The problem of education then,
among Negroes, must first of all deal with the 'Talented Tenth.'
It is the problem of developing the best of this race that they
may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the
worst."
DuBois believed that black America's
best and brightest would lift up the race by their example and
by their investment in black communities. It didn't work out
that way. Remember that he wrote those lines around the turn
of the 20th century, when black people still lived closely bound
together under color of legalized segregation. His Talented Tenth
arrived just as the shackles of legal segregation were being
loosed, and the nascent buppie class did what all good Americans
who find themselves with a little money are acculturated to do;
they got the hell out of the hood and ceased to have much in
common, beyond skin caste, with their old neighbors. The ethos
of this new "black America" is captured in this comment
on Oprah Winfrey, from the excellent new weekly the Buffalo (NY)
Beast: "A leading citizen in a world where rich people are
neither black nor white.
The upshot was that black-on-black cultural
tensions as old as the distinction between house slaves and field
slaves gradually grew into a genuine class gulf, one tinged with
mutual feelings of contempt and betrayal. This divide afforded
a new opening in race politics. The elevation of a minority middle
class, relatively tiny as it was, meant that any clever politician
could earn an easy pass on the vexing problem of race. Every
president since Reagan has understood as much: If you wrap one
arm around the better sort of colored folk, you can cheerfully
blast away at the rest without anyone raising much of a fuss.
A certain visible portion of the black and Latino intelligentsias
will even stand and cheer.
The Republican party at large was slow
to learn. (Remember the "big tent" that Pat Buchanan
brought crashing to the floor at the 1992 convention?) Bill Clinton
finally gave them religion. The way he managed to push every
button during the welfare debate, to paint black America as a
cesspool of crime and dysfunction while at the same time preaching
tolerance and compassion and brotherhood--that was good stuff.
The lesson was not lost on up and coming Republicans like W,
who cozied up to Hispanics throughout his tenure in Texas.
So now we have a politics in which all
the old notions of racism, like all the old notions of liberal
and conservative, are no longer meaningful. Racism is all about
class and xenophobia and coded speech now, but its role in American
politics remains as vibrant as ever. In the past year plus, since
9/11, there has been a marked decline in the sport of public
black-bashing as the whole country has turned its eye to the
teeming masses of Islam. But here again the racism is oblique,
and couched in an explicit denial of racist motives. You may
recall that figures from Bush to Rudy Giuliani spent the first
days after the attacks pointing out that Arabs and Muslims per
se were not the enemy. With that said, the administration proceeded
to write itself a blank check for warmaking anywhere and anytime,
a sweeping mandate that was in the end predicated entirely on
old saws about crazed Arabs who value human life less than we
Christian nations do.
If you doubt that this is so, consider
what happened to Patty Murray recently. A couple of weeks ago,
the Washington senator had the poor judgment to tell a high school
honors class that Americans would do well to ask why Osama bin
Laden enjoyed such popularity among Muslim masses the world round.
She pointed out his public works, the roads and schools and hospitals.
The real issue was not the purported merits of Osama but the
sentiments of Muslims the world over who admire him. Murray was
only making the innocuous and essentially conservative observation
that it is in our long-range interest to understand why the land
of the free is so roundly despised by so many. For her trouble
she was energetically bitch-slapped by Republicans from Seattle
to Washington and back, and to my knowledge no Democratic colleagues
rose to defend her. She then ran up the white flag with a press
release that began, "Osama bin Laden is an evil terrorist
who" Better. Where the perfidy of Arabs is at issue, no
explanation but evil will be tolerated. And that's the end of
the discussion, since we all know why evil people do evil things:
because they're evil, stupid.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, the
lull in homegrown white-on-black racism at the top levels of
government is likely to end sometime this year. Already you can
see the stage being set in the odd wire story. Around a month
ago there appeared an AP story with the salacious headline, "Gang
Bloodshed Surging in Some Cities." The numbers really do
not bear out the implication; besides Los Angeles, where a longstanding
gang truce has fallen apart over the past few years, the murder
rate in most major cities is flat. But the story is larded with
grave pronouncements from cops and think-tankers about a rising
national tide. "We had a stranglehold on it and we allowed
them to breathe," in the words of Wes McBride, president
of the California Gang Investigators Association. "We relaxed
our grip and now they're back." Somewhere Jack Webb nods
grimly. What is to be done?
Pronounce them terrorists, that's what. The details of the backstory
are yet to be determined, but they hardly matter; right-thinking
Americans are conditioned to believe practically anything they're
told about the world's dusky hordes, including the ones who walk
among them. So perhaps another Jose Padilla will drop into Ashcroft's
lap, some putative gangster who says or does something that smacks
of treason. (Padilla was the Latino Muslim nabbed for attempting
to download dirty bomb plans from the Internet. He is being held
indefinitely without charges, largely because the government
cannot make a case that he posed a serious threat and does not
want to be embarrassed.) More likely the Bush administration
will play its ace in the hole and announce that the drug traffickers
who supply the gangster distribution networks in the U.S. have
ties to terrorist groups, and therefore so do all American gangbangers.
Presto: enemy combatants among us, and a warrant for subjecting
more American citizens to the kinds of unconstitutional scrutiny
and detention the government so prizes.
Steve Perry,
long time CounterPunch contributer, is the new editor of the
Minneapolis/St. Paul alternative weekly City Pages. Email him
directly at sperry@citypages.com.
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