No Way, Baby

This week is the 50th anniversary of a seminal American event --- the desegregation of Central High in Little Rock Arkansas. It's a different world. But not different enough.

David Margolis has written a heart-rending profile in this months Vanity Fair about one member of the Little Rock 9, the brave African-American teenagers who faced the hostile white crowds and even the Arkansas National Guard, to attend high school with the white students of their small city. Here's how Margolis describes that first day when Elizabeth Eckford tried to walk to school:

Elizabeth's knees started to shake. She walked toward Central's main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn't go back the way she'd come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down. Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. "Lynch her!" someone shouted. "Send that nigger back to the jungle!"

It was a very ugly day. The kids were turned back. When they managed to get into Central High a few days later, the angry mob threatened to storm the school. Several days after that, a reluctant President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne division and the Little Rock 9 were allowed into the school.

But their torment had only begun:

Within two weeks, whatever pockets of goodwill the black students initially encountered had evaporated. Instead, a distinct minority of segregationist students—estimates vary between 50 and 200—set the tone, intimidating all the others (few labels were more noxious than "nigger lover") into silence. Their campaign of unremitting but largely clandestine harassment was abetted by school officials who, fearful of making things even worse, ignored all but the most flagrant offenders. The black students, already scattered, became almost entirely isolated, none more than Elizabeth. In classes, she was made to sit by herself, always at the back, often with no one nearby. In the corridors, there was always a space around her...

Less than a week into school, Mrs. Huckaby later wrote, Elizabeth came into her office "red-eyed, her handkerchief in a damp ball in her hands." The harassment was so bad that she wanted to go home early. But things only got worse, as the disciplinary files, in the collection of Mrs. Huckaby's papers at the University of Arkansas, reveal. Sometime in October: Elizabeth hit with a shower of sharpened pencils. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. December 10: Elizabeth kicked. December 18: Elizabeth punched. January 10: Elizabeth shoved on the stairs. January 14: Elizabeth knocked flat. January 22: Elizabeth spat upon. January 29: Elizabeth attacked with spitballs. January 31: Elizabeth asks grandfather to take her home after girls serenade her with humiliating songs in gym class. February 4: Elizabeth has soda bottle thrown at her. February 14: Elizabeth attacked with rock-filled snowballs. March 7: Elizabeth hit by egg. March 12: Elizabeth hit by tomato. "She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day," Mrs. Huckaby wrote at one point, apparently with a straight face.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it? But it's even more hard to believe that the echoes of this exact behavior are still heard -- loudly -- down in Jena, Louisiana today where they didn't scream "lynch her" or "send that nigger back to the jungle" -- they just hung symbolic nooses under the "white tree" where African Americans aren't allowed to sit and posted the addresses of black students on web sites, calling for their followers to "lynch the Jena 6". And once again, as those who have followed the story know, the authorities are complicit at best and active perpetrators at worst. For instance:

[Mayor Murphy] McMillin has insisted that his town is being unfairly portrayed as racist—an assertion the mayor repeated in an interview with Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist group based in Learned, Miss., who asked McMillin to "set aside some place for those opposing the colored folks."

"I am not endorsing any demonstrations, but I do appreciate what you are trying to do," Barrett quoted McMillin as saying. "Your moral support means a lot."

Katrina brought the ugly reminder of America's original sin back to our TV screens in living color. Then, this past summer, the immigration debate erupted in the right-wing noise machine, exposing the great brown underbelly of American nativism once again and scuttling long laid plans for GOP Hispanic outreach. And Jena has reminded us in stark black and white that we haven't progressed as far as many people assumed, since that day 50 years ago in Little Rock. What's going on here?

Tuesday, Bob Herbert in the New York Times answered that question:

The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans. Last week, the residents of Washington, D.C., with its majority black population, came remarkably close to realizing a goal they have sought for decades — a voting member of Congress to represent them.

A majority in Congress favored the move, and the House had already approved it. But the Republican minority in the Senate — with the enthusiastic support of President Bush — rose up on Tuesday and said: “No way, baby.”

[..]

At the same time that the Republicans were killing Congressional representation for D.C. residents, the major G.O.P. candidates for president were offering a collective slap in the face to black voters nationally by refusing to participate in a long-scheduled, nationally televised debate focusing on issues important to minorities.

[...]

The Republican debate is scheduled for Thursday. But Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson have all told Mr. Smiley: “No way, baby.”

They won’t be there. They can’t be bothered debating issues that might be of interest to black Americans. After all, they’re Republicans.

They can't be bothered debating issues that might be of interest to brown Americans either. They also skipped the Univision Spanish language debate.

Herbert reminds us about the Southern Strategy -- and famed GOP strategist Lee Atwater's candid admission: “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.”

But what is unusual this time out is that the Republicans are getting more overt rather than less for the first time in 40 years. In recent campaigns the Southern Strategy had developed into a sophisticated code, even more obscure than Atwater's examples, where they would support "Southern heritage" symbols like the confederate flag and run on "law and order" but at the same time make a great show of "outreach" and inclusion to the public at large. This has been the pattern for some years now, perfected by the current president in his "compassionate conservative" campaign in 2000. But as Rick Perlstein points out here, they aren't even doing that anymore.

It actually isn't surprising. If you listen to right-wing talk radio these days you will hear more outright racist rhetoric than I can remember in the last 25 years. The Internet is even worse. Blacks, "illegal aliens," Muslims -- all day long you hear an endless litany of complaints about these illegitimate people who are allegedly trying to ruin the American way of life through whining and scheming, stealing jobs and trying to kill us all in our beds. The other day, even General John Abizaid's statement that the world could live with a nuclear Iran was greeted on rightwing forums with a spew of insults about his "Arab" ancestry.

The racist beast is clamoring to be set free.

Perhaps it's just the old twin pillars of right-wing populism raising their hideous heads: economic insecurity leading to a nativist resentment toward foreigners and African Americans. I suspect it has something to do with the last six years of endless fearmongering and racist subtext of the rhetoric of the War On Terror (it doesn't matter which ones attacked us!). The war in Iraq has left many of these conservatives unsatisfied and unfulfilled, so they've turned to those of darker hue closer to home.

Whatever the impetus for this latest round of racism and nativism, you can see that it is already having an effect on our politics. And that was predictable, too. The country has politically realigned, as least to the extent that the South is now a Republican monolith. And the Republicans, being weaker than they've been in a generation, are forced to retreat behind the firewall of their Southern Strategy, a development that was predicted by conservative journalist Christopher Caldwell back in 1998 in his article "Why The GOP Is Doomed":

The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed the “tipping point” and begun to alienate voters from other regions.

The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values—particularly Christian values—at the center of politics. This is not the same as saying that the Republican Party is “too far right”; Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are conservative on values issues. It is, rather, that the Republicans have narrowly defined values as the folkways of one regional subculture and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country.

Perhaps it's more accurate that the one folkway and "value" that many right wing conservatives around the country share with their conservative, Southern Republican brethren is racism. It's a tie that has always bound. Perhaps in this era of epic Republican failure, it's the one thing they can all fall back on.

The controversial Southern Democratic political consultant Mudcat Saunders is not someone liberals like me feel very comfortable with on a number of issues. But he recently wrote something that I think is useful to think about as we go into this election. I don't know if it will be useful in picking up southern Republican votes as he suggests, which is a quixotic quest in my view. But he is surely correct on the merits:

On race, I say it’s time to hit the Republicans straight on. When they use race-baiting to divide God’s children, let’s call them on it. It’s now been 27 years since Lee Atwater introduced one of the most effective great lies in political history—the “Welfare Queen”. Yet we have not even hit that one in the mouth. I say let’s shout out with the fury of hell, “If you are a racist, go ahead and vote for the Republicans.”

.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future