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2nd Level Yellow Feather
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There's a Lott of it about
By Julian Coman
(Filed: 22/12/2002)
Washington
The American poet William Alexander Percy once described a 19th-century mob in Trent Lott's home county in Mississippi as "ill-dressed, unintelligent and slinking - the sort of people who lynch Negroes, attend revivals, and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards".
No one in Washington last week has accused Mr Lott of being ill-dressed. His passion for starched white shirts is notorious on Capitol Hill. But as representatives of the Republican Party have scrambled to distance themselves from America's latest race row, the GOP's senior senator has been singled out as uniquely sharing most of the other sins of the old South. According to the White House and Mr Lott's colleagues in Congress, America's segregationist past is a foreign country, and only he still lives there.
Mr Lott resigned as US Senate majority leader on Friday after apparently endorsing the racially-divisive former views of a white 100-year-old politician, Strom Thurmond. Lott has been typecast as an anomalous throwback to the days of Dixie, no longer relevant to the country's concerns. The judgment is unnecessarily harsh on Mr Lott and unduly flattering to America.
These days a de facto segregation exists which is so entrenched that the services of a Strom Thurmond are hardly required. The battles over "affirmative action" only testify to the depth of the divide.
Most of the congressmen who recoiled in horror at Mr Lott's fatal, belated endorsement of Mr Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat platform, will never have visited south-east Washington, the black part of town. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice notwithstanding, America's capital, like its other cities, offers its black and white residents parallel lives and parallel cultures. Mixed couples are still rare. London is a model of integration in comparison.
Politics is also a black and white issue. The Republican Party, whose leaders have devoted much of the week invoking the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, has spent most of the last 40 years stealthily wooing the white diehards of the old confederacy.
It was Richard Nixon who first spotted the votes to be gained in courting the anti-civil rights movement in the South. By 1972, Mississippi had given him 78 per cent of the vote. Mr Lott, who grew up as a Democrat, decided to become a Republican.
The Republican Party's "southern strategy" no longer deals with segregation, but the overwhelming majority of blacks have voted Democrat since the 1960s and continue to do so. The failure to "get the black vote out" was cited as the principal reason for Democratic failures in November's mid-term elections.
The everyday separation of blacks and whites, particularly in the South, is so routine that few people notice, except when someone like Mr Lott has an attack of candour. Indeed, when he said that the election of the segregationist Mr Thurmond would have saved America "a whole lot of problems", journalists from the Washington Post and the New York Times barely batted an eyelid.
The senator's comments were judged to be merely the kind of "in-house" aside that white southern politicians have been making for years. It was only when President George Bush let it be known that Mr Lott had strayed too far from the Republican's new "inclusive" message to black voters that a semi-private comment became a scandal.
President Bush, bolstered by impressive poll ratings, is determined to increase his market share of the vote by wooing the black and Hispanic vote. Trent Lott was too immersed in the old "southern strategy" to take due note. He made a mistake. But even in modern "inclusive" America, Lott is anything but alone.
Whats your view on this my American Friends?
By Julian Coman
(Filed: 22/12/2002)
Washington
The American poet William Alexander Percy once described a 19th-century mob in Trent Lott's home county in Mississippi as "ill-dressed, unintelligent and slinking - the sort of people who lynch Negroes, attend revivals, and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards".
No one in Washington last week has accused Mr Lott of being ill-dressed. His passion for starched white shirts is notorious on Capitol Hill. But as representatives of the Republican Party have scrambled to distance themselves from America's latest race row, the GOP's senior senator has been singled out as uniquely sharing most of the other sins of the old South. According to the White House and Mr Lott's colleagues in Congress, America's segregationist past is a foreign country, and only he still lives there.
Mr Lott resigned as US Senate majority leader on Friday after apparently endorsing the racially-divisive former views of a white 100-year-old politician, Strom Thurmond. Lott has been typecast as an anomalous throwback to the days of Dixie, no longer relevant to the country's concerns. The judgment is unnecessarily harsh on Mr Lott and unduly flattering to America.
These days a de facto segregation exists which is so entrenched that the services of a Strom Thurmond are hardly required. The battles over "affirmative action" only testify to the depth of the divide.
Most of the congressmen who recoiled in horror at Mr Lott's fatal, belated endorsement of Mr Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat platform, will never have visited south-east Washington, the black part of town. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice notwithstanding, America's capital, like its other cities, offers its black and white residents parallel lives and parallel cultures. Mixed couples are still rare. London is a model of integration in comparison.
Politics is also a black and white issue. The Republican Party, whose leaders have devoted much of the week invoking the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, has spent most of the last 40 years stealthily wooing the white diehards of the old confederacy.
It was Richard Nixon who first spotted the votes to be gained in courting the anti-civil rights movement in the South. By 1972, Mississippi had given him 78 per cent of the vote. Mr Lott, who grew up as a Democrat, decided to become a Republican.
The Republican Party's "southern strategy" no longer deals with segregation, but the overwhelming majority of blacks have voted Democrat since the 1960s and continue to do so. The failure to "get the black vote out" was cited as the principal reason for Democratic failures in November's mid-term elections.
The everyday separation of blacks and whites, particularly in the South, is so routine that few people notice, except when someone like Mr Lott has an attack of candour. Indeed, when he said that the election of the segregationist Mr Thurmond would have saved America "a whole lot of problems", journalists from the Washington Post and the New York Times barely batted an eyelid.
The senator's comments were judged to be merely the kind of "in-house" aside that white southern politicians have been making for years. It was only when President George Bush let it be known that Mr Lott had strayed too far from the Republican's new "inclusive" message to black voters that a semi-private comment became a scandal.
President Bush, bolstered by impressive poll ratings, is determined to increase his market share of the vote by wooing the black and Hispanic vote. Trent Lott was too immersed in the old "southern strategy" to take due note. He made a mistake. But even in modern "inclusive" America, Lott is anything but alone.
Whats your view on this my American Friends?
