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If
they haven't already done so by now, Virginia's United
States Senators John Warner and George Allen should
quietly ask Trent Lott to forgo service as the
Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate. An "inside
ask" would be in keeping with the collegial
traditions of the Senate. The stance would be
consistent with the records of the two Virginia
Senators on advancing racial equality in their years
of public service. The move wouldn't jeopardize in
any way the Republican majority restored by voters
in November and ready to launch in January.
Everyone
has seen or heard the news. After lauding retiring
South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond last week,
Senator Lott praised Thurmond's 1948 run for
president as a segregationist, saying in the process
that America would have been better off if Thurmond
had won. It wasn't hard to conclude that he meant
"better off" without desegregation of
schools, without civil rights for all Americans,
without blacks in the University of Mississippi,
without a Voting Rights Act, maybe even without an
African American as a Governor of Virginia or
Secretary of State or Supreme Court Justice or
National Security Advisor to the President.
Lott,
incredibly, had spoken almost exactly the same words
20 years ago, once again proving that human
resistance to both reason and experience remains our
most highly destructive characteristic. But it is
important to see clearly the twin threads of
prejudice and bad habits that run through Lott's
comments.
Any
one who grew up in the South during the period when
white-only drinking fountains and buses gave way to
equal opportunity and justice under the law knows
Lott-like people. Hatred and violence engulfed
hundreds of communities then. Virginia's massive
resistance tactics put the Commonwealth right down
at the bottom with Mississippi in dealing with the
challenges of African Americans determined to seize
and exercise their most basic rights as citizens.
Changes
in law and practice reaffirmed the most positive
course for American rights and democracy, but racial
prejudice and discrimination remain. Born of
ignorance and defiant of facts or reasoning, such
prejudice still leads otherwise seemingly fine
citizens to categorize people. This practice runs so
deep that the effect of these categorizations is to
lock those making such simplistic judgments so far
behind the bars of prejudice and stereotype that
they are never free to know themselves or others.
Like Trent Lott, they become victims of their own
ignorance. At the most basic level, these are people
who are puzzled when one asks them not to tell those
jokes or use those words, please. They obviously are
not the ones to trust with remarks at your
retirement party.
Further,
there are the sultry and smothering traditions of
the South that discourage, even demonize those who
challenge divisions of society, whether the barriers
are there because of race, sex, wealth, religion,
side of town, occupation, type of truck or a hundred
other things. One of Mississippi's greatest writers,
William Faulkner, summarized it best with his
assessment, "The past isn't dead, it isn’t
even past."
Almost
daily new media revelations show there is a
depressing consistency over decades in Trent Lott's
attitudes, actions and words on segregation,
desegregation and the future of the United States.
But trying to put together some legal case to prove
the violation of the spirit of America, to use the
characterization of Lott's comments by President
George W. Bush, isn't the point. After all, research
on the human genome now shows genetic differences
that determine race are among the most minor and
insignificant of differences among humans.
The
point now is leadership and commitment that puts
racial prejudice, in Faulkner's words, not only
"past," but "dead." Senators
Warner and Allen have done that themselves and they
have demanded it of others. So asking quietly for
Lott's resignation as Majority Leader-designate
should be a no-brainer for Virginia's Senators.
Making sure the Republican Party isn't seen
fertilizing the old racially charged, Dixiecrat
roots of its Southern Strategy should be a prime
objective, lest their own leadership suffer.
Lott's
fate as the Senator from Mississippi, of course, is
and should be up to the voters of that state. He
owes Mississippi deeper explanations. But leadership
of the Republican Party in the Senate is a matter
for Republican members of the Senate. Some time as a
pillar of salt on the Republican backbench might
help Lott come to some understanding of his greatest
failure as a man and political leader and the
dangers of ignorantly looking back.
The
long-term challenge for Senators, the South and
everyone else, of course, is how to dismantle a
whole set of cultural and societal norms grown from
times when we did not know that race is a divider
and determinant of no biological significance. New
knowledge, reason and experience are powerful forces
for progress, particularly in dismantling racial
prejudice and even when progress is measured in
decades.
-- December 16, 2002
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