---1) States Rights is not invariably linked to racism, segregation, and/or slavery (or however Mike wants to phrase it). FACT: Robert E Lee was against slavery. FACT: Robert E Lee was in favor of states rights enough to refuse the command of the Union Army and fight for the Confederacy.----
Rebuttal to point 1-by the way the author is white
- Remember read the ENTIRE article .
The Ghost of Racism Past
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor
December 20, 2002
"Leaning Left"
We're all familiar with Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", in which the ghosts of the past and future labor to persuade a miserly Scrooge to change his ways. This month, future Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) confronts the ghosts of his past. Will he learn, and like Scrooge become a better person for it? Or does he get buried, unloved and unlamented by those he could have helped? And what of his party?
I, for one, don't believe that most of today's conservatives are segregationist. Most conservatives aren't prejudiced against blacks; they're simply prejudiced against the poor.
That, of course, is a topic for another column. But since a large percentage of blacks just happen to be poor, they correctly perceive that a conservative agenda that includes removal of welfare benefits, the watering-down of public education with vouchers and poor funding, the removal or blocking of minimum wage and living wage laws, the attempted destruction of labor unions and collective bargaining, and the ideological support for sending jobs overseas, etc., is aimed at them. Throw in a few actual segregationists like Lott and their 'paranoia' becomes very real---if today's segregationists can no longer keep blacks separate, they can still keep them poor.
Yes, some conservatives remain segregationist, hiding behind conservative ideology. You can even read some of them here on The American Partisan's pages (see Dave Gibson's "So Utterly Predictable" or SARTRE's Strappado Wrack: "The Many Colors of Ignorance.") These segregationists call themselves conservatives and profess to believe in conservative values like "states' rights," "freedom of association," and "less government."
A whole generation of Southern segregationists used these concepts to fight against civil rights, integration, and the removal of laws discriminating against blacks in the 1960s. 1970s, and 1980s. For these segregationists "state's rights" meant the right of states to pass Jim Crow laws regulating the conduct of the races; "freedom of association" meant separating the races; and "less government" meant less federal interference in integration and court-ordered desegregation plans.
Today's conservatives, for the most part, repudiate these interpretations of conservative doctrine. But even conservatives without a bigoted bone in their body must recognize the Republican Party's recent debt to segregationism. After the Democratic Party's ideological commitment to civil rights in 1964, many Republicans closed their eyes to their ideological differences with segregationists and accepted them into the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan's famous visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi was emblematic of that moral ambiguity. And it paid off --- within a couple of decades Southern white voters, once predominantly conservative Democrats, became conservative Republicans instead.
Some conservatives are now patting themselves on the back for calling out Lott on his segregationist views. But will they also condemn his segregationist brothers when they hear them in private? Will they condemn attempts to use race to rally voters to their party? In Georgia this past election, Republican Sonny Perdue won an upset victory in part by appealing to turn back a change to the Georgia state flag that had removed the Confederate battle flag from a prominent place in the flag's field. That change had been supported in a bipartisan fashion both by the NAACP and by Georgia's business community.
The flag issue, some will argue, is about Southern tradition, not segregation. But that answer ignores the flag's origin in 1956, during the days when segregation was under federal attack, as well as its meaning for blacks and a rallying point for segregationists today. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the Confederate battle flag is flown by over 500 race hate groups today. If conservative Southern whites want their flag back, they must take it back from hate groups first.
Secretary of State Colin Powell put the issue straight to his Republican colleagues at the 2000 Republican National Convention when he asked why the party fights so hard to deny affirmative action for a few thousand poor black students, but advances affirmative action policies for the treatment of corporations and their CEOs. Why do Republican-controlled state legislatures continue to draw up gerrymandered districts that are completely black or lily white, creating segregated districts to guarantee their election rather than trying to run themselves in mixed --- integrated --- districts?
Conservatives should ask themselves why segregationists are attracted to the Right. They must be careful not to be used by the segregationists who still lurk within their ranks to promote policies that keep black Americans stuck in poverty, deny black Americans chances for a good education and equal protection under the law. They ought to be concerned about political gambits like Perdue's, that pit blacks against whites. The Ghost of Racism Past is in the room; meanwhile, a conservative Ebenezer Scrooge is still making excuses for staying in bed. ***
James Hall
Orlando, Florida, USA
---2 Mike's obsession with race issues reminds me of Straha's obsession with legalizing drugs. Except Straha isn't so annoying about it. '
No offense is meant to Straha, btw.----
Rebuttal of point 2 .I'll take this one. Obsession can be a good thing depending on what it is.Many people here seem to be obsessed with sugar coating,soft pedaling,ignoring and out and out lying about racism in American history. I'm obsessed with correcting that.I use my own words but also post others as above when they so adequately refute the same sugar-coating.
ps Found another one.He's white to
E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Washington Post Writers Group
12.20.02
States' wrongs
Can a post-Lott Senate GOP adopt a post-Goldwater ideology?
WASHINGTON -- In all the denunciations of Trent Lott's after-the-fact endorsement of Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign, almost no one is talking about the principle on which Thurmond based his defense of segregation. The principle was states' rights.
It's not surprising that Republicans shoved Lott out of his job before the debate went too deep. For all their attacks on Lott's excursion back to the 1940s -- they culminated in his resignation as leader on Friday -- most contemporary Republicans are as committed to states' rights doctrines as he is.
This creates a problem. Most Republicans, to their credit, now embrace the civil rights laws of the 1960s. These laws, after all, were passed with significant support from such important Republican figures as Senate leader Everett McKinley Dirksen and Rep. Bill McCulloch.
But Dirksen, McCulloch and their allies were standing up for the old Republican tradition that defended the power of national government to promote equal rights. That tradition came under attack in 1964 when Republican nominee Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act in the name of states' rights, and also because he thought some of its anti-discrimination provisions violated property rights. As Republican Jack Kemp put it recently in a column: “'The GOP went wrong in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, no racist, tragically voted against the Civil Rights Act out of misguided ideological purity.” That phrase, “'ideological purity,” is both accurate and instructive.
It was Goldwater's campaign, of course, that began the Era of the Republican South. Post-Goldwater Republicanism swept in millions of States' Rights Democrats, as Thurmond's supporters called themselves, including an ambitious young Mississippian named Trent Lott. Goldwater carried only six states in 1964: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Arizona. The first four of these had been the only states to vote for Thurmond in 1948. Apropos some of Lott's recent comments, the overlap did not occur because Goldwater and Thurmond shared some views on national defense. At issue were civil rights -- and states' rights.
One can now hear Republicans groaning: “But that's ancient history, and Lott was a problem because he's letting all our opponents dredge it up.”
That sentence is true except for the part about ancient history. While most Republicans now support the old civil rights measures, they continue to cast themselves as the party of states' rights, and proudly so. Republican court appointees, from the Supreme Court on down, are busily fashioning a new jurisprudence that uses states' rights as grounds for overturning progressive national legislation. Already, for example, the courts have used states' rights to limit the reach of federal laws on behalf of the disabled and the environment. Where states' rights don't work to eviscerate national legislation, property rights are called in. Sound familiar?
Until Lott reminded us, here's what we had forgotten: States' rights doctrines were invoked in our history for purposes other than preserving the sanctity of state laws. As Grant McConnell put it in his classic book, “Private Power and American Democracy,” states' rights provided “the classic defense of the privileges enjoyed by local and other elites.”
African-Americans in the South are among the best-known victims of states' rights claims, but they were not alone in having to turn to the federal government to seek vindication for their rights. It also took federal power to advance the rights of workers (through the Wagner Act and wages and hours laws), to protect consumers, and to guarantee the rights of small investors. Federal law protects the rights of women, the disabled and members of religious minorities.
Yes, it's good that many Republicans (some more quickly than others) came out against what Lott said. But it's significant that many of his earliest and most forceful critics were neo-conservative former Democrats -- Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol come to mind -- who never shared the old states' rights faith. The first Republican senator to issue an outright call on Lott to quit was Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee who, as his first name suggests, speaks from his party's oldest tradition of support for federal power.
But Lott's Republican critics, who share his states' rights views on many contemporary matters, need to explain why states' rights doctrines that were so wrong as a general proposition in 1948 are right today. If the federal government was right to overturn states' rights in defense of African-Americans, why is it wrong now to view states' rights with a degree of suspicion and to continue to see the federal government as a bulwark for individual rights? Lott has now been hustled off center stage, but the question will still haunt his party.