“Typical, Old-Fashioned, Indulgent Louisiana Republican”: Why Nobody Who Knows Louisiana Believes Steve Scalise
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) has admitted that he delivered a speech to a so-called “white rights” conference in 2002 that was held by an organization known as EURO, headed by the neo-Nazi leader David Duke. Scalise has also insisted that he shares American society’s abhorrence of such “hate groups” — and that he did not know what kind of group he was talking to. He is asking the public to believe that he did not notice any of the virulent racist and anti-Semitic talk by the Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and assorted white nationalists in attendance at this gathering.
But Louisiana Republicans have had a David Duke problem since 1989, when Duke won a state assembly seat. He had been a neo-Nazi ideologue since his youth; he had paraded one night in full Nazi uniform with a swastika armband at the state university; and he had made the “international Jewish conspiracy” central to his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Even after he was elected, Duke was still selling Holocaust denial books from his state legislative office.
Yet the Louisiana State Republican Party Central Committee refused to either investigate Duke’s views or pass a censure motion, despite the repeated efforts of Beth Rickey, a Central Committee member. When Duke said he had changed his beliefs, his fellow Republicans and many white Louisianans decided to believe him.
Then in 1990 and 1991 Duke ran in two consecutive statewide elections in Louisiana — for U.S. senator and governor — and won a majority of the white vote both times. The state was saved by black voters, whose ballots defeated him. Again, the state Republican Party refused to investigate Duke’s actual positions. Nevertheless, his worldview became the central issue in those campaigns. And after Duke equated affirmative action with the extermination of European Jews, President George H.W. Bush stepped in to denounce him. Once more, local Republicans remained silent. Scalise, who was 25 years old in 1990, could not have missed this debate, which made national news.
A few years later, Duke finally gave up his Republican “my views have changed” smokescreen. He published an Aryan primer as an autobiography in 1998, was convicted of tax fraud and went to federal prison in 2002, and began a prolonged public rant and rave about Jews that continues to this date. At the time of the EURO meeting with Scalise, Duke was overseas, attempting to avoid indictment, and addressed the gathering in Metairie, LA, via long-distance video hookup.
It is hard to believe that Steve Scalise, a sentient adult, missed all this, particularly as he was running for re-election to the state legislature in 2002. It is much easier to believe that he had the typical, old-fashioned, indulgent Louisiana Republican attitude toward David Duke. The question remains: Are there any national Republican leaders who will stand up, as President George H. W. Bush did in the 1990s, and speak the truth?
By: Leonard Zeskind, The National Memo, December 30, 2014
“Today In GOP Outreach”: House Majority Whip Admits Speaking At White-Power Event
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), the third highest-ranking member in the Republican caucus, admitted on Monday that he spoke at a white-power conference in 2002.
Scalise’s presence as an “honored guest” at a 2002 European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) conference was first reported on Sunday by Louisiana-based blogger Lamar White, Jr. EURO, which was founded by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, is classified as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
According to posts that White, Jr. uncovered from the white-power site stormfront.org, Scalise — who was a state representative at the time — addressed the crowd and “discussed ways to oversee gross mismanagement of tax revenue or ‘slush funds’ that have little or no accountability,” and “brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, under-funded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the Housing and Urban Development Fund, an apparent give-away to a selective group based on race.”
On Monday, Scalise’s spokeswoman Moira Bagley confirmed his attendence at the event to The Washington Post:
“Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints,” Bagley said. “In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around. In 2002, he made himself available to anyone who wanted to hear his proposal to eliminate slush funds that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars as well as his opposition to a proposed tax increase on middle-class families.”
She added, “He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question. The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic.”
Bagley’s statement does not specify if or when Scalise realized that he had addressed a group that believes that “the Jews are the enemy of the White race, and they are largely responsible for the ‘browning’ of America,” or that “the beautiful Germany of the 1930s with blonde children happily running through every village has been replaced with a multi-racial cesspool.” Furthermore, her claim that he “has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question” is rather undercut by the fact that he gave an apparently well-regarded speech to their annual conference.
Scalise is not the first prominent Republican to associate with white supremacists; Scalise’s former colleague in the House, Ron Paul, once praised Duke in a newsletter. But Paul never held a position nearly as powerful as majority whip.
It remains to be seen whether the new revelations will cost Scalise his position; GOP leaders are reportedly “monitoring” the situation.
Meanwhile, the news seems extremely unlikely to help Republicans in their mostly forgotten quest to reach out to minority voters.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, December 29, 2014
“Missouri Burning”: Why Ferguson’s Inferno Is No Surprise
The past week’s unfolding tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, with its militarized and overwhelmingly white police force confronting angry and hopeless African-Americans, is not a story unique to that place or moment. Many cities and towns in this country confront the same problems of poverty, alienation, and inequality as metropolitan St. Louis — or even worse.
But beneath the familiar narrative there is a deeper history that reflects the unfinished agenda of race relations – and the persistence of poisonous prejudice that has never been fully cleansed from the American mainstream.
For decades, Missouri has spawned or attracted many of the nation’s most virulent racists, including neo-Nazis and the remnants of the once-powerful Ku Klux Klan. Associated with violent criminality and crackpot religious extremism, these fringe groups could never wield much influence in the post-civil rights era. Beyond those marginalized outfits, however, exists another white supremacist group whose leaders have long enjoyed the patronage of right-wing Republican politicians.
The Council of Conservative Citizens, headquartered in St. Louis, is a living legacy of Southern “white resistance” to desegregation, with historical roots in the so-called “citizens’ councils” that sprung up during the 1950s as a “respectable” adjunct to the Klan. Its website currently proclaims that the CCC is “the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights!” What that means, more specifically, is promoting hatred of blacks, Jews, gays and lesbians, and Latino immigrants, while extolling the virtues of the “Southern way of life,” the Confederacy, and even slavery.
The group’s website goes on to brag that the CCC is the only group promoting “white rights” whose meetings regularly feature “numerous elected officials, important authors, talk-show hosts, active pastors, and other important people” as speakers.
Although that boast may be exaggerated, it isn’t hollow. Founded in 1985 by the ax handle-wielding Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox and a group of white activists, the CCC remained obscure to most Americans until 1998, when media exposure of its ties to prominent congressional Republicans led to the resignation of Mississippi senator Trent Lott as Majority Leader. Six years later, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group monitoring racist activity in the United States, reported that the CCC had hosted as many as 38 federal, state, and local officials at its meetings (all of them Republicans except one Democrat) – despite a warning from the Republican National Committee against associating with the hate group.
Over the years, the CCC’s friends in high places included such figures as former Missouri senator John Ashcroft, who shared much of the CCC agenda as governor, when he opposed “forced desegregation” of St. Louis schools – along with the CCC members who served on the city’s school board. When President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General, the CCC openly celebrated, declaring in its newsletter that “Our Ship Has Come In.”
Recently, many fewer Republican officials have been willing to associate in public with the CCC’s racist leaders. Then again, however, Ashcroft himself tended to meet secretly with those same bigots, while outwardly shunning them. When asked about his connections with the group during his confirmation hearings in 2001, he swore that he had no inkling of its racist and anti-Semitic propaganda – a very implausible excuse given the CCC’s prominence in St. Louis while he served as governor.
Despite the CCC’s presence, Missouri is home to many fine and decent people, of course – but malignant traces of the group, and the racial animus it represents, have spread far beyond the state’s borders. The most obvious example is Rush Limbaugh, the “conservative” cultural phenomenon who grew up south of St. Louis in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and who has earned a reputation as a racial agitator over many years on talk radio, where he began by doing mocking bits in “black” dialect.
In 1998, the talk jock defended Trent Lott when other conservatives were demanding his resignation over the politician’s CCC connection. Today, Limbaugh echoes the CCC line on the Brown killing, which suggests coldly that the unarmed teenager deserved his fate because he may have been a suspect in shoplifting or smoked marijuana. Why would a young man’s life be worth less than a box of cigars? Back in Rush’s home state, the answer is all too obvious.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, August 19, 2014
“The True Architects And Gatekeepers”: The ‘Real Racists’ Have Always Worn Suits
This week we’ve commemorated the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the monumental piece of legislation aimed at outlawing discrimination based on race. A three-day-long “civil rights summit” was organized at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, where many past and present activists and politicians spoke on the legacy of the Civil Rights Act.
With the commemoration has come further discussion about the contemporary face of American racism (Chris Hayes hosted a great segment on the topic last night with Salon’s Brittney Cooper and New York‘s Jonathan Chait). Over at BET, Keith Boykin wrote:
Despite the progress of the past half century, the struggle continues. “The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.” So said baseball hall of famer Hank Aaron in an interview with USA Today this week, in which he seemed to compare the racist klansmen of the 1960s with the supposedly post-racial cynics of our current generation.
You see, today’s racists don’t wear white hoods and scream the N-word. They wear dark suits and scream about government handouts. They don’t set up racist poll taxes to deter Blacks from voting. They set up voter ID laws to do the same thing. And they certainly don’t defend lynch mobs, which legitimize vigilante justice. Instead, they defend Stand Your Ground laws, which achieve the same purpose.
But I have trouble with this framing. It’s neat and easily digestible for anyone with only a cursory understanding of American history and racism, and therefore popular as a means of telling that history. It has broad appeal, but it’s not accurate. It flattens history and does the work of placing the onus for past bad deeds on a select few. It reinforces the image of “the real racist” as one who expressed their hatred in demonstrably violent ways. It suggests that racists have simply become more sophisticated, changing the tactics of their hatred from burning crosses to writing legislation, from white hoods to business suits, as that Hank Aaron quote contends.
Here’s the problem with that narrative: the architects and gatekeepers of American racism have always worn neckties. They have always been a part of the American political system.
I understand the impulse in wanting to find some way to convey that what we’re dealing with currently is a system of racism that is less overt than it once was. Saying things like “we’ve gone from white hoods to business suits” is one way to seem to speak to contemporary racism’s less vocal, yet still insidious nature. But it does a disservice to the public understanding of racism, and in the process undercuts the mission of drawing attention to contemporary racism’s severity.
It wasn’t the KKK that wrote the slave codes. It wasn’t the armed vigilantes who conceived of convict leasing, postemancipation. It wasn’t hooded men who purposefully left black people out of New Deal legislation. Redlining wasn’t conceived at a Klan meeting in rural Georgia. It wasn’t “the real racists” who bulldozed black communities in order to build America’s highway system. The Grand Wizard didn’t run COINTELPRO in order to dismantle the Black Panthers. The men who raped black women hired to clean their homes and care for their children didn’t hide their faces.
The ones in the hoods did commit violent acts of racist terrorism that shouldn’t be overlooked, but they weren’t alone. Everyday citizens participated in and attended lynchings as if they were state fairs, bringing their children and leaving with souvenirs. These spectacles, if not outright endorsed, were silently sanctioned by elected officials and respected members of the community.
It’s easy to focus on the most vicious and dramatic forms of racist violence faced by past generations as the site of “real” racism. If we do, we can also point out the perpetrators of that violence and rightly condemn them for their actions. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that those individuals alone didn’t write America’s racial codes. It’s much harder to talk about how that violence was only reinforcing the system of political, economic and cultural racism that made America possible. That history indicts far more people, both past and present.
By: Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation, April11, 2014
“How To Lie With Statistics”: Stoking White Fear With Bad Analysis
This week, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen published an inarticulate and very inept interpretation of the demography of shootings listed in the New York City Police Department’s 2012 Crime and Enforcement report. In his “Racism vs. Reality” piece, he argued that the post-Zimmerman discourse about racial profiling isn’t acknowledging that people are afraid of black men because black men commit more crime.
Cohen writes that blacks make up “a quarter of the population and commit 78 percent of the shootings in New York City.” He implies that the city’s “Stop & Frisk” program is justified: “If young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk… It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.”
Cohen should be embarrassed by his innumeracy. He cherry-picked one piece of data and drew biased, grand generalizations, which serve no purpose other than to stoke “white fear” and reinforce a long running stereotype of the “Negro Savage,” a term used by white supremacists to assert that a slave was a docile creature, content in captivity, but as a freeman, a dangerous menace from the dark continent driven by base and barbaric instincts to rape and pillage white society. The Ku Klux Klan and others used this stereotype to justify lynching and other violence against blacks during the segregation era.
Today, this stereotype has morphed into the “Criminal Black Man.” The dangerous, inner-city, hoody-wearing, gun-toting, drug-dealing man who must be watched, stopped and frisked to ensure that proper society remains safe. It is a conception that has a long running, insidious and chilling effect on public policy. It shapes ineffective policing techniques and many other ineffective laws meant to lower crime rates. We need to go no further than Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s WOR radio interview last month to see how this plays out. He said, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
Had Cohen read Darell Huff’s 1954 book, “How to Lie with Statistics,” or attended one of the National Press Club Institutes’ recent talks on data journalism, he would have realized his inferences are weak because he misinterpreted the statistics. He committed sampling bias and overgeneralization. Cohen looks at one facet of the NYPD report and superimposes it on the entire U.S. population of black men. He doesn’t consider any other angles that may blow a hole in his conclusions, such as: How many shootings ended in a guilty verdict? How many were justified? How many accidental? How many arrests ended in acquittal?
Or for that matter, how does this information relate to the fact that New York City’s crime rate is at its lowest since the 1950s, in light of the fact that it’s minority population has grown significantly since? Or at the very least, why are the police incapable of conducting race-neutral work. Rooting out potential criminals based on behavior and not race?
Cohen’s column would have contributed rather than detracted from this conversation had it discussed how these stereotypes inform public policy choices. Instead of fanning “white fear,” he would have helped loosen the emotional grip this trial now has on the national discourse, a stranglehold that is drawing lines in the sand, fueling recriminations and preventing a substantive, solutions-driven conversation about taming the real elephant in the room: Why do we consistently allow stereotypes to stymie our continual efforts to cultivate a fair, just, democratic American Society?
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, July 16, 2013
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