"Nudge, Nudge" Racism

In its final weeks this year's elections in the South mark a real confrontation with what I call "nudge, nudge" racism.

This is the kind of covert racism that southern Republicans have been practicing as part of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. Nixon called it his "southern strategy."

It's never overt. It's always denied. Yet when pressed to the wall (as Jesse Helms was by Harvey Gantt in 1990) it comes out.

Here's how it works.

You never admit to racism. You splutter and deeply resent the charge, the very idea. Everything you do which has a racist impact is done for different reasons. You cut food aid and education to keep the cost of government down. You call the Voting Rights Act unfair, while demanding Voter IDs old black folks don't have. You separate counties into all-white enclaves, call them cities, but always say it's about "local control."

Instead racism is practiced in the way people live. The South sprawls more than any other region. Each time blacks or other minorities move into a suburb, whites move further out. Then they work to deny the cities and suburbs left behind basic infrastructure. And if poorer whites have to be thrown on the scrap heap (zoning laws that prohibit apartment blocks or trailer parks) you do that.

Over the last 25 years, since I've been in the South, this covert racism has become increasingly overt, especially in the Deep South. Blacks are given political fiefdoms in the dying cities, blacks are allowed into some suburbs (which whites then flee), blacks are even appointed to corporate boards (upper-class blacks). Some blacks have internalized all this to the point where they ape whites, especially in their social politics, usually as caricature. Black conservatives are often louder, brassier, ballsier than their white counterparts. Black preachers may ape their own white counterparts, becoming junior-grade Pat Robertsons, and getting junior-grade Robertson rich.

All this remained covert until a month ago, when George Allen's closet came open but he did not fall behind challenger Jim Webb. Which may be why, upon taking over Bob Corker's campaign in Tennessee, the Rovians made it overt.

Here is another difference. The old, overt racism was directed from inside the South, by people like George Wallace and institutions like the Southern Baptist Convention. The new, covert racism is often directed from outside, by LA ad-men like Fred Davis (right), New York financiers like Howard Rich, or Washington political pros like Karl Rove.

Overt racism brings class into it again. You let in "good blacks" and you keep out poor ones. Then you use racist ideas to make the white poors' knees jerk, and keep the wealthy blacks in their place as well.

I think it fitting, in a way, that all this is now coming down on the head of Harold Ford Jr. Look at Harold Ford Jr. some time. I mean, look at the man. Look at his skin color. His skin is light, his lips are thin, and only his hair is nappy. There are lots of white faces in his family tree. Probably white men. The word for this was miscegenation. If you were electing Ford's race based on the background of his ancestors, I think whites would have a healthy majority. He's black because we say so. Just as Tiger Woods, whose mother is all-Thai and whose father was one-fourth American Indian and one-fourth white, is black. (And his kids will be black, too, even though their mom will be Swedish.)

Ford's victimization is interesting in another way. Because he is the product of a political dynasty that grew under the watch of this Thesis. His father, Harold Ford Sr., is the long-time political boss of Memphis. And if he should lose, it may well be because liberals are angry over the candidacy of his brother Jake in his old House district, running against the white Democratic nominee, Steve Cohen.

The Fords were given a taste of power, a taste of money, by the overt racist crowd. They have their own power base, their own organization, their own political skeletons. But now that Ford Jr. has gotten "uppity," and gone after something assumed to belong to whitey, it's all out in the open.

And there's this. Like many other black politicians (especially in the South) Ford has decided there's someone on whom he must look down upon to feel like a "real man." Gays. Ford is a gay-baiter. He wants equality on his own terms. Fully accept my skin. But he won't give it to others, those whose hearts are different. Until the subject of race came into it, he was successfully running to the right of his Republican opponent.

Which is good. I think it's good that southerners confront their racism, pure and unsullied by real equality, that they're forced to make this choice. I fully expect them to choose racism. I expect Allen and Corker will win.

And then, as the new majority, a majority based in the Northeast, and the Midwest, and the Far West, assumes power, the politicians of this region will be shunned, as all racists deserve to be shunned.