I guess people are agitated that Haley Barbour said some kind of stupid things again about his life growing up in Yazoo City, Mississippi. I read what he said and I don’t think it’s much of a scandal. He said that his local White Citizen’s Council kept the Ku Klux Klan from using violence or opening an active chapter in his hometown. And he said that the civil rights era in Yazoo City had not been that big of a deal. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”
Haley Barbour isn’t going to get what’s wrong and insensitive about his statements. He had a wonderful childhood. He was very successful. He was extremely popular. He was a good athlete. He had a nice family that had some money and a good reputation. He just isn’t ever going to see all that as wrong or tainted or in any way less than idyllic. His brother was the mayor that oversaw the desegregation of Yazoo City schools. Within a few years the public schools were 80% black. Haley and his siblings were sent to a school specifically built for families that didn’t want their kids to go to school with coloreds. How can you expect Haley to really get it?
It wasn’t a big deal to him then, and it isn’t a big deal to him now. He’s about the laziest racist you are going to find.
He knows what he’s doing. These comments were on purpose. It’s not the first time he’s said the same thing, either.
To illustrate:
This is the Fox Nation page.
If Haley Barbour had said those things in the 1970s, he would have never been a successful politician — in Mississippi.
Haley knows exactly what he is doing. It’s the next step in the “we racists are so cuddly, what’s the big deal” strategy that politicians have been playing out since Ronald Reagan became President. Any Southern politician who looks lazy or stupid generally isn’t.
What Haley Barbour is doing is testing to see if he will get a harsh reaction outside the South. That is part of his calculus in deciding whether to run for President in 2012 as the anti-Obama scourge of the Republican Party. So far, the media has treated him as cuddly. And I don’t believe for one minute that the White Citizens Council of Yazoo City kept the KKK from being violent. If the KKK did not open a chapter in Yazoo City it was because the KKK and the White Citizens Council were the same “respectable” people.
I don’t expect Haley to get it (but he’s not stupid). But the rest of the country better get it or we are in for a repeat of the 1890s. And once again they will have a Supreme Court who will support them.
It’s not just his statement that are worrying but the uptick in open racism in Alabama and Mississippi since the November election.
“And I don’t believe for one minute that the White Citizens Council of Yazoo City kept the KKK from being violent. If the KKK did not open a chapter in Yazoo City it was because the KKK and the White Citizens Council were the same “respectable” people.”
Read Willie Morris’ books about Yazoo City. There was nothing peaceful about segregation there. It was notoriously violent.
And that thing about the ‘finer’ citizens keeping the ‘coarser’ citizens under control is old Southern rhetoric for the benefit of Yankees: I use your class prejudice to deodorize my race prejudice. Nice trick, huh?
And he does a complete 180 this afternoon.
So, what happens to the news orgs like FOX who were defending Barbour’s odious bullshit now that he admits he got caught and flipped like a Mississippi catfish out of water?
FoxNews will go forward without saying a thing. “We have always been at war with Eurasia.” That’s the FoxNews standard.
This means that Barbour must have gotten some slapdown from within the Republican Party, possibly potential donors who are not interested in running a racist campaign against Obama.
Watch for some more tests of the revisionist message between now and next January. There are enough good ole boys out there chomping at the bit for a leader to give them cover.
I don’t buy this at all. I think it’s more likely that he got pushback from people in the GOP who are interested in running a slightly more subtle racist campaign against Obama than one where Haley Barbour is flapping off about how great it was to be white in the 1950s.
They’re going to run a racist campaign against him, but it’ll be more like the “scary seeecret moooslim” racist campaign. And having someone like Haley Barbour out there in the GOP primary pulling out the mouthbreathers to his rallies and getting clips of racists being openly racist out on YouTube and into the cable news networks is not compatible with a “scary seeecret moooslim” style racist campaign.
You nailed it.
Well, yes a subtle but deniable racist campaign that white folks of good will won’t notice because they are being nice.
I guess I should have used the words “blantant”, “over the top”, and “in your face” as qualifiers.
Good point.
Is that sarcasm or are you just that willing to give people the benefit of the doubt?
I’d call it more of a “subtle but deniable racist campaign so that certain middle-to-upper-middle class white folks can keep up their pretenses that they’re not racist” myself. But then I’m a misanthropic bastard whose related to people who are moderately racist but who are horrified when they get called out on it. The kind of folks who start sentences with “Not to be racist, but…” caveats.
Yep.
Fortunately, there will be a BCS Championship trophy in Starkville before Haley Barbour wins the presidency.
Only in the largest possible sense is he an idiot. At the smaller, but more functional, political sense he’s making a Reagan play because that is the only play he can make. Think Waffen-SS and Ronald Reagan’s “states’ rights” speech given on August 3, 1980, near Philadelphia, Mississippi.