The Ways Republicans Talk About Race NYT December 13, 2002 By JOSEPH CRESPINO
WASHINGTON - The scandal surrounding Trent Lott is not about a poor choice of words at a birthday party for Strom Thurmond. It's about the political choices Republicans made in the 1960's to 'go hunting where the ducks are' - code language for winning over white segregationists who abandoned the Democratic Party in the South. It's about continuing to benefit from racial prejudice through subtle and not-so-subtle sound bites that play to the Republican Party's far-right base. It's about the choice today to deny that the party is as much the party of Thurmond as it is the party of Lincoln.
Trent Lott admits that his comment about the nation's being better served if Mr. Thurmond, who ran on a segregationist platform, had been elected president in 1948 was terrible. That sentiment was terrible when he expressed it in nearly identical fashion in 1980. Tom DeLay, the incoming House majority leader, says reopening old racial wounds is 'unhelpful and unwelcome.' But whose wounds are we talking about?
It was the Republicans opening old wounds in 1980 when the Reagan campaign made an unmistakable effort to identify with the people, language and symbols of the South's segregationist past. The most infamous of these efforts was Ronald Reagan's advocacy of 'states' rights' - the Dixiecrat code word for segregation - at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., where 16 years earlier the murder of three civil rights workers made international headlines.
Later in the campaign Mr. Reagan returned to Mississippi, where reporters asked him about his remarks in Neshoba County. He acknowledged that the term 'creates some unpleasant images in some people's minds.' But of course the point was to fire up the far-right base of the party by choosing the right words.
Sound bites pitched toward the racist right have been the dirty little secret of the Republican Party for four decades. How have they gotten away with it? Partly by obscuring the evidence. The Bush administration, for example, has essentially closed access to President Reagan's presidential papers for historical researchers, making it that much harder to examine how race remained a secret part of the American conservative discourse.
President Bush said that Mr. Lott's comments 'do not reflect the spirit of our country.' His administration is planning a campaign strategy for 2004 that reaches out to minority voters. Mr. Bush invoked the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. before his convention acceptance speech. And even as the two Republican leaders with the clearest ties to the segregationist South - Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms - retire from the Senate, two of the most high-profile members of the administration are African American. But the history of racial appeals won't go away, even if the Republicans replace Mr. Lott.
Historians can debate just how central Senator Lott's kind of doublespeak has been to Republican success in the South. They can also debate how central the South has been in the Republican Party's success nationally. But the fact that racial appeals have played a role in the success of the modern Republican Party is not under debate. It is irrefutable. As of today, it remains unacknowledged by the party as a whole.
Joseph Crespino teaches history at George Mason University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/13/opinion/13CRES.html?
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