Posted on 12/15/2002 4:07:32 AM PST by Chi-townChief
There's a joke told by Chris Rock that sort of sums of up the Trent Lott debacle. In his routine, Rock used a meter to gauge African-American progress. Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, sent the meter zooming upward. But darn it if Lil' Kim didn't come along and set black folks back 100 years.
That's a paraphrase, of course, but I think you get the gist.
After a Republican romp that boosted the GOP's morale and threw Democrats into despair, darn it if Lott's motor mouth didn't set Republicans back a century or more.
I won't dwell on Lott's comments since I'm sure everyone has heard them by now. But Lott apparently got caught up in the moment as the good ol' boys celebrated Sen. Strom Thurmond's (R-S.C.) 100th birthday.
"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," Lott said.
As expected, the Republican Senate leader is being denounced as a racist in some quarters and as a fool in others. In any case, it is time for Lott to step aside.
Inquiring minds have dug up enough Lottisms, as well as actions such as trying to keep blacks out of his college fraternity, voting against the Voting Rights Act and opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to make Lott a liability if the GOP is truly seeking diversity.
Although Lott announced that he intends to speak to Black America through an arrangement pulled together by BET founder Robert Johnson, additional groveling is not likely to make much of a difference.
Personally, I couldn't care less what a dinosaur from Mississippi has to say, even one who is in Senate leadership, since not one member of that illustrious body is African-American.
Still, I can accept that Lott was just joshing when he made his remarks and got carried away. Indeed, I see it a little like what happened last summer when Charles Barron, a New York councilman, went overboard at a "Reparations Rally" and ticked white folks off with his slap comment.
They both are a lot like the drunk who stays too long at the party and wakes up the next morning with a bad headache and a case of the cringes.
And whenever public figures make fools of themselves, writers are obligated to publicly filet them. But in this instance, the only knife that matters is the one that is wielded by Republicans themselves, particularly black Republicans.
So I talked to a black man who claims never to have voted for a Democrat in his life. He gets bonus points for being from Alabama.
"Instead of worrying about Trent Lott, Democrats ought to be worried about this: Out of a group where 95 percent of the people vote Democratic, they were passed over when it came to Al Gore's selection of a running mate," A.J. Fox told me, his voice grating with agitation.
"We should be worried about that. We are so misguided that we listen to whatever Kweisi Mfume and Jesse Jackson have to say. Trent Lott is one individual person, and he doesn't speak for the Republican Party.
"We don't care when Democrats show us that they think we are not good enough, but we worry about Trent Lott. I think they were having a party and the old guy had too much brandy."
Of course, things are never that simple.
While some people may have dismissed Barron's slap remarks as a tasteless joke, his insensitivity pushed the reparations movement back to the fringes where it had been for far too long. Indeed, has anyone heard more than a whimper about reparations since then?
The same thing is destined to happen to the GOP's progressive agenda if Republican leaders, especially President Bush and his two shining stars--Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice--don't push Lott from his post.
After all, you would expect Democrats and civil rights leaders to react when a Republican appears to wave the Confederate flag. That conservatives have publicly denounced Lott's remarks shows what a liability he is.
And frankly, Sen. Peter Fitzgerald's (R-Ill.) "I-don't-believe-that- Sen.-Lott's-remarks-were intended-in-the-spirit-in-which-it-was-interpreted" shows why he shouldn't be representing a diverse state.
It is also disappointing that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is taking the cowardly path by avoiding commenting on the uproar altogether.
But it really doesn't matter what Democrats or civil rights groups have to say about Trent Lott. If white Republicans are serious about creating a "big tent" that includes minorities and women, they have to leave the Lotts in the past.
If not, they can't blame the brandy.
E-mail: marym@suntimes.com
Hi Mr. Kettle, I'm Mr. Pot. You're black.
Inquiring minds have also dug "Fritzisms"; actions such as being a vocal supporter of segregation, supporting the incorporation of the Confederate flag into the banner of South Carolina (and signing it into law as Governor), referring to Latinos as "wetbacks" and African Americans as "darkies", etc make Senator Ernest Fritz Hollings (D-SC) a liability if the Democrats really do have respect for "diversity".
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