Posted on 12/17/2002 9:24:10 PM PST by Pokey78
Edited on 04/23/2004 12:05:05 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
On the Tuesday after Trent Lott's racial gaffe, I was approached by people close to the senator for advice on an appropriate apology. There was real desperation in their voices as they spoke into a speakerphone, but I had already concluded that he deserved what he was getting. That such a thought--segregation as a deliverance from "all these problems over all these years"--was rambling around in his head under the category of humor was clearly chilling. But they were also asking a perfectly reasonable question: How does a white male Mississippian, who has made an amazingly ugly racial gaffe, apologize? Could he have a political redemption?
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
But in the end a man cannot be redeemed by a moral equivalence. That those who ask Sen. Lott to imagine beyond his race do not do so themselves is no consolation. The senator is probably a more moral man and thus a better conservative today than he was two weeks ago, but moral calculus is more forgiving than political calculus. He is now so politically compromised that in his Black Entertainment Television interview he declared "across the board" support for affirmative action, vowed to rethink his support for Judge Charles Pickering, and agreed to a "civil rights tour" with Rep. John Lewis.
A vacuum of white guilt as wide as the Grand Canyon has opened in him, and he will never again see civil rights, welfare, judgeships or education with a clear eye. He will now live in a territory of irony where his redemption will be purchased through support for racialist social reforms that make a virtue of the same segregationist spirit that has now brought him low. "
I like this website because I do feel a good space with people with whom I have a broad general agreement.
I do say the following with the feeling that I am talking to a friend who I see as making a mistake and nothing more hostile than that.
What I have come to detest on the Free Republic are comments like yours, after an extraordinary comment from a poster or article, which offers a thin "things are not as simple as that" quip made from an all-knowing face designed to mask an unwillingness to come to terms with a real challenge and statement of truth, as Steele offers in this article.
Read the article again, especially the quote I excerpted above. You have to had missed its meaning completely, to then go out and dismiss it like you did. If you want to uphold what you identify as Goldwater principles, then you should admit that something more should have been done to show that the Southern strategy was not simply writing off blacks as a lost cause. I think they were written off as a lost cause and I think that the reason was not malice but a practical sense that for the foreseeable elections back then, there was not much of a payoff to be seen in revelaing the incohate compassionate conservatism in our opposition to quotas and setasides and all the rest of the left's misguided policies that served to divide our country.
But what Steele is saying here about the imagination that is needed for true political freedom in a society that goes beyond mere indivdualism [as much as individualism is not unimportant and is indeed a prerequisite] is indeed a wonderful insight that should be deeply considered. It is that insight that is need for the GOP or at least for conservatives tonow speak from their principles without apologizing to anyone about their morality and compassion. Lotts' comments and smallmindedness blur all that and make it too easy for the left to make their false charge against us seem plausible.
Your immediate post after the article should be retracted because you obviously did not have time to understand what he was saying and only felt Goldwater somehow being implicitly attacked unfairly. Please read the excerpt above again. Thank you.
If you would like on or off this bump list, let me know.
Here are links to the first two pieces:
A Question of Temperament [What makes one a conservative?] First of a Series
To Preserve What We Have- American Conservatism - WSJ article by Bill Buckley
Here is the telling statement for me. The bolding is mine.
Equality is not preference.
Would love to hear any pro or con critiques of it from those who've been in the trenches on this for the past couple of weeks.
They asked for language, so I gave them what I wanted to hear: "I loathe segregation and racism with everything in me. This loathing is, for me, the starting point of human decency." "He won't do all this," one of them said. "Then he should go down," I said. ...
The senator's many apologies--perhaps more than his original gaffe--have revealed him to be a man who has troubled himself very little with self-examination where race is concerned. And now, in racial crisis, he has no inner anchoring to call on. ...
But the slow march of conservative principles back to mainstream respectability is still so fragile that conservatives themselves must be absolutely innocent of racism. Anything less than this will count as virulent racism and be held against the principles themselves. And if you have associated with Bob Jones University, despite its ban on interracial dating, your racial innocence is a long way from absolute. ...
Conservatives in the civil rights era failed to see themselves in the Negro, failed to imagine themselves into his plight. Had they imagined themselves there, they would have made themselves the measure of the rights blacks should receive. But conservative principles, entrepreneurial in so many ways, lost this opportunity to a lack of imagination. ...
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
Agreed. Erudite, well-reasoned, and to the point. Too bad Lott ain't got the mental wherewithal to understand it.
(BTW, agree this is one of the best essays on the subject I have seen and should be kept BUMPED.)
Bump for the truth.
George Wallace, whose journey from racism to redemption was nothing less than Shakespearean, said it was suffering that finally expanded his imagination. Shot, paralyzed, and in constant pain for many years, he came to see himself in the black caretakers whom he had clearly grown to love. It is not conceivable that he would have stopped their children at the university door.
Still, even though many blacks including Jesse Jackson vetted his redemption, Wallace apparently did not like racial preferences. They required the same denial of human commonality that racism enforced, the same suppression of imagination. And this begs the question of whether there is much difference between the old Wallace who blocked the schoolhouse door and today's Ivy League admissions officers who say they have too many Asian applicants.
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