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Posted on 01/16/2003 9:37:55 AM PST by NorCoGOP
LOS ANGELES -- Race is a deadly rhetorical weapon in politics, especially lately.
In recent weeks, the subject of race and the apparent divide of the two main political parties has been harshly brought to the fore with Sen. Trent Lott's now infamous birthday tribute to Sen. Strom Thurmond.
The reactions to Lott's statements revealed the depths to which the issue of race has been abused and continues to be abused for political gain in this country. Righteous indignation turned into active propagation of blatant falsehoods.
Sen. Hillary Clinton went so far as to say all Lott did "was to state publicly what many (Republicans) have stated privately over many years in the back roads and back streets of the South."
Such wholesale condemnation of the party and its historical record merits examination. Even a cursory check of the historical record and current racially divisive issues reveals a gross misrepresentation of cases of discrimination.
Trent Lott deservedly is politically through. Sen. Robert Byrd's track record, however, is at least equally ill-starred, yet he remains a Democratic leader despite being the only former Ku Klux Klan member in the Senate.
Byrd voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and took the floor for 14 hours in the filibuster attempting to derail the act. He is the only senator to have voted against both black Supreme Court nominees, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. Yet he was the majority leader from 1977 until 1989. And even last year, in an interview with Fox News, he was quoted as saying, "There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time." He later apologized.
In another instance of race being used irresponsibly, opposing affirmative action has long been a barometer, in some camps, of racism. Failure to lower the college entrance standards for minorities has been cited as a symptom of pandering to a discriminatory constituency.
The intellectual counterargument, however, states that educational equality begins with elementary school, and topical solutions, such as allowing unprepared students into demanding academic environments, are superficial.
The historical record would seem to confirm that at least some Republicans are willing to back up that idea with action. In 1970, seven Southern states still had segregated school systems.
In March 1970, President Richard Nixon announced his resolution to enforce the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Topeka ruling after the delinquent states ignored a 1969 court order to immediately begin integration.
Although Nixon's announcement was greeted by Nostradamus-like prophesies of violence, he went ahead. The schools, amazingly, opened without violence.
More recently, Senate Democrats have been fighting the renomination of Charles Pickering Sr. to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), said that Pickering "has not built a distinguished record and is probably best known for intervening on behalf of a convicted cross-burner."
As it turns out, Senator Schumer deliberately misrepresented the truth, blatantly waving the race card in front of a public he knew to be ignorant of the facts of the case.
Judge Pickering, in the United States v. Swan, lowered the sentence of one of three defendants who had burned a cross in the yard of a mixed-race couple. The other two accepted a plea bargain, offered by the Clinton Justice Department, that let them off with no prison time, while Swan, the third defendant, refused the deal and was subsequently convicted and sentenced to prison for five to seven years.
Pickering reduced the sentence on the grounds that it was disproportionate to that of the other defendants, adding that Swan lacked a history of racist crimes.
This is not unusual for Pickering, who in the past has similarly lowered the sentence of a black man convicted of a first-time drug offense. But Pickering's record in the community is even more telling.
As was noted in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, "Pickering sent his children to the newly integrated Mississippi public schools ... (and) aided the FBI in prosecutions of KKK members." He lost re-election to the bench as a result but "was elected, in 1971, to the state Senate with the support of two-thirds of the African-American voters in his district."
Former Democratic Mississippi Gov. William Winter has characterized Pickering as "one of this state's most dedicated and effective voices for breaking down racial barriers."
Most would see Pickering's record as sympathetic to civil rights, if not outstandingly proactive for the causes of African Americans.
The divisive and false cries of all-encompassing racism in the last few months undermine the advances made in this country for all minorities and reveal the underlying avarice for political power that motivates all too many in the political realm.
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