For quite some time now, Texas Governor and would be Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s family has been in possession of a central Texas property named Niggerhead. Or at least, that’s the name that was painted in black block letters on a rock at the property’s entrance gate.
The Washington Post broke the story a few days ago. And While Perry maintains that he notified his parents after first seeing the rock in either 1983 or 1984, and that they had painted it over by the next time he saw it, the article disputes this timeline. The Post interviewed over two dozen people, at least seven of whom say they continued to see the Niggerhead rock through the decade and into the 1990s, even as Rick Perry was an up and coming state official and politician, bringing friends and associates to the property for hunting trips.
The field of politicians vying for a major party presidential nomination almost never includes black candidates, Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson being the most notable Democratic exceptions. Since Colin Powell passed up the opportunity in 2000, the Republicans Party still has yet to find a serious black presidential hopeful. For the upcoming election, however, they do have a minor black politician in the fray: Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.
If not for Cain, the GOP establishment could safely and unanimously rally around Perry’s assertion that he immediately objected to the Niggerhead rock and was the catalyst in having it quickly painted over, despite the fact that this version of events seems to be a lie. If not for Cain’s presenc
e, they could dismiss the entire episode as an inconclusive disputation of the historical record set forth by a hostile, liberal newspaper, a He Said/She Said affair in which Democrats are trying to cynically exploit a potentially embarrassing situation, while Perry tries to scramble to the high ground by bemoaning the indignities of our racist past and trumpeting his own earnest efforts to make things better.
But Herman Cain is very much with us. He’s a Republican, he is a religious Christian, and he is a right wing Conservative in almost every sense of the words. He’s even backtracked on affirmative action. But Cain is also a black man who was born and raised in the Deep South, who came of age in the American system of apartheid known as Jim Crow, and who was already 20 years old at the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which helped restore the franchise to most African Americans in the South and parts of the West.
So when Herman Cain went on national television this past Sunday morning, called Perry “insensitive,” and openly questioned when the rock was actually painted over, it was difficult to dismiss him as an overly sensitive Liberal hypocrite.
That hasn’t stopped many Republicans from going after him, however. Rather, they are now attacking Cain for being a disingenuous political opportunist.
Adam Serwer has pulled together a nice compilation of the fury, including the remarkably callous and revealing statement by Glenn
Reynolds that Cain’s “big appeal” to this point had been “that he’s not just another black race-card-playing politician.”
In other words, absolutely no black politicians is ever allowed to talk about racism because it can never be anything other than race baiting, and the big appeal of a black Republican specifically is that his mere existence might counter accusations of racism against the Republican Party. That’s his big appeal. Not any of his actual policy proposals.
When I teach the Civil Rights movement during the U.S. survey course, one of the things I try to get across is the cultural impact. It’s easy enough to focus on the social and political gains: most black people finally received the right to vote and segregation laws were finally deemed unconstitutional. But the cultural impact is perhaps just as important.
In the long run the result is that racism is no longer acceptable in mainstream American culture.
Not that racism and other forms of bigotry are gone, mind you. Of course they’re still here. But they’re largely underground and hidden away in backrooms because the mainstream culture has determined them unfit for society.
But a change like that doesn’t happen over night. So for example, one of the keys to All in The Family’s massive success during the 1970s was watching one family struggle with that transition, centered around the irrascible symbol of earlier times, Archie Bunker. The show was timely and it hit home with many Americans. Back then, everyone knew, and maybe even loved someone like Archie who had grown up before the Civil Rights movement and wasn’t adjusting well to the cultural change.
But here in 2011, things have changed, which is why I’ll give you dollars to doughnuts that Glenn Reynolds doesn’t think his comment is racist. How could he? We’ve gotten to that point in our culture that racism’s not okay. So consequently, very few people have the detachment and/or courage to admit it to themselves, much less anyone else.
But racism and bigotry are still very much a part of our culture, everyewhere from Niggerhead to New York City. And Herman Cain knows it.
Now he’s paying the price for pointing it out, instead of denying it, being a good party loyalist, and just reminding everyone that Rick Perry was a Democrat until 1989.