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The Republican Party's Achilles' Heel

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SEXUAL SCANDAL is not what plagues Republicans. It's outbursts of racial insensitivity, casually uttered across the country, even in California, where minorities are now the majority.

The latest flap involves Bill Back, a Bush ally who is state GOP vice chairman and campaigning for the top position. In 1999, Back reprinted an essay titled "What if the South had won the Civil War?" in his e-mail newsletter. The essay's author, William S. Lind, wrote that "history might have taken a better turn" and that "the real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won."

Back initially said he's not responsible for the opinions of others and that he'd sent articles promoting a broad range of political positions. But nostalgia for slavery is not a political perspective. It is simply racist.

Then Back realized he should recant. "Upon reflection," he admitted, "I should have been more sensitive regarding issues raised in this piece and not included it in the e-mail. I regret any pain and offense taken by readers." But the damage is done. Back should resign his post and save his party further embarrassment.

The larger problem, as political history shows, is not Sen. Trent Lott or Bill Back. It is the political culture of the Republican Party. For four decades, white Southern racial supremacists, nicknamed "Dixiecrats, " held the Democratic Party hostage. In 1968, in the wake of the civil rights movement, Richard Nixon successfully deployed a new "Southern Strategy" designed to pander to white fears and nudge Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. It worked. And ever since, the white South has given Republicans the political edge Democrats had once enjoyed. (Which doesn't mean that most Republicans embrace that Dixiecrat tradition.)

It's no surprise, then, that the Republican Party suffers from the same racism that corroded and divided the Democratic Party. And, like earlier Dixiecrats, these good ol' boys refuse to recognize that racism is no longer acceptable in American political culture.

On the day Lott resigned as Senate Republican leader, for example, Rep. Cass Ballenger, R-N.C., said that outgoing Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., is a "bitch" whose politics so irritated him that "I must admit I had segregationist feelings." Ballenger insisted he was only guilty of a poor "choice of words."

But words matter. As do actions. That's why Lott's demise won't change anything. The NAACP rates Sen. Bill Frist, the new majority leader, as only marginally better than Lott. The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda views Frist as less tolerant than Lott. And both Lott and Frist cast votes against the Employment Nondiscrimination Act of 1996 and the Hate Crimes Expansion Act of 2000.

Although President Bush has tried to weaken the Democratic base by posing as a friend of minority voters, his political nominations and economic policies reflect his inability to grasp the poverty and discrimination experienced by racial minorities. Attorney General John Ashcroft, for example, once led the fight against desegregating Missouri schools. Charles Pickering, whom Bush still champions for a position on a federal appeals court, tried in 1994 to lighten the sentence of a man convicted of cross-burning. Bush also campaigned for Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, R-Ala., whose record on race is so deplorable that the New Republic headlined a recent article about him,"The senator who's worse than Lott."

At the dawn of the 20th century, W. E. B. DuBois, an African American sociologist and civil rights leader, predicted that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." Sadly, it is the problem of this century as well.


This article first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and is reprinted with permission.