Get your tomatoes ready, folks, because this white Republican’s about to talk about race and politics.
Sen. George Allen, R-Va., got the political outrage factories pumping out righteous indignation at a truly impressive rate this week. On the campaign trail in western Virginia, Allen taunted a volunteer from his opponent Jim Webb’s campaign, and was then accused of racial insensitivity.
Here’s the exchange (and you can watch the video on YouTube):
“This fellow over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere and it’s just great.
“We’re going to places all over Virginia and he’s having it on film, and it’s great to have you here. And, you show it to your opponent because he’s never been here and he’ll probably never come … .
“His opponent right now is with a bunch of Hollywood movie moguls. We care about fact, not fiction. So, welcome. Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”
The Webb campaign volunteer is 20-year-old S.R. Sidarth, a Fairfax County native of Indian descent. Sidarth had this to say about Allen’s comments:
“He was doing that because he could, because he could get away with it. I think he was just trying to, trying to point out the fact that I was a person of color in a crowd that was not otherwise.”
Liberal bloggers noted that “macaque” is a French Tunisian insult for dark-skinned people and that Allen’s mother is of French Tunisian descent.
So, the yelling begins. Is he a racist? To liberals, it’s a foregone conclusion, despite the Allen campaign’s claims that Allen was fumbling the nickname they had given the young cameraman — “Mohawk,” for his haircut. Allen’s apology for the incident, claims of ignorance of the meaning of “macaque” and seemingly good relations with Indian-Americans in the past matter not.
To me, it looks like Allen got caught doing something dumb, but not dastardly. He seems to fumble for the word “Macaca,” not use it deliberately. But it was insensitive. He harped on Sidarth too much and for too long. Allen has been troubled by race issues before and he’ll pay a price for it this time.
The incident happened Friday. Since then, it’s been worth two stories and an editorial in The New York Times and eight stories — three on the front page — three blog posts, one video, and one forum discussion, in The Washington Post. A Google Blog search for the week shows more posts related to “macaca” than Iraq this week, and Israel just barely hanging on for the overall lead.
Liberal blogger FireDogLake posted a photo of a burning cross and said the GOP is a “JC Penney White Sale away from its cross-burning, lynching, Jim Crow roots.” Just weeks ago, FDL’s proprietor posted a Photoshopped picture of Joe Lieberman in blackface on the Huffington Post.
All right, slow down, everyone.
A little more than a month ago, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) got caught on tape telling an Indian-American supporter, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent … I’m not joking.”
In January, Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) remarked that Mahatma Ghandi used to run a gas station in St. Louis.
Both comments were much more obviously racial than Allen’s, which required rigorous Googling in the Foreign-Language Dictionary of Racial Slurs. Both comments employed common cultural stereotypes and were downright stupid.
Whoa, these Democratic senators are just a filibuster away from their Civil-Rights-Act-blocking days, right?
Pundits on the right gave those remarks little play, not because they are racist, but because the Whack-a-Racist game is a silly, counter-productive one. It brings down the level of political debate, and it ratchets up racial tensions — both negative consequences of American politics the left claims to abhor.
The fact that the abhorrence disappears as long as it’s Democrats doing the ratcheting makes the political nature of their anger pretty transparent.
This country has race-relations problems to solve and a candidate’s views on race are certainly pertinent. Allen’s views will continue to get plenty of scrutiny, as they already have, and he’ll have much to prove to many voters.
But the gotcha game will never solve race problems by going around looking for racism in places where it doesn’t exist.
Mary Katharine Ham is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at Townhall.com.
