What Are We Gonna Do About Haley?

I love my city, Jackson, and Mississippi as a whole. Moved back here from Boulder, CO; that says something I think. But, it sure is hard sometimes to be a Mississippian, because of what people think about us, our past, our present, etc. It is even harder when we have to answer for our Governor, Haley Barbour-a man who thinks that running the worst state (statistically and generally speaking) further into the proverbial ground over the past several years qualifies a man to be president. On top of that, every few months or so he rattles off some kind of racist remarks off his slimy tongue to the national press. And, we the people are left to deal with it.

Let's start with the quotes from the man himself.

1.) This past spring, when asked about the Governor of Virginia's failure to mention slavery in the state's Confederate History Month Proclamation, Barbour refers to the omission as "just a nit." "It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

Well, what he says "doesn't matter for diddly" was actually the most important aspect of the Civil War era, the enslavement of Africans on American soil. Southern politicians and educators like to act like that wasn't the main deal in the conflict, but it was.

I don't feel like explaining it, but start by reading Mississippi's Articles of Secession, just the first few sentences: "In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."

You get the idea.

2.) In late December, he said this during an interview: "You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

Ah, the Citizen's Council. The group of men who took the hoods off and worked "legitimately" to block segregation in any way possible. They started a good number of the private schools that sully our landscape and draw resources from public schools, helping to fuel a nasty cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy that allows Barbour to cut funds from an education system that the voters think doesn't work because of the result of underfunding the schools where the Black folks go. My head hurts.

It is as simple as that. There is no sugarcoating the Citizen's Council. When the best thing you can say about an organization is that they are not the KKK, then you really need to question what positives can be construed. Further, anyone that would try is at worst a racist and at best a real asshole. Or both.

So, as it should be, the mainstream media reported these quotes and the liberal blogosphere got it and ran. And not that it is a big conceptual or logical leap, but Barbour gets the racist tag, which certainly won't help his presidential run, considering he is in fact a racist and he would be running against a black man in 2012.

To recap, Barbour, as you can see by his words above, has done nothing to help his own cause, with his willingness to say things that are just downright wrong and disrespectful to the majority of people in Mississippi. He makes the racist comments. No one said these things for him. He said them. It was him.

That is why I was so disheartened to read a recent Sid Salter column in The Clarion Ledger. I guess Salter took a couple minutes off from bathing in Barbour's discarded bathwater to write a column that attacks the, you guessed it, liberal media for attempting to "deconstruct" Haley Barbour.

It was one of those moments for me where I wanted to pull Salter aside, hand him a Twinkie, and say, "Here you go. Have a snack, take a nap, and when you wake up I'll explain to you all the ways that you are wrong. That's right, buddy."

He writes, "Deconstruction? Yes. The goal here is to publicly tear Barbour limb from limb and leave him so politically disemboweled that he crawls back to the lake house and retirement when his term as governor is over. That deconstruction effort began in earnest Monday after a few fits and starts earlier this year. For Barbour - just months ago anointed by the Politico web site as "the most powerful Republican in American politics" - it is an effort that will almost certainly expand and become more brutal."

Basically, Salter argues that Barbour is being attacked by the liberal establishment "who will oppose anyone who challenges President Obama in 2012." The key here is that Salter places absolutely no onus on the Governor for making his own bed; it all comes from the outside. He rants about the people who try to deconstruct the president by playing the race card: "When it's race, the game is even simpler - make the argument that the candidate or public figure is a racist and then dig in their background to find something, anything, plausible enough to at least make the racist characterization plausible." Salter goes on to explain this process while never once mentioning the things that Barbour has actually said and done. The thing is, Salter would have a case if there was actually people digging random shit up on Barbour. But they are not. Two of the worst things I have heard said by anyone in years came right out of Barbour's mouth, within the past 8 months.

Doesn't seem like anyone is digging, Salter. But, he goes on: "The bottom line is that this kind of journalistic archeology and partisan burnishing of Barbour's past on the issue of race will accelerate and intensify so long as he's even a potential presidential candidate. It will target both Barbour and his family." (Wow. Journalistic Archaeology. That is the kind of concept that keeps guys like Salter elated and enamored with themselves.)

Actually, Sid, this kind of stuff will continue as long as Barbour keeps saying things like this. And the scary part is, is that I am afraid too many people have fallen for his "Racist, Bumbling Small Town Southern Sheriff during WWII" shtick. This guy knows what he is doing. He knows what he is saying. The Tea Party wing of the Republican Party is clearly motivated by race (again, I don't feel the need to explain that). He is drumming up support for his cause while at the same time testing the limits of permissible racism. Every time he says something and it gets covered, he gains more followers nationally that share his sentiments but have been waiting for someone in a national leadership position to say them in a way that can be said over the air. Barbour gets beat up by the press for a few days, but eventually the boundaries are widened and more really nasty racist thoughts are normalized, bringing more awful people into the political mainstream. My head hurts.

We can look to this week to see just how calculating this man is. Yesterday, Barbour finally released the Scott sisters from prison. In many ways, it was a great day, because so many of us had been fighting for their release for so long. Lots of high fives and relief. But then Barbour started talking. Basically, it turns out, he released the sisters because one of them was costing the state upwards of $200,000 a year for dialysis treatments. Further, one agreement in the release is that the other sister will donate a kidney to her sick sister to help alleviate further dialysis costs. Barbour's good. In the wake of his recent racial gaffe, he makes a move on one of the biggest race matters in the state, helping to show his soft side. Out of the other side of his head, he speaks right to the Tea Party base with an indictment of state spending. The commenters on the Clarion Ledger get all whipped up about the common themes: welfare; whose going to pay for the sister treatments considering they have been in prison for over a decade and probably won't find jobs with the insurance to cover these procedures. Then, Barbour no doubt hopes, he can politicize it even further, when the sisters end up on Medicaid roles to be covered by the oppressed white taxpayers of Mississippi. Finally, he also declared that this release was more of a parole situation: the sisters screw up at all and they are back behind bars. I wonder how Barbour wants this all to turn out. Oh, and he also wants the state prison board to find out how many more prisoners on dialysis can be released early to save the state money. Amazing.

What all of this boils down to is our collective misunderstanding of the concept of racism. Since the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act, racism has been narrowed down to individual acts of racism perpetrated by one person on another. Once the structural barriers were supposedly torn down by legislation, the only enemy, the thinking goes, is personal racism. And Barbour doesn't violate that edict. He didn't call anyone a n****r or kill a Mexican or anything. That is why Salter can claim that Barbour is not being racist by not even paying attention to the things he actually said. In the minds of the people who make these rules, cough old white men cough, racism is almost gone, except for the rabble rousers that continue to bring it up. That's why Al Sharpton is a racist but Haley Barbour is not. Trust me, it's not supposed to make sense.

Racism, though, is about far more than all of that. Racism is structural. It is systemic. It is inherent in all of our systems. It is about power. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was good, but it wasn't that good: there was no way that it could break down a power system that European males had spent centuries to create, perfect, and keep going. When Barbour says that slavery doesn't matter and that the Citizen's Council wasn't that bad, he is being racist to the core of the word's meaning. It takes a whole lot of accumulated power to think those things and say them out loud as the leader of the state where it all happened. That's white privilege and it is alive and well. And, that privilege comes from power. And racism is all about power. To be able to act like slavery and Civil Rights have nothing to do with him, Barbour is upholding and celebrating the white privilege structure that holds all power relationships in place in this country. That is what racism is, and it makes the things that Barbour does and says far worse that using a racial epithet to refer to his gardener (I'm just making an educated guess here, I don't know if he has really done that). On top of all that, people like Sid Salter aid in the problem by defending the things that Barbour says. Instead of helping to fix a system that hurts us all, Sid Salter and others like him vindicate the Barbours of the world and set the struggle back even further and further every day.

And, Barbour does most of his damage systemically. He cuts public education funding every time he can, which means he cuts black education money, since his pals at the Citizen's Council kept the schools segregated. He cuts state hospital funding and public health funds, which in a state where the poverty level is high and race and poverty remain to be correlated, well, you know what that means. The only place he consistently raises funding is in the prison system. And since poverty, race, and crime tend to correlate in a state where the past has never been dealt with, Barbour basically pays to keep a good number of our Black brothers and sisters locked up and segregated from everyone else.

That is what is scary. While we sit around and fight over what words make someone racist, we forget that it doesn't matter if Barbour is personally racist. What matters is that he is the face of structural racism in this state, as is Sid Salter, and too many others to name; that is far more damaging than an old white man who still uses the word colored. Until we are willing to deal with strucutre and systems, we can't hope to fix any of this. And the Sid Salter's of the world will continue to be able to prop the system while those of us that work against it are labeled the problem.