Tag: latent racism

Perry’s Rock And What It Says About Us

A few words about Rick Perry’s rock.

This would be the one at the entrance to a remote Texas hunting ground used by Perry for decades, the one painted with the name of the camp: “N—-rhead.” The Texas governor says his father painted over the ugly name almost 30 years ago, though some locals interviewed by the Washington Post in a story that ran Sunday claimed to have seen it there much more recently.

That same day, Herman Cain, who is competing with Perry for the GOP presidential nomination, called the word on the rock “vile,” and accused Perry of being “insensitive.” He was pretty much the only candidate to go after Perry about the rock, though he was backpedaling a day later.

“I really don’t care about that word,” he said, after being accused of playing the so-called “race card.”

It was difficult to escape a suspicion that, though he is African-American, he never cared about the perceived insult as much as he cared about the opportunity to inflict damage on Perry. Cain thus managed to make both his attack and retreat feel calculated and cynical.

Meanwhile, the rock becomes the latest outrage du jour, meaning the momentary controversies through which what passes for discussion of race and privilege in this country are carried. Think Bill O’Reilly and Don Imus shooting their mouths off. Think Andrew Breitbart sliming Shirley Sherrod. Periodically, the news delivers these neatly packaged, self-contained dustups that allow political leaders and others to line up on the side of the angels, harrumphing the necessary condemnations, while never venturing too deeply into what the dustups tell us about us.

Where race is concerned, people sometimes act as if the past is a distant country, a far, forgotten place we ought never revisit, unless it be for the occasional purpose of congratulating ourselves on how far we have come.

But the past has this way of crashing the party. Usually, it does so with the relative subtlety of statistics quantifying ongoing racial bias in hiring, education and criminal justice. Occasionally, it does so with the bluntness of a sign reading “N—-rhead.”

The name is not unique. To the contrary, the map of the United States was once dotted with similar words. For example, there is still a Negrohead Point in Florida and a Negro Cove in Maryland, both changed from the original slur in a fig leaf of decency. There is also Dago Peak in Idaho, Jew Hill in Pennsylvania and Redskin Mountain in Colorado.

Not to let the Texas governor off too easily, then, but to make this all about Perry is to miss the point. It is also about us. What does it say about America, about fairness in hiring, education, justice, that such place names were ever acceptable — or that some people don’t understand why they no longer are?

“It’s just a name,” a man named David Davis told the Post. He is a Texas judge, a man to whom, we may suppose, African-Americans periodically come seeking justice. “Like those are vertical blinds,” he said, looking at a window in his courtroom. “It’s just what it was called.”

That rationalization ought to tell you that that rock is not the political football Cain sought to make it. Rather, it is a reproach to the unearned smugness of modern days. And a reminder that the past is closer than we think.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2011 The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

See No Racism, Hear No Racism: Despite Evidence, Perry About To Execute Another Texas Man

Update: The Supreme Court has temporarily halted Duane Buck’s execution.

Whether Duane Edward Buck will live or die by lethal injection on Thursday is now up to one man: Texas Governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry. The case for commuting Buck’s death sentence to life in prison should have been a slam dunk, given the egregious racial bias in the case. But the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles — a panel hand-picked by Perry — denied Buck’s clemency request on Tuesday, making it far easier for Perry to do what he’s already done 234 times: allow the execution to proceed.

Without an affirmative recommendation for clemency from the board, Perry’s only legal recourse is to grant Buck a 30-day reprieve, which Buck’s lawyers could use to try and bring another claim in state court. Perry could also use his considerable political powers to explain why Buck’s case demands more serious review to ensure that justice is done. But that would be totally out of character.

Except in cases where he was compelled to do so by Supreme Court rulings or other special circumstances, Perry has commuted only one death sentence to life without parole since he took office in December 2000. Appeals for clemency that involved cases of prosecutorial misconduct and inadequate counsel have all been shunned by Perry. The governor has demonstrated no reservations about allowing execution of juveniles or those with severe mental impairments. In one case that continues to haunt Perry’s presidential campaign, he denied clemency to Cameron Todd Willingham — sentenced to death for murdering his three daughters — despite what was probably the most credible claim of innocence by any death row inmate in the United States in the last 35 years.

Duane Buck, a 48-year-old African American, is scheduled to be executed at Texas’s busy Polunsky Unit deathhouse in Livingston later this week for killing his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend in Houston in 1995. Buck admits that he shot both of them and that he shot Phyllis Taylor, who survived a bullet wound to her chest. What’s at issue is testimony by a psychologist who took the stand at Buck’s 1997 trial and stated that Buck was more likely to be a violent threat in the future because he’s black. The state used that testimony of “future dangerousness” to convince the jury that Buck should die.

In a highly unusual intervention in 2000 then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn called for the retrial of Buck and five other death row inmates, citing evidence of racism in all six trials. “[I]t is inappropriate to allow race to be considered as a factor in our criminal justice system,” said Cornyn, now a Texas senator. “The people of Texas want and deserve a system that affords the same fairness to everyone.” The five other defendants all received new trials because Cornyn stood firm against appeals to race.

Phyllis Taylor, the surviving shooting victim, joined Buck’s lawyers in appealing for clemency. Even the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Buck in 1997 now says the trial was a miscarriage of justice. “It is regrettable that any race-based considerations were placed before Mr. Buck’s jury,” Linda Geffin wrote in a letter to Perry and his parole board last week.

Buck’s lawyer, Kate Black of the Texas Defender Service, said the parole board’s decision “fails to recognize what the highest legal officer in the State of Texas had acknowledged,” that Buck’s trial was “tainted by considerations of race.” Black called on Perry to stay the execution and allow Buck to pursue his case for a new sentencing hearing at which a jury would be asked to hand down an appropriate sentence for the two murders without being influenced by appeals to race. That jury would still have the option of sentencing Buck to death.

Had the parole board considered seriously its responsibility to try to mitigate miscarriages of justice, the outcome in the Buck matter would have certainly been different. But the board is a creature of the governor and its members knew that recommending a commutation to life in prison — or the 120-day reprieve Buck’s lawyer’s sought as an alternative — would have only complicated Perry’s political life. For Perry to deny clemency after his own board acknowledged that Buck was sentenced to death because of his race would have been hugely controversial and would have focused even more attention on Perry’s sorry clemency record. If, on the other hand, Perry agreed to a recommendation to commute the sentence, he no doubt would have angered his hardcore conservative base. Recall that only a week ago, during a debate among Republican presidential candidates at the Reagan Library in California, the audience erupted in wild applause at the mere mention of Perry’s execution record.

The parole board’s decision to say no to Buck will allow Perry to do what he normally does — issue a statement claiming that Buck had the benefit of a thorough review by the courts, the clemency board and the governor, and then send him to his death.

At last week’s Republican debate, Perry said that Texas has a “very thoughtful, clear process” for reviewing death cases. Sadly, the case of Duane Buck and many, many more suggest that nothing could be further from the truth.

For These GOPers, There’s Only One Problem: Obama

Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, “your boy,” that “tar baby,” the president of the United States, Barack Obama:

Ahem.

The first title was bestowed upon Obama by political commentator Patrick Buchanan on Tuesday, the second by U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn on the Friday before last, the third by the American electorate in November 2008. If the first two seem to cancel out the third, well, that’s the point. One hopes they will help the president understand something he has thus far refused to grasp about his political opposition.

Namely, these people don’t want to be friends. They don’t want to compromise for the greater good. They don’t want to solve problems unless by problems you mean his continued tenancy in that mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue.

They have not been coy about this. Rush Limbaugh said it (“I hope he fails”) when Mrs. Obama was still picking out a dress for the inauguration. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in November that, in a time of war and recession, his No. 1 goal is to deny Obama a second term.

Yet somehow, the Obama brain trust, a term herein used advisedly, always seems caught off guard by the ferocity, velocity and fury of the response to him. They were surprised at the verbal and physical violence of the health-care debate, surprised at the hardiness of the birther nonsense, surprised by the stiff defense of the Bush-era tax cuts.

Now, they are surprised the GOP would rather see the U.S. economy go off a cliff than surrender the aforementioned tax cuts for rich folks. So the debt ceiling gets raised in exchange for cuts to services for the poor, who shortsightedly failed to hire lobbyists.

It is time Obama quit being surprised by the predictable, time he understood this is not politics as usual, not Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill snarling at one another by day and having drinks by night, like that old cartoon where the sheepdog and the coyote punch a time clock to signal the beginning and end of their hostilities. It is not Bill Clinton living in a state of permanent investigation, nor even George W. Bush being called incompetent all day every day.

No, this is a new thing, repulsion at a visceral, indeed, mitochondrial level. Obama’s denigrators are appalled by the newness of him, the liberality of him, the exoticness of him and, yes, the blackness of him.

“Your boy?” Really?

Sure. Why not. Didn’t Rep. Lynn Westmoreland call him “uppity”? Didn’t the ex-mayor of Los Alamitos, Calif., send out an email showing the White House with a watermelon patch?

See, here’s the thing: If, as is frequently said, Obama represents America’s future, what do they represent?

You know the answer. Worse, they do, too.

Still, what matters here are neither their feelings nor his. No, what matters is homeowners dispossessed of their homes, workers who can’t find work, sick people who can’t afford health insurance, American soldiers on patrol in hostile places.

The president is a basketball fan, so surely he knows it is sometimes necessary to throw an elbow on your way to the goal. This is one of those times. His instinct to compromise, to work with the opposition to solve problems, is admirable.

But Obama needs to understand: as far as they are concerned, they have no problem bigger than him.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)