The problem is that Lott has been in that moment for a very long time.
In supporting discrimination at Bob Jones University, in cheerleading for the white segregationist Council of Conservative Citizens, in standing against the Voting Rights Act, in rejecting an array of minority judicial candidates, Lott has made it clear that the moment in which he lives is one most Americans have left behind. As Ralph Neas, head of People for the American Way, put it, “Even Strom Thurmond evolved somewhat.”
Last week the fact that Lott helped lead the fight to bar blacks from his fraternity while at the University of Mississippi received considerable attention. Tom Johnson, then a fellow Sigma Nu member at the University of Georgia, voted with Lott. It is a vote the retired CNN president and Los Angeles Times publisher now says he deeply regrets, and he sees that regret as a marker of evolution. That growth was spurred in part by another campus battle. In January 1961, a young black student, Charlayne Hunter, was escorted to the University of Georgia through an ugly, screaming mob. Johnson saw one classmate spit at Hunter and witnessed a fraternity brother throw a brick through her window. Within Johnson, the incidents sparked “a huge awakening.” He is mystified that Lott went through the same era with his consciousness apparently unaffected.
This is not to say that Lott is a racist. That word is so loaded with inflammatory connotations as to have little meaning outside of describing the behavior of certified kooks–the kind who march around in sheets with burning crosses. Interestingly enough, the sheet wearers were also in the news last week. This was occasioned by arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court over the constitutionality of a Virginia anti-cross-burning law. Cross burning is not a form of speech, pointed out Justice Clarence Thomas, but an instrument of terror–an obvious and repugnant symbol of a century of lynchings in the South. Given Lott’s efforts at spin and his tendency to defend segregationist groups, such a lesson was timely. For Lott clearly misunderstands history, and seems to hold a decidedly rosy view of the system and times that gave rise to the butchery of the KKK.
Following his scripted apology in Pascagoula, Miss., Lott was asked when his attitude changed. “We changed with the rest of the country,” he replied. It was an odd response. For his answer says, in effect, “I was really no different from the rest of the South, which was really no different from the rest of America. And whatever little problems we had, we have now all moved on.” It is an answer that not only gets the history wrong but releases Lott–and anyone else–from accepting any responsibility for Jim Crow (and for the problems it engendered that remain with us today).
Why is a man so willfully ignorant of history serving in the Senate at all–much less preparing to become its leader? How could a man on record for championing the ideas of the Confederacy become part of America’s ruling power elite? “Why do these issues not seem to matter?” asked Theodore Shaw, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in frustration, after detailing Lott’s horrific history.
I suspect part of the answer is that Americans are very forgiving folks. We also strongly believe in the redeeming power of remorse and in the possibility of personal transformation–which presumably is why Lott bothered to apologize at all. And, like Lott, we collectively are often more comfortable rewriting history than honestly dealing with certain aspects of our past.
Despite all the calls for Lott’s resignation, some Democrats and civil-rights types wonder whether it wouldn’t be better if he ascended to the leadership post as planned. For such a damaged leader, goes the thinking, couldn’t possibly be effective in promoting an agenda they perceive as antipoor, antiminority and antiprogressive.
They may be right, although his colleagues’ willingness to overlook Lott’s flaws in the past suggests such hopes may be misplaced. Yet the very fact that so many are so upset at Lott may mean things are beginning to change. And if we are lucky, what will come of this sorry mess is a wider awareness that virtue is not rooted in blindness (as Lott apparently believes) but in squarely acknowledging where we (individually and collectively) have gone wrong–and, just as important, in accepting responsibility for setting things right.
