THE QUESTION OF RACE

The political questions in the outrage surrounding Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott are whether he will remain in his post and what that means for the next session of Congress, his Republican Party, the Democrats and the 2004 elections. A question that should but probably won’t be asked in Congress is what his comments and his enthusiasm for a racist organization say about the state of race relations.

Racial discrimination was supposed to be solved by now. The 2000 Census showed an increasing number of Americans marrying across races.

Television shows, when they bother to demonstrate racial diversity, keep insisting race doesn’t matter. Organizations dedicated to spreading fear among white people that African-Americans would dilute the gene pool seem as though from another age, not the objects of support from Senate leaders.

But it really wasn’t so long ago that segregation was common and racial equality – before the law, in schools, employment, banks, restaurants, hotels and on and on – was so distant that only someone with a dream would see it. So it surfaces again having barely been submerged, although not, interestingly, in the 100-year-old ex-Dixiecrat who had renounced segregation but in the 61-year-old man honoring him.

And the merest look into Sen. Lott’s immediate past finds him supportive of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that asks itself on its Web site whether it opposes racism and answers with this: “The word racism was concocted by a communist ideologue in the 1920s. The purpose of racism was to instill guilt and shame in the minds of white people and to inflame racial hostility among blacks.” Fair to take that answer as a “No.”

From Sen. Lott’s assertion 18 years ago that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform” to his more recent leadership in the fight against Bill Lann Lee to head the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, because of Mr. Lee’s advocacy of affirmative action, the pattern is clear. And Sen. Lott hasn’t been alone in his positions on civil rights, as his friends have helpfully pointed out regarding his potential opponent in a Jan. 6 reconsideration for majority leader. Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma joined him in voting against making Martin Luther King’s birthday a federal holiday and against the Civil Rights Act of 1990. And both wanted a tax exemption to benefit Bob Jones University, despite the school’s policies that discriminated against minorities and prohibited interracial dating.

These senators lead the nation. They are in positions to set the standard for what the country will and will not allow. Their values often are codified into law. Is it any wonder that despite the millions of words said and written about race, the issue is still unresolved?

Sen. Lott’s recent remarks have allowed the nation to remember that it was just 52 years ago that Sen. Strom Thurmond, on his way to winning 39 Electoral College votes – Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina – said, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches.” That such racism may still exist in this country would be no surprise; that its more subtle cousin resides to this day in Congress is a disgrace.