Honolulu Lite
Lott could look
to Hawaii for
inspirationI've tried to explain segregation to my daughter but I get the feeling she can't quite believe that such a thing ever existed in this country.
That's good. It means we've made a lot of progress.
But United States Sen. Trent Lott's idiotic statement that there would have been fewer "problems" in America had former segregationist and longtime South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond been elected president has suddenly reminded us that though segregation is a thing of the past, it's not in the far, far, far distant past. We only wish it were.
I was a year old in Florida when a weary black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person in Alabama. Later, when our family moved to Georgia, I remember "black" and "white" service windows at drive-in restaurants. Though I was too young to understand what was going on, I still feel embarrassed that those conditions existed in my lifetime.
So how do you explain Lott's brain implosion during Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party? Is the man a closet racist? Can he possibly long for the days of segregation?
When I first heard about Lott's odious remarks, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat came to mind. Arafat has a history of making inflammatory anti-Semitic and anti-U.S. statements in Arabic to Palestinians but moderates his verbiage when speaking to international audiences in English. Perhaps Lott, who is from Mississippi, slips into some kind of racist dialect when he's on his home turf and the national media isn't watching. It's like, at Thurmond's birthday he was speaking "hick" and when he returned to Washington, D.C., he spoke regular English again.
I suspect that running for high public office from Mississippi does involve a certain amount of kissing up to less-evolved citizens. But I doubt Lott is a true racist. What he is is a true politician, which may be worse. True politicians are willing to pander to any crowd, especially if they think the mikes and video cameras are turned off. Lott likely was trying to smooch Thurmond's backside in an effort to solidify his Southern political base.
It was a stupid thing to do on many levels. First of all, after a century of life on this planet, Thurmond didn't even know where he was, let alone who was talking to him. Thurmond himself repudiated segregation so long ago he probably can't even remember when. (Former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole once asked Thurmond if he could remember when Dole had entered the Senate. Thurmond said he remembered when Kansas entered the Senate.)
Hawaii has had its rough spots on the race front with each succeeding wave of immigrants, but we've shown that race isn't a barrier to people getting along. Trent Lott would do well to embrace Hawaii as the future of race relations in this country instead of looking wistfully back to the dark days of the South.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com