Columnist – John Sammon
Is it just a coincidence that Joe Wilson, the representative who heckled the president during an address to Congress, is from South Carolina, one of the most southern of all states? For those of you who have opened a history book at least once in your lives, South Carolina is the state that first seceded from the Union to launch the Civil War.

Wilson tried to turn the address by the president into a town-hall monkeys-screaming-at-each-other-over-a-coconut heckle session. Now comes word that Wilson’s son is infuriated because former President Jimmy Carter, himself a southerner who should know southerners, said he thought blatant racism was behind Joe’s outburst.

First of all, it must be improbable, outlandish, inconceivable, and downright ridiculous, that a white man from a southern state that promoted slavery, then after a lost war engaged in decades of racist separation until it was federally mandated not to do so, could possibly be racist.

There are no racists in the South. Everybody knows that.

Joe Wilson is my age. He grew up as a white boy just like I did, in a country where there were no visible black people. There were none on TV, except the harmless buffoons Amos and Andy. There were none in the schools we attended. There were none at the lunch counter. There were none at the public pool or the library.

Until I was 14, I didn’t think black people existed.

My boyhood conception of a black man, and Joe’s too, the image that we had in our heads, was of a shoeshine boy who drawled in a thick, amusing, un-educated, white-imagined, jig-a-boo accent, “shine? Shine Mistah (Mister)? With that kind of background, how could Joe possibly be racist?

I’m at least honest enough to admit I received that kind of conditioning. My parents’ generation and Joe’s were racist and separatist. I’m still to this day trying to un-learn what I wrongly learned. Things believed in childhood are not easy to shake.

Here are 10 reasons why Joe can’t be racist.

1.   First of all, there is a second form of racism, that of subtle racism. The subtle racist doesn’t don white Klan sheets or burn crosses. But the subtle racist doesn’t want his son to marry a black woman, and if he was honest he’d admit it.

2.   Joe, like me, watched westerns on TV. The bad guys always wore black hats.

3.   Joe in all probability doesn’t make overt racist comments like, “he’s just a nigger,” or “all coons look alike to me.” But the simple fact is, not liking the way people who look different from you look, different from the way you look, IS A BASIC HUMAN FAILING. It can not be legislated away by government.

4.   The most fundamental characteristic of the Republican Party, Joe’s party, is its exclusionist principles, its rock-hard base. Or to put it another way, envision someone with a smug look on their face, saying in a phrase laced with arrogance and condescension, “America. It isn’t for everybody.”

5.   Equating blacks with liberals as if they are one in the same is the same way Nazis in Germany in 1933 blended Jews with Bolshevism. It’s easy to think of a person’s skin color as synonymous with a political platform. Throughout the last century, blacks depended on the liberal left-wing to gain them all the things conservatives would not, and would still oppose today, fair housing, employment and education.

6.   A subtle racist views blacks as the race of crime and chaos. Joe was an attorney. He’s against crime. He can’t be racist.

7.   Joe is a noted hot-head who finds it hard to control his emotions. He can’t be racist for this reason.

8.   Joe is one of the few Republicans who actually served in the military, in the National Guard (Democrats on Capitol Hill have out-served Republicans by a margin of two-to-one). He can’t be racist.

9.   Intolerance for the opinion of those with whom we disagree is a hallmark of the modern Republican Party.

10.  Joe perhaps views the Civil War as paradise lost.

Hating Obama: The Racism of Republicans

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References:

1. Over the Line in South Carolina

2. Rapping Joe’s Knuckles: The pressure from House Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, on Joe Wilson to apologize was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it.
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