SOP for GOP looks KKK, IMHO

Just when you think politicians have stooped as low as they can go . . . .

And in the Tennessee race for U.S. Senate, the Republicans had to stoop to a time-worn dirty trick to better their own contemporary lows. When I was growing up in the Deep South, there was a term for what the Republican National Committee has done to U.S. Rep. Harold Ford, the Democrats' candidate for the open Senate seat of Bill Frist, who's retiring.

Decorum prevents me from telling you outright what that term is. The polite modern term, however, is "race baiting" -- playing upon the electorate's most vicious and deeply held racial prejudices to get one candidate elected while sinking the other one . . . but good.

Race baiting is vicious, ugly and evil beyond all telling. But that's the road the Republican National Committee has taken -- all in the name of saving American from the eeeevvillll Democrats. From MSNBC (get the whole story here):

The Republican National Committee said Wednesday it was taking off the air an attack ad that critics said was a racial slur against Democratic Tennessee Senate candidate
Harold Ford Jr., one day after the party’s chairman said he saw nothing wrong with
it.

The ad -- in which a young, white actress talks about meeting Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor who is black, “at the Playboy party” and invites him to “call me” -- was denounced as a race-baiting tactic by the Ford campaign, the NAACP and Republican former Sen. Bill Cohen.

Bob Corker, Ford’s Republican opponent for the seat being vacated by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, also called it “tacky” and asked that it be pulled.

The black man having his way with a white woman is one of the oldest and most pernicious racist hot buttons in the South. The racist imagery -- and racist passions -- that notion dredges up from the fetid muck of the fallen human heart (at least in fallen Southern human hearts of recent history) does not get any more stark or malevolent.

That particular racial hot button got Emmitt Till murdered in 1955. Here is what that looked like (right). The brutality of what happened to Emmitt Till at the hands of "Big" Milam and J.W. Bryant shocked the nation and was one of the events triggering the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

A Mississippi jury found the two not guilty. They later confessed their crime -- which they, of course, didn't see as a crime -- to Look magazine.

THOSE ARE THE KINDS OF DEMONS the Republican National Committee thinks are legitimate to call upon to win a lousy election.

I know something of what I speak. I was born in 1961 in Baton Rouge, La. Was raised and educated there.

At that time, in that place, "separate but equal" would have been a step up from the Jim Crow reality, which many white folk -- like my parents, like my kinfolk, like most white folk -- saw as ordained by God Almighty Himself.

Not only was a white, working-class child taught to be racist, he steeped in it. It was the air he breathed, the water he drank, the food he ate. It infested all of the society that socialized him (in a manner of speaking).

You know what saved me, showed me a different and better way of viewing the world?

Oddly enough, television. Walter Cronkite and The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Room 222. Good Times. Sanford and Son. Julia. The Mod Squad. American Bandstand. Ed Sullivan. Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (when I could manage to watch such "communist" fare). Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

There was a whole universe out there, beyond the Deep South -- beyond those bigoted enclaves in every state and every American city -- where black folks were pretty much like me. And nobody called them nigger.

It was an epiphany. I began to learn to rebel against the Rebels. It has been a lifelong process -- fight to the death, actually -- and it will never end.

I say "lifelong" and "fight to the death" for a reason -- simple conditioning. Pavlov's Dog type stuff.

Thing is, you can change your heart and change your mind, but I don't know whether you can ever change your early conditioning -- that reflexive, fleeting Pavlovian first response you have to various stimuli.

F'rinstance, here's a test to see whether you were raised white and Southern in the '60s or earlier: What's the first, non-rational thought that pops into your head -- that split second before reason and morality kicks in -- when you see a white woman "with" a black man?

Exactly.

And that's why RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman and whoever else had anything to do with the race-baiting of Harold Ford need to be tarred, feathered and ridden out of American politics on a rail.

At. A. Minimum.

What they have done is evil. Hateful, actually. Fortunately for us -- and unfortunately for them -- God reigns over Heaven and Earth.

And God don't sleep.

More on the ad here.