Of Course They Did

[Black Democratic former congressman and U.S. agriculture secretary Mike Espy’s] campaign got a jolt of adrenaline when a video surfaced a week ago showing [Republican incumbent Senator Cindy] Hyde-Smith, 59, praising a supporter by saying: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”
In Mississippi U.S. Senate race, a 'hanging' remark spurs Democrats

I honestly can’t even find these sorts if things cringeworthy anymore, otherwise I’d be locked into a rictus of perma-cringing. But more to the point, it doesn't seem to make sense to expect any better. Republican in the deep South, making a comment that could be construed as supporting lynchings? That may as well be a checkbox on their application for party membership. And not because I suspect that all White Republicans are secret Klan members, waiting for the South to rise again. It’s just because this sort of tone deafness is par for the course.

I would be unsurprised to find that it isn’t entirely accidental. This isn’t to say that I expect that Senator Hyde-Smith practices comments meant to rile up Black people. But rather that the sort of disregard for “political correctness” that many Republicans are expected to cultivate means that actually taking the time to think about how a remark is going to be taken once it gets away from them isn't seen as worthwhile. Of course, it not like the only people who suddenly come down with a self-inflicted case of foot-in-mouth disease are Republicans. President Obama and Hillary Clinton are likely never going to live down “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and “basket of deplorables.” It’s never good to make critical comments about potential future constituents.

But there is an apparent... antipathy (that seems like a good word) in Republican circles to the idea that the reactions of people to words is born of something other than a deliberate brittleness and hypersensitivity. I think that part of it is the idea that someone took racism out back and shot to death 50 years ago, and no matter what happens, it’s going to stay dead. Republican voters may sometimes evince nostalgia for a time that Black Americans never want to return to, but they understand it differently. The racism, bigotry and violence that characterized the pre-civil-rights era United States is seen as an unfortunate side effect of scattered mean people, and so there is an understanding that only “the good parts” of the past can be resurrected. But I think that for many Black people, that time is lurking just out of sight, and the systematic marginalization and mistreatment were not only part and parcel of the prosperity that White people felt during that time, but a requirement for it. And so a nostalgia for stronger Labor and more robust families must also mean a desire to reinstate Jim Crow along with it.

I don’t have a problem with Republicans saying to themselves: “The idea that the use of these sorts of old, folksy, sayings means that we want a return to a time of open inequality is utterly ridiculous.” The miss, I believe, is when they convince themselves that because it’s self-evidently ridiculous, only a motivated critic would see it otherwise.

But 50 years isn’t that long ago. The surviving members of the generation before me in my family all have first-hand memories of that long ago, and further. And they know that other people do, too.

Elizabeth Eckford, front, and Hazel Massery, shouting from behind.

After all, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Massery are still alive. They have reconciled since the events of 1957 (even if Oprah Winfrey was skeptical), but that doesn't mean that everyone has. That doesn’t mean that everyone now the belief that the society that took so much blood and tears to change was wrong is universal. To be sure, I think that the number of people who believe that the Republican Party would actively campaign on rolling back the clock is small. But in 2013, Republican Nevada Assemblyman Jim Wheeler said that he’d hold his nose, and there would need to be a gun to his head, but if his constituents wanted it, he’d vote for slavery to be re-instituted, “if that’s what the constituency wants that elected me.”

There is a view of Republicans as cynical political operators, subtly feeding bigots in exchange for votes. And it’s a view that many Republicans reject. But it’s one that's fed by comments like “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” because there are people who have the uncomfortable feeling that they’d be invited to that public hanging, too. Republicans don’t have buy into that, and they don’t have to take responsibility for it. But I think that it would benefit them to see recognizing and considering it as something other than weakness.