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By David A. Graham
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It sure seemed that South Carolina politics had reached its zenith of weirdness, with Mark Sanford still in the governor's mansion and the leading Republican gubernatorial candidate denying accusations of not one but two extramarital affairs.
But as Gaggle special South Carolina correspondent Carl Sullivan has said time and again, you can't underestimate the Palmetto State. To wit:
A lawmaker on Thursday called a Republican gubernatorial candidate of Indian descent a "raghead," saying we have one in the White House, we don't need one in the governor's mansion.
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For background, Republican state Sen. Jake Knotts was referring to Nikki Haley, a Tea Party–backed candidate for governor who was born to Sikh parents and later converted to Methodism. Obvious, unveiled racism like this is appalling, but individual comments like this aren't particularly interesting—it's the banality of racism, if you will.
But it's worth wondering whether Knotts would have made the comment if Haley had been, say, black. While it's true there have been some high-profile cases of racist statements against President Obama—but there have been swift repercussions, too—CEOs have been fired and politicians have been forced to resign after circulating racist e-mails and images. The optimistic discussion about "post-racial America" may have been premature, but it's increasingly clear that racist statements about African-Americans aren't OK in public discourse.
There's still space for racism, in different levels of clarity, though. Many observers seem to think Muslims are fair game. That's partly a legacy of history. Because of the painful, centuries-long relationship between white and black Americans—from the Atlantic slave trade to the civil-rights movement—white-on-black racism draws fast and angry responses. Muslims, meanwhile, don't have that history in the U.S., and have traditionally not been subject to the same sort of racism.
We've seen the willingness to attack Middle Easterners and Muslims in the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is either a Muslim or an Arab—neither of which, of course, would affect his legal ability to do his job. There's also the right-wing writer who's determined to prove that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is an anti-American movement. You won't see similar books on CAIR's equally mainstream equivalent, the NAACP. More recently, there's been an outcry against opening a mosque near Ground Zero in New York.
Haley, being of Indian descent, is apparently close enough to Middle Eastern to fit. No one's denying that it's racist, but there's a middle ground—yes, it's racist, but it's harmless, you see? See, for example, the laissez-faire, "boys will be boys" mentality of a comment on wltx.com, a local news site, spotted by Wonkette: "Oh give me a break. Everyone in South Carolina knows Jake as a bull butt redneck from Lexington County. So freakin' what if he called them ragheads."
In reality, of course, it's not harmless at all. It's not even so-called benevolent racism, but a plainly inflammatory slur.
Knotts is now trying to disavow the comments, but it appears that this wasn't a one-time thing: he's made similar comments in the past, TPM reports. Despite the widespread condemnation his comments on Haley have drawn, and will draw, Knotts is living proof that for some people, it's still OK to be racist—as long as your targets are carefully chosen.
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