Playing the 'race card'

Over the last several years, white conservatives in this country have managed to successfully blame the victims of American institutional racism and white supremacy.

First, they attacked �affirmative action,� the remedy proposed by Republican President Richard Nixon�s Department of Labor. They labeled any efforts to correct centuries-old, systematic hiring inequities as �reverse discrimination.�

Then they attacked programs that set aside a small portion of government contracts for small, economically disadvantaged non-white vendors and entrepreneurs.

Even tax-incentives to encourage the sale of federally-regulated broadcast licenses to Black and Latinos were systematically struck down by the courts and by regulators. For the last decade anything resembling an effort to give a non-white person a �helping hand� instead of a �hand-out� has been relegated to the trash heap of American history.

Just last month, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) even went so far as to accuse the collective Black leadership�including many of his Black congressional colleagues�of committing �racial McCarthyism,� or �reverse race-baiting.�

It has become an �all-too-common practice,� Mr. Armey wrote in a letter to NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, �to spread unfounded, racially charged falsehoods for political advantage.�

Now, the senior senator from West Virginia, the Dean of the Senate�s Democratic Caucus, has had the effrontery to use the so-called �N-word,� on national television.

Twice.

�There are white n��s. I�ve seen a lot of white n��s in my time. I�m going to use that word,� he emphasized in an interview taped and broadcast March 11 on Fox News Sunday.

Sen. Byrd is also a former member of the night-riding, murdering, castrating lynch-mob known as the Ku Klux Klan. He was a �Kleagle,� an official recruiter who signed up new members for $10 a head.

Mr. Byrd once said he joined because the group �offered excitement,� and because he felt the Klan was an �effective force� in promoting traditional American values.�

American values, indeed.

What seems �amazing� (or maybe it should come as a no surprise) to some influential Black leaders who are now on the receiving end of charges of �racial McCarthyism,� is that whenever a Black person speaks out, articulating the understandable pain of his or her people, there is not only a chorus of official denunciations�the U.S. Senate once voted 95-0, for example, to repudiate Minister Louis Farrakhan, a good man who has never taught his followers to tie nooses; nor has he ever voted to approve the bombing of an African, Asian, Latin American, or Caribbean nation, or to approve laws that condemned the poor in this country to more wretched poverty, hunger and homelessness�there is also a chorus  of denunciations from �responsible� Blacks to repudiate the speaker.

Where is the Senate repudiation of Sen. Byrd? Where is the denunciation of this former Klansmen, who voted against the confirmation of both Black Supreme Court Justices�the liberal Thurgood Marshall, as well as the conservative Clarence Thomas?

Black people in this society are largely accurate in their analyses of those who have abused them for nearly 450 years, and rarely  loosely charge people with racism. But when anyone demonstrates racism in word or deed, we must condemn the actions of white supremacists for what they are.