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Using Trent Lott

There he was on BET (Black Entertainment Television), Sen. Trent Lott, the reformed segregationist looking for redemption in the ethnic media — perhaps the only place in America where a kind of benign segregation is practiced and revered as marketing strategy.

Despite his record, I couldn’t believe my ears. “I am for affirmative action,” Lott told the BET audience. “And I’ve acted on it! ... I have blacks on my staff!”

That was as close as he got to saying, “Some of my best friends are ....”

He is now the poster boy for “white guilt.” A death bed converter. He’s seen the light.

Have mercy.

Should we?

LONG WICK TO INDIGNATION: I’ll admit I was a bit slow to react to the story two weeks ago. It just wasn’t reported with the kind of zeal you’d expect. Here was a white southern senator toasting a much older southern relic at a 100th birthday celebration. A lot of reporters were just waiting to hear “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.”

But Trent Lott went further. He praised Thurmond for his run for president as a Dixicrat in 1948, and said how he was proud to have supported him. And then he said these words: “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”

All these problems?

You mean decent Chinese restaurants in the South? Hmong and Vietnamese on the Bayou? A ton of people from other countries coming to these pristine shores of America?

Now, I hear the tone. But it took a while before it truly sank in. In the context of a party for a retiring senator, all the talk just ran into each other as a kind of innocuous, heartwarming affair to the mainstream press. Hardly anyone reported it.

Maybe if they had more people of color in the newsrooms.

Only on the Monday after, when Lott first began his “apology tour,” did the mainstream realize the horror of Lott’s words.

He was being nostalgic for segregation.

Oh....

It’s a good indicator of where mainstream society stands these days on issues of race. No indignation? No outrage? We have a higher threshold for racism than we think. That’s bad. That’s how this stuff grows.

Lott said he was just “winging it.” That it was a “mistake of the head and not the heart.” But his feeling is so ingrained. It’s second nature. And now that he’s seen the 21st century, he’s willing to undergo this public confessional that’s really more like a public exorcism on race.

He could be every white person in America.

LOTT’S PAST AND FUTURE: The truth about Lott is he had been a “baaad, baaad man” in terms of race issues well before his Thurmond statement. For example, he’s the darling of the Council of Conservative Americans, a group often linked to white supremacy. Its website proudly displays the confederate flag, and books that discredit Dr. Martin Luther King and all he stood for. Oh, and you’ll find Trent Lott’s picture there too. They just love Trent Lott.

Lott voted against the King holiday and against the appropriation to administer it. Additionally, Lott’s past includes a spirited legal defense of Bob Jones University, the southern school that banned interracial dating. He was against integration at his college frat.

Do you sense a pattern of behavior?

WHAT ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICANS SHOULD DO: Shall we pile on? The list of the angry and the shrill is long and deep. On the left, there are the standard civil rights divas like Maxine Waters and Rev. Al Sharpton.

On the right are both white and minority conservatives. If you’re a minority mouthpiece, you have to be outraged. Lott’s exposed your alliance, and threatened your credibility with the community you’re trying to proselytize. If you’re a white conservative, you just want Lott’s job. (And many of them are no better than Lott.) Senate Republicans have set a meeting for Jan. 6 to decide. That means Lott can keep apologizing until then.

But I don’t want to dump on Lott like everyone else. Really.

As it turns out, Trent Lott and I have something in common. We share the same birthday, Oct. 9. Different years. Different race politics. Same sign. It makes me willing to be a bit more compassionate.

I think Lott should stay.

Here’s what he’s really done with his Thurmond gaffe. He’s spoken more honestly about race than any politician in the recent past. America isn’t used to this kind of honesty on race. We’ve taken to a kind of double-talk, hoodwinked by the likes of Ward Connerly and Prop. 209, which was called the “Civil Rights Initiative.”

Lott’s honesty shows all that up as a charade. Before his remarks, civil rights were going nowhere. When the Supreme Court announced it would take on affirmative action in the University of Michigan case, who wasn’t convinced it would mean the end for good old affirmative action? It sounded like another heart-breaking 5-4 vote, with Clarence Thomas, a beneficiary of affirmative action, casting the final negative vote.

Now race is back on the agenda. Everyone’s indignant again. Who knows? The Bush administration may yet side with Michigan and not the aggrieved white students on that case that the Supreme Court will review. The power of Lott’s honesty is to make everyone more honest.

That’s not an insignificant thing.

Black commentators were cynical about Lott’s “conversion.” If he lacked specifics on BET, I still think Lott’s new found “religion” is better than the kind of double-talk we get from right wing mouthpieces like Ward Connerly.

I do wish Lott were on a more mainstream channel talking to everybody, not just BET. I doubt if he’ll be showing up for a live interview with the Cantonese or the Mandarin News on KTSF. But maybe he should, in order to let us know he understands the meaning of the term “other minorities.”

Still, on balance, I think Trent Lott is worth keeping around. You don’t get his new awareness and honesty from your average Republican. Besides, a good reformed hypocrite is hard to come by. We should use him.

Reach Emil Guillermo at emil@amok.com.