As I tried to check out for a few minutes on Friday night and into a bit of escapist television, I landed instead on 20/20’s report on Lamb and Lynx Gaede, who were described as “the Olsen Twins of Hate,” blonde, blue-eyed 13-year old daughters of a white supremacist mom who trots them out with former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke to sing about preserving the white race under the banner “Prussian Blue.” Their mother, April, home schools them, and their grandfather makes sure their home is appropriately decorated with swastikas—he actually brands his cattle with one. Featured in their repertoire is a song praising Hitler’s deputy Führer, Rudolph Hess as “a man of peace who wouldn’t give up.” The story concluded with rejection of Lamb’s and Lynx’s attempt to deliver aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina—presumably just the white ones; and Cynthia McFadden’s reassuring voice-over that “most Americans don’t accept their racist message.” And that’s probably true.
Next, I tuned into my Tivo of Real Time with Bill Maher; and watched Spike Lee and Tucker Carlson debate an element of Spike’s new documentary which highlights the apparent belief of many African Americans that damage to the levees in New Orleans might have been a deliberate effort to destroy the black community. Carlson couldn’t wrap his brain around the reality that black people in this country actually consider that a possibility. Most startling to me was that Michel Martin from ABC and Nightline supported Spike’s assertion of this sense among African Americans, and agreed that while the conversation probably isn’t helpful because it makes white people think blacks are crazy, many African-Americans really wouldn’t rule it out.
But aside from the debate about whether the 20/20 piece is more insightful than incite-ful; and whether neglect and budget cuts, coupled with the deployment of most of the Louisiana National Guard troops to Iraq is really that much different from deliberate sabotage, I started to think about a trip I took to New Orleans in the summer of 1991 when David Duke was running for Governor of Louisiana--not as Grand Dragon of the KKK--but as the candidate of the Republican Party.
I was at Duke’s Fourth of July picnic in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie and had the opportunity to point a camera at the angry and disillusioned white voters who had turned out to support his Gubernatorial run. It wasn’t the neo-Nazis and Jew Haters that were the most illuminating part of the event; and it wasn’t the guy who had drunk so much beer that he pinned his David Duke for Governor button through the skin in his chest; or the blonde who sang ‘Dixie’ or the man in the “It’s a White Thing You Wouldn’t Understand” t-shirt. The most piercing conversation was with a man who said he was a “closet person” who had come out and was openly supporting Duke, because Duke understood the pain of white working people and the white middle class.
At the end of the afternoon I was able to interview Duke himself. He boasted that he was the first politician to use affirmative action as a campaign issue. KKK Grand Dragon Duke is the man who first called it “reverse discrimination.” Duke received forty percent of the vote in the State of Louisiana—55 percent of the White Vote (and lost to Edwin Edwards who later went to jail for various forms of corruption).
For a short film piece we made about Duke’s Independence Day picnic, my colleague Danny Schechter and I filmed an interview with a board certified plastic surgeon. He analyzed photographs and video of David Duke and pointed out that plastic surgery-- chin and cheek implants and chemical peels -- had transformed the homely Klansman into a photogenic GOP candidate for Governor. But even Duke’s extreme makeover couldn’t hide the reality of what he truly is, and the Republican Party worked to distance itself from him. But not from his issues and policies. Instead, they’ve made them their own.
For the Republicans, especially the Bush family, who raised race-baiting to new heights with the Willie Horton ads in the 1988 election campaign of George HW; and George W’s visit to Bob Jones University in 2000, the message could not be clearer. Playing the race card works.
And now with the President’s approval rating at two percent among blacks, it seems that African-Americans are most definitely getting the message. We may no longer tolerate the likes of Klansman burning crosses on lawns, and we reject odes to Nazi heroes, even if they are sung by little white girls who look like cheerleaders. But racism, big and ugly and destructive as a Category Four storm, is alive and well—in our tax cuts, in our military spending, in our education and health care systems, and in the way we count our votes. It’s alive in the cluelessness of ‘brilliant’ men like John Roberts who oppose extension of the voting rights act; and the President’s mom and her comments about the ‘underprivileged’; and the horrific neglect of Bush’s cronies--like Brownie, who was too busy getting dinner to send a bite to eat to the starving flood victims in the New Orleans Convention Center; and right wing mouthpieces like Bill Bennett and Tucker Carlson. And in the eager politicians who continue to exploit race to divide and conquer.
If it hadn’t been so tragic, it might have almost been amusing to see the President and his people take such umbrage at suggestions that the pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina might have been about race. Maybe they really can’t see it, but I doubt it.
(And if you’re interested in a bit of New Orleans history, you can see the short film we made about Duke on our website at balconyfilms.com.
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