Alabama is electing a new U.S. senator on Tuesday. Doug Jones is running as a former prosecutor and a Democrat. On the stump, he highlights the conviction he secured as U.S. Attorney against two of the Ku Klux Klan members who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church and killed four black girls in Birmingham in 1963. His opponent is Roy Moore, a twice-elected and twice-defrocked Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and a Republican.
All eyes are on the race because of allegations made by several women that Moore engaged in sexual contact with them when they were minors. The accusations seem to have given new life to the Jones campaign and even in this heavily Republican state, polls show he might eke out a victory. Still, many outside of the state seem surprised that the election is even close. Twitter has been abuzz with a poll from the Washington Post indicating that an overwhelming number of white voters will choose Moore and that even a majority of white women voters, including those who find the allegations credible, are leaning in his direction. Political pundits housed in offices in New York or Washington or other parts of the country have sought to attribute this data to Jones’ pro-choice stance or Moore’s historical support from the evangelical community.
As a former Alabamian, I can tell you the real reason: it’s good ole fashioned racism.
Until I moved to Los Angeles in 1995, I had spent most of my life in Montgomery, Alabama. I still speak with a Dixie twang accompanied by a bit of Southern drawl. But, because I am a South Asian American with an Indian name and a brown complexion, it is not the accent that folks would typically ascribe to me.
Being neither black nor white in Alabama, I was often cast as the supposedly neutral observer. People said things in front of me that they likely wouldn’t say in the presence of individuals of the opposite race. Most notably, white friends and their parents would routinely make derogatory statements about African Americans or share inappropriate jokes. The “n” word was uttered with some frequency in these conversations, though often in a hushed tone.
And, once in a while, they would say things to me or about me that evidenced a similar prejudice based on my being a child of Indian immigrants. My ninth grade Earth Science teacher explained to the class that the reason I was able to answer so many questions correctly in a classroom game of Jeopardy was because I was “not American.” And in eleventh grade, my American History teacher asked the class whether a fellow South Asian student and I should be removed from our homes and placed in camps like Japanese Americans in World War II if the U.S. were in some future war with India; without hesitation, she along with twenty-four of my twenty-five classmates voted to intern us.
Roy Moore has largely avoided media attention and has held few rallies since the allegations have surfaced. But, comments he made at a September rally have drawn significant attention. The LA Times reported that when asked when America was last great, Moore said, “"I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another.... Our families were strong, our country had a direction." At the same rally, he said, “Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting,” apparently referring to Native Americans and Asian Americans when he used the term “reds and yellows.”
None of these statements surprise me. This is just the way white politicians in Alabama talk if they want to get elected. There is a straight line from George Wallace to Roy Moore.
Before starting law school, I worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center, researching the legislative history of specific Jim Crow laws that sought to prevent African Americans from being elected to city and county offices. I read countless bills passed by the Alabama legislature from the 1920s through the 1970s that revealed significant racial animus.
Moore’s comments read like the testimony in hearings for the bills I researched. The dog whistles are loud and clear: Moore will support a white nationalist agenda. Jones’ record of prosecuting KKK members on behalf of four dead black girls suggests quite the opposite.
We will soon find out whom Alabama voters want to represent them in the U.S. Senate. We may learn that allegations of pedophilia against Moore or Jones’ pro-choice stance had an impact. But, we already know that the most significant factor in this contest is the one that it has always been in the heart of Dixie: race. And, like the 2016 election of our current president, all of the allegations in the world may be unlikely to change the outcome.