Huckabee and Racism #
Christopher Hitchens has an incisive essay about Mike Huckabee’s “straightfoward racist appeal” about the Confederate flag in South Carolina and uses it to make some interesting comments about race in America. He begins:
In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about “race” as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other “sensitivities” as well).