>I would think that a high-profile politician saying the word "nigger" twice on television would draw ratings.
If you're talking about Byrd, he is a Democrat, and the media loves Democrats. He said it on Fox, and apologized on Fox.
What I said wasn't really relevant here, I was just pissed cause I had to sit through a 5 minute bit about some guy who is raising 10 dogs.
Fox News didn't make a big deal about it, because Fox is fair. What Byrd said was not racist, he was pointing out that the stereotypical black person could also be white, that it is a personality, not a race that is defined by the word nigger. Brett Hume realized this and didn't make a big deal about it.
The media is making a big deal about what Trent Lott said even though he did NOT say anything outwardly racist because he is a Republican.
Read this article from my local newspaper, and tell me it is not biased:
Sunday, December 15, 2002 - PASCAGOULA, Miss. - Trent Lott arrived on the Mississippi coast just after lunch on Friday and disappeared into his antebellum-style home on the beach. The lush yard between the white house and the rippling saltwater is anchored by twisted, giant oaks that have bent but not broken against the storms of a hundred years.
The embattled senator from Mississippi found safe harbor among friends and family here after a week of bruising controversy and repeated apologies over remarks widely interpreted as an endorsement of racism. A sign outside a roadside hotel on U.S. 90 no doubt brought him comfort: "We love you, Trent," it declared.
While some say the media and Democrats are just hankering to take a bite out of one of the nation's leading conservative voices, others here say what's on a man's lips is also in his heart. The sentiments Lott has sought to distance himself from this past week have left many, including President Bush, wondering where such an unthinking choice of words came from in the first place.
They came from here.
Mississippi is a place, perhaps the last place, where such remarks don't deeply wound, unless you do something about them. Four decades after the Freedom Summer murders, the assassination of Medgar Evers and scores of lynchings, bombings and beatings, a few words are a small affair.
Lott grew up in the meanest kind of segregated South, in a region that still clings to its worst traditions the way Scarlett O'Hara clutched a parasol.
Some folks here in Pascagoula say Lott should have proudly stood his ground.
"Why apologize?" said Glenna Barnes, a waitress who has worked behind the Sav-Rex lunch counter for 29 years. Barnes was the only white waitress among the crew of four working on Friday; her co-workers were black. "When you're right, you're right."
Nursing a cup of coffee nearby, E.H. Johnson, 72, spoke viciously, but with a smile on his face.
"If the white man don't wake up, the niggers are going to take over," he said. Johnson, who spoke just a few feet from black patrons and waitresses, considers himself a Dixiecrat, and he does believe that the nation would have prospered had it been racially divided. Minutes later, however, he would flirt with one of the black waitresses.
Ron Sisk, painfully thin with bushy black hair and a beard salted with gray, flies a Confederate battle flag the size of a shrimp boat on a 100-foot pole above his home along U.S. 49. "It's still segregated," Sisk said of Mississippi. "It's just voluntary. Whites stay with whites, and blacks stay with their own kind. That's the way it is, man."
Old times here are not forgotten.
Lott's comments that the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948 made the incoming Senate majority leader particularly vulnerable because he's from Mississippi, where the flames of racism are easily fanned and the fire burns particularly hot.
Older whites and blacks remember a 1959 incident, for example, in which a white gang armed with baseball bats, bottles, chains and rocks beat a group of blacks, killing two, for wading in the water at the whites-only beach in Biloxi. Last year, Mississippians voted nearly 3-to-1 to leave the Confederate battle emblem in the upper left corner of the state flag, for the sake of heritage, supporters said. And last month, nearby Harrison County residents voted in favor of leaving the Confederate battle flag, the favorite symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, flying above public facilities.
But others here want to cast off the old ways and resent the negative attention Lott has brought to the state. And some say Lott has been unfairly labeled as a racist, period.
"Some people say holding on to the flag is holding on to heritage," said 22-year-old Jason Whitfield of nearby Gulfport, who camped in the shadows of the Confederate flag at the public beach where it was displayed for 77 days last summer, protesting what he called an offensive symbol.
"But Trent Lott has shown us the old ways Mississippi is holding on to - the segregated South."
State Rep. Carmel Wells-Smith of Pascagoula, an up-and-comer in the state Republican Party, said Mississippi has weathered far tougher struggles in trying to come to grips with the race issue. The label of racism will not stick, she hopes, to Lott or Mississippi.
"You can call Trent Lott a lot of things," she said, "but 'racist' isn't one of them."
Lott's pastor at First Baptist Church in Pascagoula, the Rev. Rex Yancey, preaches routinely about peace, unity and inclusion to a congregation that includes white and black parishioners. Lott is no racist, he said.
"Every Mississippian, every Southerner, has had to grow through some things," said Yancey, referring to racism of the past. "He's grown through it."
Mac Clark, owner of the Sav-Rex Pharmacy, where blacks and whites congregate for news and gossip at the drugstore lunch counter, is deeply concerned about having Mississippi's turbulent racial history rekindled on a national stage. Clark, like many here, is not only concerned about the image of Pascagoula being tarnished, but also worries about how Lott is perceived.
"I've been knowing him just about his whole life, and I know that he has never looked down on nobody," Clark said. "You can't judge a man by a few words, but look at his whole life."
In a state where 38 percent of the residents are black, and most of them poor, Lott's presence in Washington has meant jobs and food on the table. Ingalls Shipyard, which can be seen from the senator's home in Pascagoula, employs 10,000 of Lott's constituents, about 40 percent of whom are black. During his long tenure in the Senate, Lott has steered millions of dollars in defense contracts to the shipyard.
To many, he is a hero, indirectly responsible for their paychecks, their mortgage payments and their pride in building America's fighting fleet.
"There's a lot of mixed feelings," said Chico McGill, business manager for the electrical workers union at the shipyard. "Trent Lott has been good to Ingalls, bringing in a lot of work, but there are a lot of black people in our (union) membership. People don't know what to think."
Rip Daniels knows what he believes and has no problem saying it - and including thousands of listeners in on the conversation.
A radio station owner and host, Daniels is as well known among blacks and whites on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as Lott is among conservatives in Washington.
Daniels delivers a firebrand sermon on the sad state of race in Mississippi and the demons that perpetuate it for two hours each morning on his call-in radio show, "It's a New Day," the highest-rated radio program in southern Mississippi.
"Trent Lott is a bigot. He's always been a bigot. He was raised in a bigoted environment," said Daniels, before going on the air Friday morning.
"Does that mean he is unfit to represent Mississippi? No. That means he represents Mississippi."
From the Sunday Denver Post
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