So MIssissippi Governor Haley Barbour wants to be president, huh? His first challenge is going to be outrunning his atrocious record on race. In an America that recently elected its first black Commander-In-Chief, no candidate would force white moderates and conservatives to grapple with tough racial questions -- or galvanize black and brown voters -- like Haley Reeves Barbour.
Barbour has a long history of putting his cringe-inducing racial insensitivity on display in the most public of forums. Back in April, for instance, Barbour weighed in on the controversy engulfing Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell over his declaration of Confederate History Month without once mentioning the institution of slavery. In a fit of revisionist passion, McDonnell infamously claimed that slavery just wasn't "significant" enough a cause of the war to merit a mention.
McDonnell beat a hasty retreat from that position, inveighing strongly against slavery's role in starting the War of Northern Aggression Civil War. But that example didn't stop Haley Barbour from belittling those whose sensitivities were inflamed by the omission (READ: black people). He told CNN's Candy Crowley later in the week "It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't amount to diddly."
More recently, Barbour tried to rehabilitate the image his generation of white Mississippians by claiming that his was the generation that integrated the state. To demonstrate his point, he recounted his friendship with "Verna Lee Bailey", the first black woman to attend Ole Miss. He says that she was just another student, accepted by her peers. But her name is actually Verna Ann Bailey, and she says that her experience was very different from the one Barbour shared:
Barbour left Ole Miss before he finished his bachelor's degree to work for the Nixon campaign, then came back to earn his law degree. Bailey said she finished her undergraduate degree in three years, not because she was a great student, but because she wanted to get out of Oxford, Miss., as fast as she could.
She recalled dancing in Oxford Square once with another black student at a school celebration when a crowd of whites began pelting them with coins and beer. "It was just an awful experience. I just saw this mass of anger; anger and hostility. I thought my life was going to end."
A campus minister, one of the only whites she remembers showing her kindness, took her by the hand and led her to safety. She said the minister was ostracized.
During her undergraduate days, she was inundated with intimidating phone calls to her dorm from white men. "The calls were so constant," she said. "Vulgar, all sexual connotations, saying nigger bitches needed to go back to the cotton field and things of that nature." She'd complain, have the phone number changed. Then the calls would start again. Funeral wreaths with what appeared to be animal blood on them were found outside her dorm.
In one science class in a lecture hall, no one would sit near her. The only class in which she remembers alphabetized seating was a Spanish class where the teacher seemed empathetic to her. Bailey figured that was because the teacher was from South America, not Mississippi.
The common thread running through both these incidents is Barbour's eagerness to weave an imaginitively revisionist tale about the South, about Mississippi, and about the region's tortured -- and torturous -- history of institutional racism. Nowhere was that more apparent than in Barbour's recent interview with The Weekly Standard, where he sanitizes the role and nature of civil rights-era White Citizens' Councils (which grew into today's Council of Conservative Citizens). Barbour claimed the Councils helped stop the formation of the Klan and kept the peace during integration. The truth is that the Councils were a powerful force to preserve a racist status quo, organizing economic reprisals and condoning violence against integrationists.
Barbour's cluelessness on race suggests an almost genetic predisposition to not get it. Back in 1982, when Barbour was running for Senate as a 34-year old young gun against venerable (and bigoted) Democrat John C. Stennis, an aide referred to black folks as "coons" in the presence of national press. According to the New York Times, "Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."
Oddly enough, none of the preceding is to imply that Haley Barbour is himself a bigot -- frankly, the question barely matters. But Haley's history begs a fascinating question: how the hell does this guy intend to run against someone like Barack Obama? It's hard to argue that Obama's campaign and subsequent victory didn't mark a substantive shift in what most Americans expect in our leaders' attitudes about and comportment towards race. For all America's failings in how we deal with race and racism collectively, this much is clear: with each passing day we move further away from an America that would elect a leader willing to give comfort to the Tea Party's petulant discursive excesses where race is concerned.
Americans generally want leaders who speak to the nation's highest aspirations instead of pandering to their fears. And for better or for worse Obama's election -- indeed his very person -- still embodies the hope of a nation desperate to move beyond centuries-old cultural and economic wounds. Barbour's deeply rooted insensitivity to others' perspectives appears as a throwback to an increasingly bygone time. More than any other prospective Republican candidate, Barbour would invite a public examination of the modern GOP's racial attitudes and values. Uh oh.
Republican political operatives know this to be a problem. That's why they're recruiting him to run for RNC chief in 2012 instead of president. But Barbour's camp is rejecting such calls, and all signs point to a Barbour run for the White House in 2012.
The surest sign? Barbour has in recent weeks taken carefully crafted steps to burnish his reputation as a colorblind conservative, advocating for a $50 million civil rights museum in Mississippi and ordering the early release of Jamie and Gladys Scott, sisters who were sentenced to an absurdly unjust prison sentence for their alleged role in a robbery that netted $11. The sisters were released on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to her ailing sister.
The problem for Barbour is that no matter how fast he runs, no matter how many museums he proposes, he'll never evade his deplorable record on race -- which also includes routinely advocating for policies destined to have a disparate impact on poor and minority communities (which almost goes without saying: he is a Republican, after all.) A Barbour run could invite a new national conversation on race in America -- one unlikely to be to his benefit.