George Allen, for the rest of his life, will be peddling uphill. At the end of that mountain, is not the White House, the roadmap has been moved under his wheels. From here on out it doesn't matter how fast he peddles, he will be going around in racial circles. Too bad.
Two former acquaintances of Senator George Allen said Monday that he used racist slurs in the 1970’s and 1980’s, a development that compounded accusations of racial insensitivity that have dogged his re-election campaign in Virginia. Mr. Allen denied that he had ever used such words.
One of the two old acquaintances, Christopher Taylor, now an anthropology professor at the Birmingham campus of the University of Alabama, said he heard Mr. Allen use an epithet to describe African-Americans in the early 1980’s.
Mr. Taylor, who is white and was then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, said the term had come up in a conversation about the turtles in a pond near Mr. Allen’s property. Mr. Allen, Mr. Taylor said, told him that “around here” the only people who “eat ’em” were African-Americans, whom he described with the notorious epithet for blacks.
Separately, Dr. Ken Shelton, who was a football teammate of the senator at the University of Virginia and who is also white, said that while in college in the early 1970’s Mr. Allen often used the same racially charged term. Mr. Shelton, whose account was first reported Sunday night in the online newsmagazine Salon, said Mr. Allen had told him that he had moved to Virginia “because the blacks know their place.”
George Allen is now going to be eating crow for a while. It will be a sad little drama to watch him dance on the griddle and try to find some black friends to back him up. Then he'll say.. well those were different times and Richard Pryor used to say it. Then he and his campaign will go through the, what are they five?, stages of mourning. Today he's in denial.
Even though I am tempted to interrogate the messenger, this one stinks like a real stinker, not just a funny smell as with the 'macaca' thing. When somebody brings up such a memory, it's noticable for how it must have been a real shock when it happened.
I don't believe that George Allen has more than three or four racist bones in his body. Nor have I been convinced that he does much work with those bones either in destructive bigotry or supporting his weight. But he's addressing a nation with higher, if disengenuous, political standards than that, and so has recieved the kiss of death. Chalk one more up to the social capital of African Americans, and watch your step, because somewhere deep in your long forgotten past, you were a racist. I know I was.
Oh, and by the way, I like Mitt Romney and John McCain better anyway.
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