White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (25 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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By 1990, David had undergone numerous plastic surgeries to Aryanize his look, trading in the flattened down ’do and moustache for a neatly coiffed and lightened blonde head of hair—all the better to represent the interests of the white race. It was a white race, he insisted, that needed him to stand up for it, to repel the attack from “reverse discrimination,” busing in schools, “parasitic” welfare recipients, immigration, and any other evil under the sun onto which he could cast a brown face.
Much of Duke’s rhetoric was classic right-wing boilerplate, mirroring mainstream conservative discourse on such subjects as affirmative action, anti-poverty programs, and education, and sounding quite a bit like previous narratives spun by politicians like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace for the previous twenty years. Because Duke steered clear of his more blatantly racist positions—those he’d advocated in the Klan or the NAAWP for instance, like racial separation—he was able to convince some right from the beginning that he had truly changed. The Klan was in his past, he would insist, and after all, hadn’t Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat, also been a Klansman in his youth?
Of course, there were some differences between Byrd and Duke that the latter conveniently ignored. To begin, Byrd’s youth had been fifty years prior, whereas Duke had only been out of the KKK for a decade. Additionally, Byrd had never joined another white supremacist group after leaving the Klan, while Duke had actually
started
another one, in the form of the NAAWP (of which he would remain the head until a few days before the Senate election). More to the point, Byrd had apologized for his Klan membership and called it a mistake, while Duke had never repudiated the organization. In fact, Duke said he was proud of the work he had done in the Klan, and in 1985—just two years before he turned to electoral politics and began running for public office—admitted that his ideology had “not fundamentally changed” since his Klan days.
Obviously, despite Duke’s attempts to convince voters of his turn from racism, the only thing that had really changed about David was his face.
YOU MIGHT EXPECT
that organizing a campaign against a neo-Nazi would be easy, especially in the sense of settling on the proper strategy for doing so. You might think that since Nazis are pretty well reviled, pointing out Duke’s ongoing affiliations with Hitlerian types would be an easy call and a winning plan about which all could agree. And if you did think that, you would be terribly wrong, as I would learn.
Within the Coalition ranks, there was an ongoing battle about how to respond to Duke and how to combat his candidacy. On one side were those of us who came from a more progressive tradition—and in this group one could include Larry and Lance—and on the other were several of the Board members from more conservative and Republican backgrounds, who were nervous about challenging Duke on the matter of racism at all. As one would put it, “we need racists to vote against Duke too,” so, presumably, we shouldn’t make a big deal out of the fact that he didn’t like black people much. They preferred that we talk about Duke having “dodged the draft” during Vietnam, or failing to pay taxes on time, or the fact that he once wrote a sex manual under a female pseudonym.
For the most part, Lance, as Director, was able to sidestep these unprincipled positions coming from board members, aided in that process by Beth Rickey, who despite being a relatively conservative Republican, was motivated by an intense dislike for racism and a recognition that indeed that
was
the issue. Lance would placate the more conservative board members as best he could, but from his perspective—and all of us on staff agreed—the only ethically acceptable approach was to focus on Duke’s ties to racial hatred and neo-Nazi extremism. Yes, we might need people who were far from enlightened to vote against Duke in order to beat him, but that didn’t mean we had to ignore racism, or pretend that draft-dodging or late tax payments were equivalent to calling for the creation of a master race or separating people into their own sub-nations based on color.
There were, of course, those who thought even this approach was too conservative. I had several friends, for instance, who believed we shouldn’t call Duke a Nazi, not because he wasn’t one, but because to do so was no better, ostensibly, than for right-wingers to call those of us on the left “communists.” It was, to their way of thinking, no better than red-baiting. They preferred that we simply rebut Duke on the issues: explain why his claims about welfare recipients were wrong, why his stance on affirmative action was mistaken, why his perspective on immigration flawed. One friend and colleague even said that the answer was to just go into the union halls and tell working class white guys that black workers were their brothers and sisters, and they should recognize that all of them were being manipulated by the ruling class. Sure. Simple. Just like that.
Fact is, we did try to rebut Duke’s public policy narrative, but with a limited amount of time in which to mount an effective campaign, changing white folks’ minds about subjects like affirmative action and welfare spending was pretty unlikely to work; their views on these matters had taken many years to ossify, and would take time to dislodge. Rather, we tried to remain focused on Duke’s extremism—his connections to assorted white supremacists, as well as his overtly racist ideology, spelled out in his own writings—and occasionally (and unfortunately) threw a bone to the conservatives who wanted to talk about taxes, the draft, and sex manuals, by mentioning those as well.
Because Louisiana’s elections were open—meaning there were no party primaries, so all the candidates ran in a big pack and the top two vote-getters would face one another in a runoff—we were all nervous about the outcome. With the official Republican candidate, Ben Bagert, pulling six to ten percent in polls, the concern was that Duke might win the most votes in a three-way race, or at least get into a runoff with Johnston, where the outcome would be uncertain. Afraid of the same, Bagert dropped out in the waning days of the campaign.
Having traveled the state in the weeks leading up to the election, I knew to be worried. I had organized students in Lafayette, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Monroe, Shreveport, and all places between, and knew that Duke had a strong underbelly of support from scores of disaffected whites who were convinced that all their problems could be laid at the feet of black people. Although Duke’s personal obsession had always been Jews and the role of the Jewish community in undermining the white race, because the Jewish population of Louisiana was small, he rarely discussed the matter; but it wasn’t because he hadn’t wanted to. As one of his campaign managers would explain, they had had to beg him not to talk about Jews too much because it didn’t resonate with people in Louisiana the way going after blacks did, so he had stuck to the script and built his support base by doing so.
Sadly, it wasn’t just the racist white folks—or the desperate whites, convinced by Duke’s racial siren song to vote their resentments—who posed a threat. There were also more than a few relatively liberal and even far-left folks I knew and considered friends who genuinely mused about their desire to abstain from the election and not vote at all. To them, both candidates were unacceptable, and in keeping with their purity-of-arms leftism, they would refuse to vote for Johnston—the “lesser of the two evils.” That J. Bennett Johnston was indeed a conservative Democrat whose record on everything from foreign affairs to the environment was rightly offensive was inarguable. That anyone claiming to believe in justice could think a bad environmental record was morally equivalent to being a Nazi, however, suggested an intellectual and ethical miscalibration so profound as to boggle the mind—but in any event, there it was.
On election day, the Coalition and our supporters gathered downtown at the Sheraton on Canal Street to watch returns and celebrate Duke’s defeat—which despite our fears, we fully anticipated would yet be the outcome. And although Duke did lose, the celebration quickly turned into something more closely resembling a funeral procession or a wake. Unmoved by the evidence of David’s racism and his connections to the neo-Nazi movement, a whopping 60 percent of white Louisianans had voted for Duke: in some northern Louisiana parishes, and even next door to New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish, the numbers climbed closer to 70 percent. Only a high black voter turnout had prevented him from winning, but even then, his final tally of 43.5 percent of the overall vote sent shockwaves through the state and nation. As Lance explained that evening to the media, the election had been a referendum on hate, and hate had won.
HAVING MANAGED TO
score such a great job right out of school, I was unprepared for the professional insecurity that would follow in the wake of the anti-Duke campaign. Not that I had expected to find jobs as easily as I’d wrangled the one at the Coalition, but still, what would transpire over the next several years was the very definition of an occupational roller-coaster.
For at least four weeks after the election I would still have work, acting essentially as a gopher on the Congressional campaign of Marc Morial, who was running against William Jefferson for the House seat vacated by longtime Congresswoman Lindy Boggs. I had known Marc for two years, having met him during the anti-apartheid movement; he was a local civil rights attorney and son of the city’s first black Mayor, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, and would become Mayor himself in 1994. In this race, however, and despite the clout of his late father’s political machine, Marc would lose to Jefferson, the latter of whom would go on to serve nearly twenty years in Congress before being indicted on corruption charges a few years ago, another in a long line of not-quite-honest Louisiana politicians.
My responsibilities in the campaign were essentially banal. I answered phones, went to the post office to mail campaign fliers and other materials, ran errands for supplies, and did whatever else was needed around the office. It was boring but it was a paycheck, and I’m grateful for the experience, if only because it taught me how much I despised the game of electoral politics. Any thought of working on campaigns for traditional candidates—even those I respected, like Marc—went out the proverbial window by November 1990. There was no aspect of it that appealed to me: not the glad-handing for money, not the ass-kissing for votes, not the pandering to people you didn’t even like just to seem “electable,” and certainly not the gamesmanship, which turns such efforts into mere competitions between high-priced consultants, who, if they weren’t selling politicians, would be hawking get-rich-quick schemes on late-night infomercials, or perhaps Extenze tablets.
At the same time that I was trying to figure out the direction in which I wanted to go professionally, I had just begun a new relationship with a woman I’d met during the anti-Duke campaign, but who was, to be sure, not the typical activist type. Nicol Breaux was a local, born and reared in the mostly-white suburbs of Jefferson Parish: in other words, David Duke country. Though she didn’t live in the district from which Duke had been elected to the statehouse in 1989, she spent a lot of time there, including at her—and soon to be our—favorite dive bar, Mick’s: a pub run by a young Irish American kid named Rusty, and frequented by more than a few Duke supporters.
Nicol was a student at Tulane, a year behind me, and although her social circle included a lot of whites with less-than-enlightened racial views, she was militantly opposed to Duke—she would, in fact, throw a beer on him during a St. Patrick’s Day parade a few years later—and was committed to challenging those friends of hers to see what she saw in the Klansman who was so covetous of, and had likely received, their votes. Indeed, among the things that attracted me to Nicol had been her fearlessness in standing up to the kinds of white people who, frankly, I had never spent any significant time around. Coming from a liberalleft background, where I had been able to construct a life that allowed me to avoid too many overtly racist white people—and even working class white folks, period, racist or not—her bravado at telling her mostly male social circle where to step off was fascinating to me. Although we couldn’t have been more different—at the time I was wearing tiedyed T-shirts and a woven bracelet in the colors of the African National Congress, while she coveted Chanel bags and DKNY—there was something about her that I found alluring.

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