Ranching and basketball may not appear to have much in common. But last week, they converged in two major American news stories — both about race — putting that hot-button issue at the forefront of American thought. Again. The first involved a Nevada rancher, Cliven Bundy, whose long-running dispute over grazing rights with the government agency that oversees 264 million acres of public lands briefly captured the attention of conservative media.
Perhaps in the hope that the Barack Obama administration will overreach itself, Bundy was granted an almost daily platform, casting his heavily armed supporters as “patriots” and turning his battle over back payments into a sort of conservative cause celebre. But all that came crashing to a halt the moment he spoke to a New York Times reporter about the plight of “the Negro” and wondered aloud whether or not blacks might have been better off “picking cotton” as slaves.
The pundits on Fox News and other Bundy-boosters quickly distanced themselves from him as their folk hero turned into a monster, but the damage was done. It was only the news that Donald Sterling, the billionaire owner of professional basketball’s Los Angeles Clippers, was caught on tape making his own racist remarks that took the heat off Bundy. He was recorded telling his mixed-race girlfriend not to bring blacks to his games — and not to post photographs with them on the social media websites. That controversy dominated headlines for days and only settled down when the National Basketball Association banned Sterling for life — and fined him $2.5 million (Dh9.19 million), the maximum amount permitted. Both sides of the political divide have tried to score points in both cases — and the ugly problem of America and race still lingers.
When Democrats hear talk of picking cotton their first instinct is to make hay — and that is just what they have done. The last thing Republicans, who can typically expect to lose around 90 per cent of the black vote in presidential elections, needed was to reinforce the impression that they condone bigotry. But when you have embraced someone like Bundy, his taint is hard to wash off. For various reasons the Republican Party has long been criticised as a party for rich, old, white men. This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy and demographically, of course, it is suicide. In a sense, this is ironic. Many pro-life Republicans fancy themselves as modern abolitionists, viewing William Wilberforce, the parliamentarian who led the fight against the slave trade in Britain, as their hero. Wilberforce’s colleague, Edmund Burke, an ally in that effort, is widely considered as the father of modern-day conservatism and Wilberforce’s admirer across the pond, Abraham Lincoln, was the very first Republican.
For those who suspect these two high-profile examples of bigotry, among two very different men — the rural rancher and the cosmopolitan basketball mogul — is evidence that latent racism is still rampant in America, the good news is that they are two men of a certain age. If this attitude is generational, then much of it will die out naturally, through attrition.
The bad news for Republicans, however, is that white men of a certain age constitute much of their shrinking base. And even if these attitudes die when this generation passes on, the stain of racism has tainted our entire perception of public policy. Slavery was America’s original sin and, rather than fully renounce it, Americans tolerated decades of segregation and institutional racism. As a result, America is still plagued with lingering problems and conservatives — who probably should have done more to fight it — are still paying the price.
Long after the immediate controversy passes, I fear, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children. The Republicans may be the party of Abraham Lincoln — but they are also, in the minds of voters, the party of men like Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2014
Matt Lewis is a senior contributor at The Daily Caller website in Washington, DC.
