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Ragheads, Rednecks and Greene Machines; Peculiar Politics in South Carolina
Peculiar politics in South Carolina is a never ending saga. On June 15, South Carolina Republican State Senator Jake Knotts of Lexington told the South Carolina Senate he is proud to be a redneck and would not resign from the Senate for having called Nikki Haley and President Obama ragheads. Haley is a former Sikh of Indian ancestry and front-runner for the Republican nomination for Governor in the June 22nd run-off.
On June 17, Democrat Alvin Greene's stunning landslide victory in the Democratic Primary for the US Senate seat held by Jim De Mint was upheld by the SC's Democratic Executive Committee's 38.5 to 7.5 vote after hearing a protest by his opponent Vic Rawl. Rawl's witnesses argued that voting machines malfunctioned to provide a landslide victory for Greene. Greene, a Forrest Gump figure, is an unknown, unemployed, African-American veteran, who also faces a felony obscenity charge. In a brief phone interview Greene said. "They did the right thing," "I am the best candidate for the United States Senate in the state of South Carolina." Rawl is a former judge, and legislator whose 59 to 41% loss shocked the political establishment. Rawl said he didn't have enough time to prepare his case before the hearing.
Jake Knotts said the Lexington Republicans who asked him to resign for his raghead comments were hypocrites because he had been called a redneck and no one came to his defense. He said he is a true redneck if that means a farmer who works from dawn to dusk and whose neck is red from the sun. When Knotts said, "If all of us rednecks leave the Republican Party, the party is going to have one hell of a void," he was telling it like it is.
In 1968, the party of Lincoln devised a Republican Southern strategy to co-opt George Wallace's appeal to white bigotry which has been the building block for Republicanism in the South ever since. I was a Wallace staffer from 1967-71 and became Executive Director of the Wallace Presidential campaign. I witnessed Wallace's clever appeal to the prejudices of working class white folks.
In 1970, Wallace spoke to a crowd of textile workers in Alabama railing against the "Northern, liberal media who want the Federal Government to control every phase and aspect of our daily lives."
"I mean, the long-haired, pointy-headed, pseudo-intellectuals writers at the New York Times, who don't have enough sense to park their bicycles straight. They look down their noses at us and call us pea pickers and pecker-woods, lint-heads and red-necks. If they call us red-necks because our necks might be red from an honest day's toil in the Summer sun, then call us rednecks because there's two things about them; they wouldn't do an honest day's work in the summer sun and their hair's so long their necks wouldn't get red anyway."
"When Fidel Castro was launching his offensive in the hills of Cuba, the New York Times called him the Robin Hood of the Caribbean and we all know he is a Communist."
"But if you had asked any cab driver in the streets of New York City or Montgomery, Alabama what they thought about Castro when the New York Times was singing his praises, the cab driver would have told you that he was a Communist. The cab drivers know this by instinct. They are everyday people like us who have fierce contact with life."
We had fierce contact with some contentiously contested election protests when I served on the Democratic Executive Committee of South Carolina in the 1980s and ‘90s, but never one as interesting as when Vic Rawl made his case for a new primary election for the Senate race. Rawl's attorney argued that they did not have to prove corruption, but only that because the machines were unreliable, the outcome was not correct.
Rawl's protest focused on the voting machines that leave no paper trail to substantiate their reliability. The Election Systems & Software (ES&S) machines use software whose reliability was criticized in the 2008 Presidential election race in Ohio. Dr. Duncan Buell, a mathematician and computer science professor from the University of South Carolina testified that" "We should treat these machines with an enormous amount of skepticism."
Rawl's protest claimed that: the machines are susceptible to accidental or intentional modification, alteration or tampering; numerous voters experienced difficulty in trying to cast votes for Rawl; that the results cannot be verified; and that inherent unreliability of the machines constitutes evidence that the election is invalid.
Big money controls politics. The US Supreme Court has just ruled in the Citizens United case that money counts as free speech. Money talks in America. If the votes were accurately counted, and the candidate who spent no money on media ads, signs, or a web site won, it would be a good thing for our democracy.
When South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860, James L. Petigru, a former South Carolina legislator and Attorney General said, "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum." Considering our ragheads, rednecks and the Greene machines, Petigru's description still applies.
38 Comments so far
Show All"I witnessed Wallace's clever appeal to the prejudices of working class white folks."
I would put it differently.
"I witnessed Wallace's clever appeal to the economic insecurity and powerlessness of working class white folks. He continued the project of diverting their justifiable anger away from those who caused and benefitted from their difficulties, and towards those who should be their brothers".
Well-off liberals should not give demagogues talking points by looking down their noses at all working class white folks. As a group, poor white folks are complicated and have great potential once their eyes are opened to racism. Their lives have much in common with poor black folk, as opposed to liberals who may know poor black folk only as service workers. The well-off tend to hit a wall when it comes to understanding and giving power to the poor of any race. Once there is a prejudice, the poor have potential to develop more compassion and and a deeper, less doctrinaire understanding.
The term redneck should be retired, just like all the other perjorative terms. The only legit use would be for one poor white person to say to another "You my redneck?".
Joe
jclientelle
Well said sir, well said!
You mean liberals are more likely to see blacks in a subservient role than Republicans? Hmmm...gotta think about that.
I do not think I said that. Although looking back I see a bad sentence - I meant to say "Once there is a recognition of prejudice..."
Joe
drosera: In 1992 I moved to the rural midwest. In October I wandered into Dem hdqtrs in a liberal university town (pop 70,000) to volunteer. They said they didn't need any help. Then one person said oh, there was one thing. It seems everyone in the D party there was afraid to canvas public housing (read: where lots of blacks live). I did it, since I didn't think that small town ghettos could be scarier than the Chicago ghetto high schools I subbed in for 9 years, and had an interesting afternoon.
You should have seen their eyes pop when I said I'd do it. It always stuck with me how phony these people were. I don't know if they saw blacks as subservient, but I know they believed they were scary and dangerous.
@ cassandra June 20th, 2010 11:18 am: That's truly amazing -- you mean rural Midwestern white people were afraid of blacks in 1992? What were the names of the other three black folks in that population 70,000 'liberal university town'?
drosera June 19th, 2010 12:38 pm, you've obviously never worked at a Republican country club.
Joe, you are correct.
It is such a shame when poor folks, black and white, are divided by racism when they have the same basic quality of life needs. In that way the big economic interests prevent poor people from joining together politically and organizing against those interests.
Thanks for your comment
The Seed
the seed--It is not a shame that the poor are divided by racism, it is disgusting. They are deliberately propagandized to do so, and "we're better than them" is always an easy sell.
The name of the game is "divide and conquer" and it's one of the oldest games around.
It's been said that FBI Director and notorious racist J. Edgar Hoover feared four men in the 1960s -- JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcolm X -- and for the same basic reason: They each had the ability, or the strong potential, to reach across racial and class barriers and appeal to both whites and blacks with a progressive agenda. Hoover was apparently scared that one of these men would form a voting bloc of poor, working-class, and middle-class people that would be impossible to defeat. The histories of JFK and RFK are already known; MLK was reaching beyond black civil rights concerns by 1968; and Malcolm X had broken with the black nationalism of Elijah Muhammad and accepted whites as well as blacks by 1965. What a coincidence that all of these 'uniters' died by assassination before they could solidify such a voting bloc.
I believe you hit the nail on the head RSJ. My "redneck" relatives were beginning to admire MLK when he led the garbage strike. Some of the poor white people I know, especially women, respected Malcolm X for having the courage to tell the truth about things they had witnessed. (I think the men found him a little scary - but had he lived he would have won many over). The Kennedies are more complicated and problematic for me, but I can see why Hoover and those who run things behind the scenes might have felt threatened by their popular appeal.
If we give up our illusions and get together to fight for our own interests, we would prove Hoover correct. We would be fearsome.
Joe
"Long haired"? Guess that guy is stuck in 1968, approximately a century after most South Carolinians.
I would note that the people of South Carolina selected Nikki Haley and not State Senator Jake Knotts.
Perhaps Mr. Turnipseed still views the South through the lens of his time with Mr. Wallace rather than today.
I thought the term redneck originated with coal miners' attempts to form a union, who wore red bandannas to show their allegiance.
Not all poor southern whites are racist, just like all blacks are not liberals or progressives.
And while I'm not a big fan of name-calling, I am getting rather sick of people being disciplined or punished for speaking their minds in public.
Good for you!!!! Well spoken.
elainem thanks for your comment. I agree that people should not be called out in a gotcha manner. It just leads to sincere people being afraid to say anything, while those who know all the PC rules can dominate. I just hope that people would think a little about the implications before using prejudicial terms.
Joe
Electronic voting machines are not just "unreliable", they are fraudulent.
The Democrats had two presidential elections stolen from them in broad daylight and several congressional seats also. I had hoped that if the Democrats ever regained the white house and congress, as a matter of self-preservation their first order of business would be to junk the electric vote-stealers and launch criminal investigations of ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia, and others.
The fact that they haven't proves that the Democrats are dead as a political party. The Democrats have no instinct for self-defense. They are unable to fight for their own survival, much less the interests of the voters.
I, too had hope that the Dems would deal with the electronic voting machine problems, how hard is it to mandate a paper trail, but this should be the lesson of the Dems--bought and paid for phonies.
Well, in PA a few years ago I went to a hearing on electronic voting in Allegheny County and was told that an audit system with a paper trail would be prohibitively expensive. "How much would that be?" I asked. "It might be as much as a 10% increase in costs." was the reply. Our PA politicians have rejected a marginal cost increase as a price too dear to pay for honest elections. I doubt that South Carolina politicians are much different. Why are they so indifferent to electoral mischief? Perhaps because they have never seen an honest election in their lives. Ask them instead how much it costs to fix an election if you want an informed opinion.
Well, in PA a few years ago I went to a hearing on electronic voting in Allegheny County and was told that an audit system with a paper trail would be prohibitively expensive. "How much would that be?" I asked. "It might be as much as a 10% increase in costs." was the reply. Our PA politicians have rejected a marginal cost increase as a price too dear to pay for honest elections. I doubt that South Carolina politicians are much different. Why are they so indifferent to electoral mischief? Perhaps because they have never seen an honest election in their lives. Ask them instead how much it costs to fix an election if you want an informed opinion.
looks like the election was stolen, as blacks do not vote for other blacks who are just plain unqualified. there needs to be an investigation into how the votes were counted. mr. greene, of course, had nothing to do with the fraud, but the right wing had everything to do with it. they are using south carolina as a testing ground to see what they can get by with without scrutiny from the courts or the media. it looks like their test run is working out well for them.
looks like the election was stolen, as blacks do not vote for other blacks who are just plain unqualified. there needs to be an investigation into how the votes were counted. mr. greene, of course, had nothing to do with the fraud, but the right wing had everything to do with it. they are using south carolina as a testing ground to see what they can get by with without scrutiny from the courts or the media. it looks like their test run is working out well for them.
"...look down their noses at us and call us pea pickers and pecker-woods, lint-heads and red-necks. If they call us red-necks because our necks might be red from an honest day's toil in the Summer sun, then call us rednecks because there's two things about them; they wouldn't do an honest day's work in the summer sun and their hair's so long their necks wouldn't get red anyway."
The Left still does that at times, all while they wonder just What's The Matter With Kansas?
If you make whites to be the demons of mankind, they're going to turn to those who see them as angels, and those people on the Right are not of the light.
Excellent comment elainem. Good post also jclientelle, although "redneck" as elainem said, has it's roots in worker solidarity.
Redneck may have its roots in worker solidarity, but that is not they way it is used most times. Maybe we should recapture that term and make it mean something good. Meanwhile, I would prefer that those who sit in academia and comfortable circumstances think twice or refrain from these counter-productive attitudes toward poor whites. I have felt the clueless condescension of certain well-off liberals or would-be radicals many times. They do not always know as much as they presume they do.
(By the way, I come from a coal mining Appalachian family and my grandfather died in a mining accident, so maybe I should be proud of being called a redneck. I was raised in the projects in the Bronx, and lived with all races. But if you let certain people know, instead of assuming you might know something about poverty and race, they start to talk down and lecture you.)
Joe
Tom is not like most South Carolinians. We wouldn't be a rut if the Democrats paid attention to issues. We tried to elect working class blacks to office but the white conservative Democrats and Republicans never gave most of them a chance unless they were from a minority area. Both parties are racists IMHO.
I've never met Alvin Greene but like it very much that an everyday person who runs no ads, has no website or signs wins an election. As for Jakie Knotts, in spite of his racist attitude, he votes for poor and working class people on many issues. I am not a liberal, I'm a progressive populist, and detest how money controls every phase and aspect of our daily lives. My brand of populism is where poor and working class people have as equal a voice in making and enforcing our laws as the banksters and war mongerers who own our government. If you want to know who runs our government just follow the money. I'm 73 and my two political projects are working for peace and poor people.
What is wrong with Forrest Gump? I liked him in the movie.
Please check out our blog to get a better idea of who I am and where I am coming from. http://tomandjudyonablog.blogspot.com/
Wasn't it Stalin who said:
It is not voting but who counts the votes that matter?
The machines should go.
I'm a Palmetto native and I am a proud redneck progressive. I voted twice for Nixon, once for Carter, twice for Reagan, once for Dukakis, but dropped out of voting for either cretin parties and turned progressive. I voted twice for Perot and three times for Ralph Nader.
Most of us hate both parties but stupid "liberals" condescending us don't get it. The reason Republicans win is they know how to play populist. Democrats don't even try. Tom should get out of his comfy office and listen to us.
"When South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860, James L. Petigru, a former South Carolina legislator and Attorney General said, "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum." Considering our ragheads, rednecks and the Greene machines, Petigru's description still applies."
Nail hit on head...
Though the insane asylum could cover most of the GOP today.
To win in 2010 all the Dems have to do is:
Show a time-line of the disasters in GWs Admin.
Show how well GW did on creating jobs, he didn't, if jobs were created they were sent overseas. They should reverse that law and give tax breaks for making jobs here, but that actually makes sense so it won't happen.
The Gulf Gusher, is a disaster from GWs Admin. If Obama had gone in a changed things at the MMS, before the GG, the GOP would have railed at him for screwing with something that worked for the last 8 years.
"The Gulf Gusher, is a disaster from GWs Admin. If Obama had gone in a changed things at the MMS, before the GG, the GOP would have railed at him for screwing with something that worked for the last 8 years."
So what if the Republicans would have criticized Obama? That's a really lame excuse for him not doing what he was supposed to.
"Redneck may have its roots in worker solidarity, but that is not they way it is used most times. Maybe we should recapture that term and make it mean something good. Meanwhile, I would prefer that those who sit in academia and comfortable circumstances think twice or refrain from these counter-productive attitudes toward poor whites. I have felt the clueless condescension of certain well-off liberals or would-be radicals many times. They do not always know as much as they presume they do.
(By the way, I come from a coal mining Appalachian family and my grandfather died in a mining accident, so maybe I should be proud of being called a redneck. I was raised in the projects in the Bronx, and lived with all races. But if you let certain people know, instead of assuming you might know something about poverty and race, they start to talk down and lecture you.)
Joe"
I hear ya Joe. We should reclaim it. I come from working-class lower-income roots also and get tired of people assuming I'm an Archie Bunker because of it.
They never give bootstrap talk to a black guy, but one of the first things the eggheads will ask me is "Why didn't you finish school?" I couldn't afford it, jerk.
The Left needs have more working-class and poor people speaking for the movement since they're the ones who have a lot at stake in this.
"It seems to me, Rocky, that right now both the liberals and the Republicans are united in thumbing their collective noses down at one Working Class Black man of South Carolina, and not the White rednecks out that aways."
Ardent-They really don't have the best interests of whites in mind either. They just pander to them.
I worry about Alvin Greene. I don't know if he's being set up or what.
I finally looked him up on Wikipedia. He does have a bachelor's in political science and was an intelligence specialist in the Army. He may just be uncomfortable in front of a camera. It's sad that he's unemployed, especially considering his credentials. Even people who do everything right are struggling now.
He describes himself as a "moderate Democrat" though which always makes me cringe. We definitely do need more working people and poor people and non-white people in politics, but if they aren't radicals along with that, then it's business as usual.
"He describes himself as a "moderate Democrat" though which always makes me cringe."
That's how it works in SC politics. You can't possibly expect him to win even in a black district as a "liberal" Democrat these days. How many Democrats in your state come out running as "liberal Democrats"?
"It is such a shame when poor folks, black and white, are divided by racism when they have the same basic quality of life needs. In that way the big economic interests prevent poor people from joining together politically and organizing against those interests."
You got it Seed.
Yes Tom,
How dare this uppity Negro challenge the good Judge. We all know how well Judges treat the poor after all. How do these backwards poor people ever expect to get ahead if they don't bow down and kiss the feet of the white liberals who always know what's best for them. Forrest Gump indeed. There is a well thought out analysis. Maybe the poor noticed a black veteran running against the typical hypocritical DNC lawyer and decided why the hell not...what have we got to lose.
Frederick, we need radicals, not liberals.
I'm not disagreeing with that but just pointing out what we're stuck on. I used to think I was always voting for radicals when I voted for president. I voted twice for Nixon and twice for Reagan but later reformed and went independent voting twice for Perot and thrice for Nader. Nixon and Reagan were radicals on the right enough well along with Bush 2. We need radicals on the left. Perot sort of fitted in. Nader I know was an excellent candidate. I hope we can get a Perot or Nader somewhere in the next 25 years before I get closer to 90 if I live long enough.