Rick Perry: The "N Word" Edition

Sometimes you just have to take the easy pitch:

Rick Perry's Week Off To A Racially Insensitive Start

Not much to say beyond Rick Perry hunts animals at a camp called "Niggerhead."  Granted, that was something painted on a rock by the lessee prior to Rick Perry's Dad, who took over the least in the early 1980's.

From the Washington Post article itself that the Vanity Fair piece references:

At Rick Perry's Texas Hunting Spot, Camp's Old Racially Charged Name Lingered

Rick Perry says that as soon as his Dad could, he painted over the offensive language and even later turned the rock over to cover the language further.  I'm not really sure what more could be done given the unfortunate racism painted on the rock.

But the Washington Post piece interviews a number of people who hunted with Perry at the camp and their recollection of that rock differs.  Here's Perry's:

“My mother and father went to the lease and painted the rock in either 1983 or 1984,” Perry wrote. “This occurred after I paid a visit to the property with a friend and saw the rock with the offensive word. After my visit I called my folks and mentioned it to them, and they painted it over during their next visit.”

Straightforward.  Perry saw it, told his Dad about it, they painted over it.  Now, one dissenting account:

“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”

And another:

“I was just so taken aback that it was so blatant, so in your face,” said a person from the Dallas area who visited the camp once in 1990 or 1991 and did not want to be named in a story potentially critical of Perry. “It was just, ‘whop.’ It was a big rock, big enough to write that whole thing out.”

And finally The Washington Post checked it out:

As recently as this summer, the rock was still there, according to photographs viewed by The Washington Post.

In the photos, it was to the left of the gate.  It was laid down flat.  The exposed face was brushed clean of dirt.  White paint, dried drippings visible, covered a word across the surface.  An N and two G's were faintly visible. 

Now, I have to admit, I don't read this story and think "Daaaaaamn, there goes Perry's campaign."  I found a lot of the background in the article to be pretty interesting, describing Perry's section of Texas over the last sixty years or so.  Two particular quotes jumped out at me:

Throckmorton County, where the hunting camp is located, was for years considered a virtual no-go zone for blacks because of old stories about the lynching of a black man there, locals said. The 1950 Census listed one black resident in Throckmorton County out of a population of about 3,600. In 1960, there were four; in 1970, two; in 1980, none. The 2010 Census shows 11 black residents. 

Mae Lou Yeldell, who is black and has lived in Haskell County for 70 years, recalled a gas station refusing to sell her father fuel when he drove the family through Throckmorton in the 1950s. She said it was not uncommon in the 1950s and ’60s for whites to greet blacks with, “Morning, nigger!” 

“I heard that so much it’s like a broken record,” said Yeldell, who had never heard of the hunting spot by the river. 

Racial attitudes here have shifted slowly. Haskell County began observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day two years ago, according to a county commissioner. And many older white residents understand the civil rights movement as a struggle that addressed problems elsewhere.

And the other:

“It’s just a name,” said Haskell County Judge David Davis, sitting in his courtroom and looking at a window. “Like those are vertical blinds. It’s just what it was called. There was no significance other than as a hunting deal.”

The name “Niggerhead” has a long and wide history. It was once applied to products such as soap and chewing tobacco, but most often to geographic features such as hills and rocks.

In 1962, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names changed more than a hundred such names, substituting "Negro." 

“Typically these were in areas where African Americans were not all that common,” said Mark Monmonier, a geography professor at Syracuse University who wrote a book on the subject of racially offensive place names. 

The federal action still left many local names unchanged. In Texas, Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady, lobbied to change the name of a mountain in Burnet, Tex., that had the same name as Perry’s hunting spot. In 1968, it became “Colored Mountain.” In 1989, the Texas NAACP began lobbying the state legislature to change many more names, such as “Nigger Creek” and “Niggerhead Hill,” although there has been resistance from private landowners, according to news accounts. 

I think a lot of elitist east coast liberal snobs often forget just how different this country can be from area to area.  We get wrapped up thinking how could anyone in their right minds not agree with my compassionate, logical stance?  We demonize people like those who live where Perry grew up and call them racists, writing them off completely as irrational.  We also fail to try to dig a little deeper to understand the context and intent, leaving us with articles that feel like cheap shots like the Vanity Fair piece originally linked.

The full Washington Post story doesn't try to duck the racism of the name of that camp, but it does dig deeper and provide a pretty interesting slice of history that puts it all in context.  It doesn't forgive or excuse, but in providing a fuller picture, it helps crystalize that Perry isn't a racist and the camp name is a horrible relic left over from a more regretful time.  It explores the institutional discrimination of our country and how that problem always exists in the fabric of our population (what's up GOP candidates who want to reinstate Don't Ask Don't Tell?),

But that doesn't stop Herman Cain from seizing his opportunity.  From the Vanity Fair piece:

Perry’s former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain appeared on Fox News yesterday and said, “For him to leave it there as long as he did, until before, I hear, they finally painted over it, is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country.”

I would imagine something else offensive to a lot of black people in this country would be equating slavery with political platform sound bytes in ways that cheapen the suffering that institution inflicted on millions of people and our country as a whole.

Cain did it anyway.