By Kimberlé W. Crenshaw
Special to the NorthStar Network

It’s official now: The day of the racist has gone the way of the dinosaur. Only fossils tell us that they once roamed our great nation. At least that’s the inference we are to draw if we give credence to the defensive spin on Trent Lott’s latest imbroglio. Given our three-strikes culture nowadays, I had long assumed that a third strike against Lott would put any question of his continued leadership to rest.

Surely Lott’s heady nostalgia for his segregationist Mississippi wonder years can’t be framed as a new revelation. It was apparent in 1980 when Lott fired-up a Mississippi crowd with the segregationist fantasy of how it all would have turned out differently had Thurmond’s racist campaign catapulted him into the White House. He praised those “traditional values” in his appearances at meetings of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the new and improved version of White Citizen Councils. And he embraced the road not taken again last week when he projected himself back to 1948 to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Strom Thurmond of the Dixiecrats, the defiant defender of the "white is right" way of life. But all this a racist does not make, we’re now told. So, I’m longing to know what a racist really is–or was– since it apparently isn’t someone who aches for the good ol’ days when ‘the Blacks sat in the back,’ who professes great pride in having supported a segregationist, and who believes that our country went down the wrong road by repudiating white supremacy. But figuring out then what is… (oops, past tense required)… was a racist is still hard to know.

If we’re supposed to save the word "racist" for when we really mean it, then at least someone ought to tell us exactly when that might be, if it isn’t now. Do we have a real racist only when a person gets caught wishing for a different outcome in 1948, and then absolutely refuses to apologize, until a week later, under pressure, after his resignation is called for? Is that a racist? In other words, does one have to be stupid or politically suicidal to be considered a true, down to the bone racist?

And what exactly does it mean to say Lott simply committed a political gaffe? Was the gaffe saying that Thurmond should have been president knowing that history would have delivered us into an entirely different present if he had? Or was the gaffe simply wishing for it in public? And what was poor about the choice of words? It clearly conveyed a hope about a possibility that was not to be, as well as a clearly articulated moral to the story.

That moral, in Lott’s vision, is that we’ve inherited a generation of problems now that the folkways of his beloved Mississippi boyhood are no longer the ways of the present. That’s not a poor choice of words; that’s simply failing to remember that the cameras were rolling. And it’s hard to figure out what’s ambiguous about Lott’s wish. Whatever the list of particulars that "all these problems" is meant to include, the fact remains that to Lott’s way of thinking, the country took a bad turn in rejecting Thurmond’s “segregation forever” stance. To Lott, the very different country we would have been had we heeded the Dixiecrats warnings is clearly preferable than the country we live in today.

There’s really nothing left to interpret here. Questioning whether deep down he really believes what he said is not the same thing as saying that what he said was ambiguous. And the claim that "he just got caught up in the moment" is far from a defense. Of course he got caught up in the moment. But that fact is just about as bone chilling as a "yee ha" chorus coming my way on a dark, country road. Only God knows just how many atrocities have been attributed to good ol’ boys just getting caught up in the moment.

I suppose the message from the senator’s apologists is that I shouldn’t worry about Trent Lott running the U.S. Senate since real racists don’t apologize, or say ambiguous things, or get caught up in the moment. Real racists really mean what they say. Forgive me though if I resist the impulse to deny such claims. It seems to me that what we are witnessing is the consequence of having denied racism so often, and with so much vigor, that we deny it even when it wraps itself up in the unequivocal package of white-supremacist longing.

Conventional discourse has become so adverse to honest acknowledgment of racism that people have denounced those who criticized Lott’s nostalgia for segregation. Indeed, to hear Lott’s defenders tell it, it is his critics that are now the racial dividers. Excuse me? We are talking about segregation, remember? The ultimate act of racial divisiveness. Let’s not get it twisted. We’ve denied racism for so long that we don’t know what a racist looks like or sounds like. We imagine them to be social dinosaurs who refuse to abide nonwhites in any context and who remain utterly unapologetic about it.

Are we only supposed to be wary of what I call "Bull Connor" racists, namely the kind of folks who will sic dogs on children, turn water hoses on civil rights protesters and blow up little girls in church on Sunday morning? As if those are the only ones we have to worry about, not the power brokers of the racist political establishment that the police, the dogs, and the terrorists in white sheets were mobilizing to support. In today’s revisionist period of denial, Lott and others like him are just harmless politicians. Their bluster and "wish we had won that fight" attitudes are politically and morally meaningless today, as long as they have a list of good deeds, good friends, and good p.r. among the colored folk.

Of course, this is the consequence our failure to expose and dismantle the root and branch of white supremacy’s political establishment. Our country settled for a handshake and two verses of “We Shall Overcome” rather than requiring any political penance from those who went to war against American ideals. Trent Lott is a reminder of the unfinished business of the Second Reconstruction, a reminder of the fact that the same leadership that called the shots the day before the Civil Rights Acts were passed—indeed, the ones who fought those laws tooth and nail–were calling the shots the day after as well.

Sure, the white-only signs were tossed into history’s closet, but beyond pledging allegiance to a new sensibility, little more has been required of the old segregationist establishment. As a consequence, our society’s understanding of racism is no longer defined in terms of an anti-democratic and coercive vision of politics, economics, and culture whereby non-whites are structurally subordinated. Racists are instead described as individuals with bad attitudes, nothing more than pathetic and irrationally prejudiced social misfits. One can only wish that this was all there is to racism. Unfortunately the reality of racial power has never been that simple, or superficial.

It’s been said by Lott’s defenders that if we invoke claims of racism too much, it will lose its meaning. I think we now know that the reverse is true: We’ve called it out so little, and distorted it so far beyond recognition, that we cannot see it, even when it is laid out as bare-assed as Trent Lott in his birthday suit.

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Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a nationally recognized expert on critical race theory and Professor of Law at UCLA Law School and Columbia Law School.