Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Rick Perry and "that word"

Two days ago the Washington Post broke a story that a ranch leased by his family had the word "Niggerhead" painted on a rock. Eventually, no one knows when, it was painted over. But it appears that the name was quite visible early in Perry's political career, which goes back to the 1980s.

It was absolutely wrong for the ranch to have that name.

I don't think the Post story is the silver bullet for his struggling presidential campaign, but it's a problem for him--it serves as a reminder of the Lone Star State's troubled history of race relations. Until the 1960s, George W. Bush recalled in Decision Points, a sign at the city limits of Greenville declared, "Welcome to Greenville, The Blackest Land, The Whitest People." In Robert Caro's Path to Power, the first book in his study of Lyndon B. Johnson, he matter-of-factly mentioned the vote count in a Corpus Christi district known as "Niggertown."

Fortunately, Texas and the world has progressed since then.

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