WASHINGTON – Yet another tense debate about race has erupted in the United States, an intriguing if uncomfortable sideshow to the sexual harassment allegations plaguing Herman Cain.
The African-American Cain has himself suggested he believes the allegations levelled against him in the 1990s, and revealed this week by Politico.com, were influenced by his race.
“I believe the answer is yes, but we do not have any evidence to support it,” he said this week when asked on Fox News if he believed that allegations he sexually harassed two women while head of the National Restaurant Association were racially motivated.
The former pizza magnate, the unexpected front-runner in the Republican race for the presidential nomination, also compared his woes to those that plagued Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 20 years ago.
“To use Clarence Thomas as an example, I’m ready for the same high-tech lynching that he went through,” Cain said at an appearance in Washington earlier this week.
That’s a surprising comparison, given Cain has previously suggested that his fellow African-Americans often use racism as a crutch, and says prejudice no longer holds them back in the United States. It’s also a provocative one in a country still grappling with a painful history of slavery and segregation.
Nonetheless, the Cain story has fuelled a veritable verbal race riot this week.
Right-wing agitator Ann Coulter has taunted Democrats with the proclamation that “our blacks are so much better than their blacks.”
Conservative talk radio star Rush Limbaugh has accused the left of trying to oppress both blacks and Hispanics.
Donald Trump has accused Jon Stewart, host of the faux news program “The Daily Show,” of being “very, very racist” for his imitation of Cain during a segment earlier this week poking fun at his handling of the scandal.
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It’s all prompted Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state under George W. Bush, to urge everyone to cut it out.
“I actually am someone who doesn’t believe in playing the race card on either side,” the African-American Rice said on CBS’s “The Early Show” on Wednesday. “I’ve seen it played, by the way, on the other side quite a lot too. And it’s not good for the country.”
Robert Sedler, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit who specializes in civil rights cases, said the similarities between Cain and Thomas are few and far between.
“In the Thomas situation, race was very much a part of the equation but only in the very beginning, when George H. W. Bush was appointing him for social and political reasons that had everything to do with race,” he said in an interview.
“He was only 43, he was only on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for one year, he had limited experience and at that time did not have the qualifications or the stature to be a Supreme Court justice,” Sedler recalls.
“But the allegations levelled against him by Anita Hill, a black woman – they weren’t racially motivated; if anything, it became an intra-racial debate about the power struggle between black men and black women.”
The Thomas comparisons have been advanced by some of Cain’s more virulent supporters, particularly Coulter.
In the face of sexual harassment allegations from Anita Hill, Thomas barely survived his confirmation hearings after being nominated to the court by Bush in 1991, just a few years before Cain faced his own accusations.
“From my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas,” Thomas said in explosive testimony to the U.S. Senate during the hearings.
“And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
Cain’s supporters, indeed, are suddenly accusing the left of racism after spending years decrying any suggestion that conservative distaste for U.S. President Barack Obama has anything to do with race.
The Georgia businessman himself said in an appearance in Washington on Monday that none of the criticism of Obama from the right had anything to do with race, but was instead about policy.
But Politico’s story had barely broken on Sunday night when Coulter repeated the “high-tech lynching” phrase, and later added she doesn’t believe Politico would have touched the story if Cain was white.
Limbaugh joined in, suggesting Democrats want to keep their broad support from blacks and Hispanics in check, and so aim to punish any who buck the trend.
“I’ll tell you what this really is; it really is about blacks and Hispanics getting too uppity,” he said. “The left owns those two groups and those groups are going to forever be minorities … if (advancement) happens elsewhere, ‘we’re going to destroy those people.'”
Sedler said he’s not buying the conspiracy theories, and suspects Cain isn’t either.
“What Cain is doing right now is a defensive crouch,” he said.
“Race is a very convenient thing to use, especially for a Republican candidate who may well be pandering to a sympathetic conservative base by invoking the name of Clarence Thomas. But if this had been Newt Gingrich, it would have been the same thing. Everybody is looking for a story, and Cain, after all, is now a front-runner.”
Eric Deggans, an African-American media writer for the St. Pete Times, urged Cain’s defenders to stop alluding to lynchings so cavalierly as they attempt to defend his honour.
“Assessing whether a politician is guilty of a sex-based scandal is nothing close to this historical horror. And it is time for the defenders of Cain to stop using it,” he wrote in a column earlier this week.
“I hope we can all agree that connecting the imagery of lynching to a political scandal is not the wisest choice of words. Perhaps we could find a better analogy that serves the situation without distracting from the situation or trivializing history.”
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