John Ashcroft talks in white supremacist code

John Ashcroft, the former senator from Missouri, is George W. Bush's most unfortunate nomination for a Cabinet post. While Ashcroft's rhetoric is not the very worst, his statements do raise heavy questions. One might be: Should he be confirmed as attorney general? Well. Let us look at certain things. He is not new to government. Ashcroft served the state of Missouri from 1973 to 1975 as auditor; from 1975 to 1976 as assistant attorney general; as attorney general from 1976 to 1984; as governor for two terms, from 1984 to 1992; and he represented his state in the U.S. Senate since 1994.

His largely unknown 1998 interview in the quarterly Southern Partisan praises him as a "champion of states' rights and traditional Southern values." For those slow on the updraft, those are code words for white supremacist ideas about the Civil War, segregation, genetics and so on.

Code is now very important, even to those in the boggiest wilds of the far right. They, too, know that in politics it might be best to move under camouflage until you get where you want and can begin opening serious fire against your enemies.

John Hickey, executive director of the Missouri Citizen Education Fund, and his staff have been researching Ashcroft for the last few years. They have found that Southern Partisan "supported South African apartheid, prints racist theories presented in 'The Bell Curve' and gives positive coverage to former KKK leader David Duke."

Hickey explained to me that the code Ashcroft uses is part of why white people in the media don't seem too bothered by the racial implications of what Bush's nominee has said. "You can't undervalue Ashcroft's mastery of that white supremacist's code," says Hickey. "Most of the people who run media are white, and they have a hard time understanding what it means when Ashcroft speaks highly of Jefferson Davis because they don't know that he was the president of the Confederacy and that any positive reference to him scores points with extremely far-right types."

In fact, says Hickey, the idea of slavery to whites is primarily intellectual. "They don't feel it emotionally or personally. John Ashcroft knows this," he says.

This is not solely a race issue because bigotry is not about any single targeted group; it's about what we as Americans think ought to be allowed. We cannot and should not force magazines like Southern Partisan out of business, even if it has published writers who easily fall into what is known as the neo-Confederate movement. To these people, the Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery. The issue, they claim, was whether the government had the right to tell individual states that human bondage was out of order with democracy.

We cannot blame Ashcroft because a white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, is circulating a supportive petition intended to alert the former senator that "we thank you for defending the memories of great Americans like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, who dedicated their lives to constitutional principles."

What we can do is find out if he is willing to repudiate the CCC and seriously question the quality of thought Ashcroft could bring to the position of attorney general. We can ask ourselves if this is the big meat bone Bush is throwing to those rabidly on the right. We can also ask of those who represent us in Washington if they are going to let Ashcroft walk by lightly the way they did Trent Lott when it was discovered that he was zipped up in the same sleeping bag with the CCC.

Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News.

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