Let’s Give Helms A Hand

Jesse Helms, known both affectionately and with hostility as “Senator No,” is dead today at 86. There will be many obituaries, but this is not one of them. I’ve come to praise Helms, not bury him.

I certainly did not agree with everything he said or did, but, burnishing and brandishing my qualification for elite membership in the esteemed DISCRIMINATIONS Minority of One Club, I would like to go on record, again (see here and here), to offer my commendation of Helms for the one thing he did that earned him bitter, visceral enmity (which will not die with him) from all liberals and Democrats, and not a few others: his infamous “white hands” ad from his 1990 race against Harvey Gantt.

Although that ad, even more than the Willie Horton ad, has come to symbolize, for most observers, the bitter, unbridled racism liberals attribute to most Republicans, I beg to differ.

As I wrote here:

Take a close look and listen at what is widely regarded as an almost exquisite example of the worst excrescence of white, conservative, Republican, Southern racism in the modern era: Jesse Helms’ white hands ad from his 1990 campaign against Harvey Gantt. That ad featured a close-up of a pair of white hands crumpling what was described as a rejection letter as the voice over said, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota….” According to Helms consultant Alex Castellanos, surveys had identified Gantt’s support of affirmative action as highly unpopular.

The message in that spot’s very clear and that is nobody should get a job, or be denied a job because of the color of their skin. The vast majority of Americans believe that. And if it’s wrong for us to discriminate that way it’s wrong for our government to discriminate that way….

And here:

It has become an article of faith that the infamous “White Hands” ad that “derided racial quotas by depicting a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter” was a mean, nasty, racist tactic. But was it? I may be a minority of one, but I don’t think so. First, if you’re curious, go take a look at the ad itself, here. It accuses Harvey Gantt of supporting “Ted Kennedy’s racial quota law.” Supporters can argue that affirmative action does not necessarily amount to quotas, but they can’t reasonably argue that it never does. If it is a “racist tactic” to oppose affirmative action, is it similarly a racist tactic to support it?

Go take a look at the ad for yourself (linked to two different sites above). I confess that I’ve never understood (“You don’t understand many things,” many of you are no doubt thinking) the vitriolic condemnation of this ad. Do its critics really believe that no whites or Asians or others ever lost a job to a black or Hispanic because of affirmative action? Do they really believe that all opposition to affirmative action is based on racism?

Well, yes. I guess they do.

Say What? (6)

  1. Gerald Ball July 6, 2008 at 11:08 am | | Reply

    It was not the content of the ad itself as much as it is the person who used it, the person he used it against, and why he used it.

    1. The person who used it, Jesse Helms, was an unrepentant segregationist and racist. It is true that Helms did heed civil rights laws and hire qualified blacks as a station manager and senator. It is equally true that Helms always opposed those laws. The man left his longtime church because they admitted a black member! In some of his other campaigns , he defeated his Democratic opponents by accusing them of supporting interracial marriage. By making Helms into some neutral figure, you are pretending that there is no difference between Jeremiah Wright or Al Sharpton complaining about racism than Clarence Thomas claiming that he was a victim of a high tech lynching.

    2. The person he used it against, Harvey Gantt, was the first black person to attend Clemson University, and needed a court order to do so. Gantt later in the 1970s sought employment in architecture – field that still has precious few blacks – and ran a construction business. Claiming that a black man in 1960s and 1970s North or South Carolina would have been able to get a job as an architect or get private and government contracts to run his construction business without affirmative action is akin to claiming that there never was segregation or discrimination in those areas. But thanks to the desegregation orders that forced his admission to Clemson University and affirmative action laws that forced companies and state agencies to contract with him, Gantt proved his merit by becoming a nationally renowned award winning architect and running a very successful business. He was able to parlay that into becoming a very popular and successful mayor with moderate, pro – business views that was respected by blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats. So OF COURSE a guy like Gantt supported affirmative action in a state that was still sending known segregationists to the United States Senate. If you are going to vote for a known segregationist and racist that even made racial slurs in public to the press, then are you going to treat blacks fairly in hiring and promotions? Are you going to award contracts to black firms? Now whites may be able to entertain notions that it is possible to vote for a segregationist and a racist in the political context while still supporting fairness and equality, but blacks who had to live through racism and discrimination – blacks like Gantt! – do not have that luxury. In the mind of blacks who went through Jim Crow and still experience racism, a state that keeps sending a racist segregationist to represent it in Congress is still going to mistreat blacks, and therefore they are going to need government action to stop it.

    3. The Gantt ad was not merely one of many ads in a race that Helms was likely going to win anyway. Gantt was actually LEADING Helms in the race. And why not? The man who integrated Clemson, a very successful architect and businessman, and the popular mayor of Charlotte with moderate views. On individual merit and the content of his character, Gantt was a formidable challenger for that Senate seat. And what does Helms do? Run an ad that not only ignored Gantt’s considerable merit and reduced him to being just a black candidate, but made him into an NAACP race agitator black candidate who wanted to seek political and economic retribution against blacks. Nothing about Gantt’s background at Clemson, his work as an architect and businessman, his tenure as mayor, and his many community endeavors indicated anything of the kind. Quite the contrary, Gantt would have done a much better job representing the interests of white North Carolinians than did Helms, who once publicly advocated legalizing nonpotent marijuana – hemp – for the purpose of making rope and other things because the DARKIES in his state would gladly take the low paying jobs! I am not making this up … Helms actually did use the racial slur “darkies” AND used the slur in reference to blacks getting jobs that he specifically referred to as low paying manual labor with no opportunity to create wealth or advancement that whites would reject. In other words “we could make money growing hemp in North Carolina because darkies will take the jobs that whites don’t want to do, and we will be able to pay them less money to grow hemp in North Carolina than you would have to pay whites to grow hemp in Iowa and Kansas.”

    Helms did not make these comments in the early 1970s, when his partner in the Senate was a segregationist Democrat. He made them during the 1990s during the Clinton administration and AFTER he had ran the quota ad against Gantt. So it is IMPOSSIBLE to claim that Helms opposed affirmative action because he favored a color blind society. Helms, like most segregationists and racists, opposed affirmative action because it removed desirable educational, employment, and business opportunities from whites and gave them to blacks.

  2. John Rosenberg July 6, 2008 at 12:24 pm | | Reply

    Gerald – Interesting, informative comment. Well done. As you seem to admit at the beginning, however, it does not really argue with my post, whose only point is that the “white hands” ad was not racist. Indeed, I believe it was perfectly legitimate to hang the albatross of affirmative action around the neck of a candidate who supported it. That said, you’re right: Gantt was an appealing guy, and in many ways Helms was an appalling guy. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is not fair game to criticize the appealing guy for positions that he actually held.

  3. Cobra July 7, 2008 at 10:13 pm | | Reply

    Gerald Ball writes:

    >>>”Helms, like most segregationists and racists, opposed affirmative action because it removed desirable educational, employment, and business opportunities from whites and gave them to blacks.”

    Brilliant!

    Mr. Ball, I commend you on an excellent post. I would love to read more of your takes on the subject matter of this blog.

    Don’t be shy.

    –Cobra

  4. Shouting Thomas July 8, 2008 at 10:45 am | | Reply

    The guy who employs a threatening gang pseudonym and constantly advocates political patronage for blacks accuses Sen. Helms of being a racist for doing the same thing for whites.

    Cobra, you are such a deliriously wild hypocrite! The brazenness of your greed and lust for power makes you completely oblivious to this.

    You are a Sen. Helms’ clone. You have appropriated his philosophy and tactics in toto.

    God bless Sen. Helm for fighting tooth and nail for political patronage and jobs for his kind! If he is to be condemned for this, then you’d better be prepared to condemn Sen. Obama. Obama’s entire political program is patronage for his cronies.

    Cobra, of the threatening gang nickname, you are just the Sen. Helms for your side. You believe in precisely the same tactics. You intend to do precisely the same.

  5. Gerald Ball July 8, 2008 at 2:59 pm | | Reply

    John Rosenberg:

    It was in response to “Although that ad, even more than the Willie Horton ad, has come to symbolize, for most observers, the bitter, unbridled racism liberals attribute to most Republicans, I beg to differ” and to “Go take a look at the ad for yourself (linked to two different sites above). I confess that I’ve never understood (“You don’t understand many things,” many of you are no doubt thinking) the vitriolic condemnation of this ad.”

    The answer is simple: it was because the person who ran it was a known segregationist and racist. Take my analogy of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Does anyone deny that blacks experience racism?

    But whenever Jesse and Al come out and do their act, most people – including an increasing number of blacks – want them to just go away not because they support racism against blacks, but they know that Jesse and Al are exploiting the race issue to pursue their own self – serving agendas: ideology, money, fame, and power.

    This is not to say that had another candidate run that same ad that they would not have been similarly attacked by the media and by liberals. (Of course, it is equally true that conservatives will attack virtually any black person that talks about racism.) But the fact that it was a racist and segregationist using that ad that made the controversy what it was.

    I have something else to mention: do you realize that when affirmative action first came out, it was not embraced by the black community? Many blacks claimed to feel insulted at the suggestion that they could not compete with whites and needed the extra help. Other blacks claimed that it was a “sell – out”, a way of giving table scraps to a lucky few members of the a community while consigning the rest to segregation, racism, and poverty.

    So, what made affirmative action so popular? Why, people like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Pat Buchanan, Ed Meese, William Rehnquist (all former segregationists), David Duke, etc. attacking it. And surprise surprise … these same people also opposed Brown versus Board of Education, voting rights, fair housing laws, fair employment laws, busing … etc. Of course, all of these people (except Duke and to a lesser extent Buchanan) later denied or soft – pedaled their opposition to integration and equal opportunities and claimed to be only against liberal big government and people like Jackson and Sharpton. Conservatives – who were all too willing to defend and believe their heroes (not to mention their parents that supported them … why DID Hillary Clinton’s Barry Goldwater supporting father move his family to the suburbs after all … to get away from people like Michelle Obama’s family perhaps?) – bought into it. But blacks – and liberals – don’t play those games.

    And look at the result. Thanks to people like Helms, blacks have made affirmative action their #1 issue. As a result, the black community A) ignores the fact that it HAS created a victim mentality that results in lowered standards AND B) the Democrats are allowed to get away with ignoring the traditional black agenda of jobs and housing (and from adding education reform and illegitimacy to it) because they know that they can retain black support merely by promising to protect affirmative action from the Jesse Helms’ of the world.

    Best of all, the left was able to take affirmative action and use it as the basis of an entire multiculturalism/PC agenda that not only has nothing to do with blacks, but ultimately harms them. White feminists outnumber blacks so they go first at the feeding trough. Hispanics now outnumber blacks, and you are already seeing the effects of that in this presidential election … no presidential candidate – not even Obama – bothered with courting the black vote, but all candidates – including Obama and the Republicans – are pressing hard for the Hispanic vote to the point of supporting illegal immigration policies that do great harm to the black agenda of jobs, education, and housing. And gay rights issues have leapfrogged black ones in the multicultural/PC universe. Compare the liberal talk about gay marriage versus that about the need to get jobs back into our inner cities … no contest!

    And what was the result? Well, though it has been weakened somewhat – primarily through court challenges and not electoral politics! – affirmative action is still going strong with no end in sight.

    And that makes Jesse Helms no difference from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. His race – baiting (and whatever your opinions on affirmative action are you can still call it that because it is impossible to claim that Helms opposed affirmative action for honest principled reasons) was one of the very reasons why 90% of the black community shuns the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If conservatives got 35% to 40% of the black vote, not only would they easily have a governing majority, but it would be a bipartisan one. And why shouldn’t 35% to 40% of the black community be conservative? The percentage of socially conservative black evangelical Christians is actually HIGHER than the percentage of white ones. And the percentage of black business owners and homeowners that would benefit from lower taxes and pro – business policies is at an all time high. And yes, only a tiny percentage of middle and upper class blacks owe their upwardly mobile status to preferences, quotas, or set – asides.

    Bottom line, when you consider not only the millions of black votes lost to the conservative movement but the many whites who at times voted liberal because they were fearful that conservatives were not going to treat blacks fairly (it is not so much as “bleeding heart liberalism” as it is pragmatism … if you live in or near an urban area as many white moderates tend to, the last thing you want is some Dixiecrat ruining your real estate values and public schools and threatening your employment by provoking angry blacks to riot) people like Jesse Helms wound up being a clear negative to your movement. Had the face of conservatism been people like Jack Kemp instead of Jesse Helms, affirmative action would have died a natural death by now, and it certainly would not have mushroomed itself into a huge multiculturalism/PC industry. And that is something that your side is going to have to live with, especially when president John McCain makes a federal immigration amnesty bill his first major piece of legislation to be enacted. If you thought wanting to get a few more black kids a year into UCLA and Michigan was a problem, that is NOTHING compared to what your movement is going to have to deal with down the line. 20 years from now you might actually be looking FONDLY on the blacks who only wanted a college slot, job, or contract that they maybe didn’t deserve because IT GAVE THEM ACCESS INTO MAINSTREAM SOCIETY as opposed to a huge number of people from a different nation with a different culture and language that have no interest in assimilating or integrating. Please recall that the black embrace of affirmative action and other civil rights measures happened only because the black community rejected first the separatism of Booker T. Washington and then of radical groups like the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam. 20 years from now you might see a much larger number of people who have no interest in affirmative action or anything like it because they have no interest in integration or assimilation. When that day comes, I dare say that you will have to give Jesse Helms a hand for his role in making it happen by making sure that 9 out of 10 blacks (plus again not a few whites) would shun the conservative movement.

  6. Cobra July 10, 2008 at 1:08 am | | Reply

    Another fascinating, yet curious piece, Gerald. Got some questions for you, though.

    Gerald writes:

    >>>”I have something else to mention: do you realize that when affirmative action first came out, it was not embraced by the black community? Many blacks claimed to feel insulted at the suggestion that they could not compete with whites and needed the extra help. Other blacks claimed that it was a “sell – out”, a way of giving table scraps to a lucky few members of the a community while consigning the rest to segregation, racism, and poverty.”

    Sadly, this is true. But is it not ALSO true that there were many blacks who OPPOSED the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King’s marches and sermons? Particularly those who wanted to physically respond to the violence perpetrated by whites against King and the SCLC organizers non-violent protests?

    My take? Just because there are many who disagree with an idea doesn’t make it invalid.

    Gerald Ball writes:

    >>>”Thanks to people like Helms, blacks have made affirmative action their #1 issue. As a result, the black community A) ignores the fact that it HAS created a victim mentality that results in lowered standards AND B) the Democrats are allowed to get away with ignoring the traditional black agenda of jobs and housing (and from adding education reform and illegitimacy to it) because they know that they can retain black support merely by promising to protect affirmative action from the Jesse Helms’ of the world.”

    Well, I believe America had racial problems BEFORE Jesse Helms was born, and will have them for the forseeable future.

    I believe that a “victim mentality” comes from being “victimized.”

    Considering America’s officially been around for 232 years, but Affirmative Action only around 38, what gives you the notion that getting a shot at an entry level job, a slot in a good school or a leg up on the government contract trumps slavery, Jim Crow, and all manner of anti-black discriminations as far as feelings of victimization goes?

    Gerald Ball writes:

    >>>”If conservatives got 35% to 40% of the black vote, not only would they easily have a governing majority, but it would be a bipartisan one. And why shouldn’t 35% to 40% of the black community be conservative?”

    Are you conflating “conservative” with “Republican?” Louis Farrakhan is a “conservative”. He is one of the most prolific self-help, personal morality figures on the scene today. Surely you wouldn’t readily see him alligned with what most would characterize as mainstream White conservatives.

    I also believe that platform trumps ideology. I don’t think you could get 10 random people in a room and come out with 10 similiar definitions of what “liberal” and “conservative.” Tell them what you intend to do if your elected–what your policies are, and then you get a better idea of where they’ll stand.

    Gerald Ball writes:

    >>>”20 years from now you might actually be looking FONDLY on the blacks who only wanted a college slot, job, or contract that they maybe didn’t deserve because IT GAVE THEM ACCESS INTO MAINSTREAM SOCIETY as opposed to a huge number of people from a different nation with a different culture and language that have no interest in assimilating or integrating.”

    I’m with you there, but you have to remember that the Jesse Helms/Southern Strategy/WMPS/Eurocentric mindset will always push against TRUE assimilation/integration of non-whites in this society. Are there hypocritical liberals and Democrats in these regards? Absolutely, but it is not an unofficial part of the Democratic Party platform as it is with the GOP. Ken Mehlman even apologized for it.

    Gerald Ball writes:

    >>>”And that is something that your side is going to have to live with, especially when president John McCain makes a federal immigration amnesty bill his first major piece of legislation to be enacted.”

    “President John McCain” is something that I don’t believe this country can afford, especially since the day before that amnest bill he would in all likelihood launched attacks against Iran, exploding the price of oil to the stratisphere; China (Iran’s oil customer) dumping our debt, eroding our dollar to peso status, and usher in the second Great Depression.

    –Cobra

Say What?