Having it both ways on race. (Comment).

THE TRENT LOTT AFFAIR REMINDS us of the American capacity for mass denial, particularly where race is concerned. Republican racism, certainly, is an open secret. It isn't limited to good-old-boy senators from Mississippi or South Carolina who are relics from a broadly discredited past. Ever since Lyndon Johnson declared, "We shall overcome," and Richard Nixon countered with his southern strategy, the Republican grand electoral design has been based on locking up the white South while playing to the white backlash in the North.

Often the appeals to race are tacit, ...

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