Segregation in the 21st Century

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a piece on white-only country clubs in Kentucky. Under scrutiny for years, a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling in 2004 pushed the remaining all-white clubs to integrate. The last club accepted it’s first black member seven months ago. This is the context in which Senate Candidate Rand Paul, according to the Post, stated his “belief in a limited government that should not force private businesses to abide by civil rights law.”

In a world of trouble for these comments, Paul quickly clarified that he favors the Civil Rights Act and stated federal action was necessary to end Jim Crow. However, as the piece yesterday makes clear, many of Kentucky’s white elite (and other similar communities in the country) believe, without apology, that the government should not interfere with segregation and discrimination within a private business. If that weren’t a popular view, Paul wouldn’t have said it.

First, the existence of all white clubs today is pretty strong evidence of the need for civil rights and non-discrimination laws in the first place. That, decades after the Civil Rights Movement, a State Supreme Court and Kentucky’s Commission on Human Rights had to enforce desegregation, is clear evidence that the invisible hand of justice and progress doesn’t work.

Second, this is a good example, if not an extreme one, of the way in which the Republican Party is largely a parochial party, captive to the radical ideas of a region rather than the needs of the entire country. When Obama won Virginia, Indiana, Florida, and North Carolina in 2008, Republicans looked like a largely Southern party. With Republicans optimistic about the upcoming midterms and the advent of the Tea Party movement, people haven’t been mentioning the regional isolation of the Republican Party lately. Yet Rand Paul is the Tea Party candidate. He beat out the GOP’s candidate in the primary, and immediately made statements about civil rights that the national GOP had to distance itself from. The Tea Party may be nationwide, but it contains racist and backwards ideas unpalatable to the general public.

Initially seen as the GOP’s saving grace, the Tea Party is in many ways a huge liability to the Party. The November elections will demonstrate to what extent the movement has invigorated or divided the Republican Party. But one thing it hasn’t done is taken the modern Party away from it’s roots in Southern racism and white male privilege. In Kentucky, at least, it’s new libertarian bent has unleashed, rather than contained, it’s parochial aversion to progress.

Pema Levy is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

Related Stories

• New, Invasive Online Surveillance Bill Rears Its Head
• VIDEO: Marshall Fitz, Eduardo Garcia Discuss Supreme Court’s SB 1070 Hearing
• Minn. Trans Woman Faces Trial After Surviving Hate-Based Attack
• Procter & Gamble Pulls From Right-Wing ALEC, Joining 12 Other Companies
• Cartoon: George Zimmerman