Howard Witt’s story on the open display of hangman’s nooses and confederate flags at a prominent workplace in Paris, Texas stirs memories of the proliferation of noose incidents following on the heels of Jena 6 publicity. 

Perhaps it is just a coincidence.  Racist bigotry in the workplace is far more common than most people think.  Where it is tolerated it prospers. 

But the explosion of racist symbols sparked by Jena suggests a direct connection between the incidents described in Witt’s story and two years of adverse publicity linking Paris, Texas to racism.

In some weak minds, public disapproval of crude sexual vocabulary feeds an overwhelming desire to scrawl the offending words on bathroom walls.  My guess is that racist displays in public workplaces and college campuses fill a similar need.  It’s as if the noose-and-flag-boys are hollering, “Hell yeah we’re racists!  What ya gonna do about it?”

All of this comes as a deep embarrassment to public officials struggling to refute allegations that this northeast Texas community is riddled with Old South racism.   No has denied that Paris has its fair share of unreconstructed, old school bigots; but does this latest skirmish in the Paris race war signify a deeper problem?

It isn’t surprising that a bigoted publicity hound would display offensive symbols in the workplace.  But if these acts were tolerated, even condoned, by management (as Witt’s article suggests) we aren’t just talking about one isolated misfit–we’re talking about institutionalized racism.

Still, is it fair to extrapolate from a few bigoted managers to the entire white population of Paris, Texas?

Much depends on how the white establishment in Paris reacts to this latest incident.  A few questions need to be answered.  Was there official tolerance for racist hate symbols in the workplace at Turner Industries?  If so, will this tolerance be tolerated by public officials in Paris, Texas or will the whole mess be swept under carpet?

Do symbolic references to lynching and white supremacy suggest that white Parisians have been unaffected by the civil rights revolution?

Some have suggested as much, but this argument can only be sustained if a healthy dollop of nuance is added to the mix.  Paris, Texas lies at the western extremity of the Old South.  This helps explain the appearance of Old South symbols; the sort of thing we never saw in the West Texas town of Tulia.  The Texas Panhandle wasn’t populated until the latter part of the 19th century and has the ethos of the Old West.

I have argued extensively that systemic or structural racism is no more apparent in towns like Paris and Jena than in places like Chicago or Cleveland.  But the ghosts of the South’s peculiar institution persist and the torches of the Jim Crow lynch mob have never been entirely extinguished.  Vestiges of Old South racism are crude, obvious and desperate–the dying gasp of a once proud tradition. 

Here’s the problem: white Southerns have never had a chance to formally renounce slavery and Jim Crow.  The closest we have ever come, strange as it may sound to some, is the Southern Baptists’ apology in the mid-1990s and Coach Bill McCartney’s insistence that racial reconciliation be front-and-center in the Promise Keepers movement.

Southern evangelicals are so firmly wedded to Republican orthodoxy that they have a hard time seeing any connection between Jim Crow segregation (for example) and the mass incarceration of young black males. 

For most black evangelicals the connection is obvious.  They don’t make excuses for dysfunctional and illegal behavior, but they understand that, as one black evangelical friend put it to me the other day, “it takes a whole lot of people to put a young man in prison; he can’t do it all by himself.”

As Hillary Clinton might say, it takes a village to fill a prison. 

The man who wrangles a bonus while his firm is hurtling toward bankruptcy is subjected to public outrage–but he keeps his bonus.  The kid slinging dope on the corner lands in prison. 

The kid on the street and the man in the boardroom are driven by the same dark impulses, and both are shaped by the moral ethos that surrounds them.  Both individuals can be seen as individual transgressors and as symptoms of a deeper social malaise.

The difference is that the kid on the corner is trying to compensate for his lack of social, cultural and economic capital while the guy in the boardroom is cashing in on the womb-to-tomb advantages he inherited as a birthright. 

Which form of behavior is the most detestable?

So long as white southerns refuse to see the big picture the ghostly shadows of Jim Crow injustice will remain.  Crude nooses and stars-and-bars displays detract us from the species of systemic racism that stalks the land from Maine to Mississippi. 

The incarceration of a single street hustler requires the combined efforts of hundreds of people; it is a corporate accomplishment. 

The elevation of a single individual to the Bank of America boardroom also requires hundreds of people working in concert.  

No one in America is self-made. 

Is it especially difficult for southern whites to understand that?  If so, this failure constitutes the South’s real “race problem”. 

I suspect that the pathetic individuals who hung the nooses and displayed the flags at Turner Industries were motivated more by 21st century white resentment than by Old South notions of white supremacy.   Whatever their motivation, these actions must be denounced and renounced.  

But we can’t stop there.  Civil rights activists must find compelling and convincing ways to talk to white conservative evangelicals about structural injustice.  If we can’t do that no real progress will be made. 

Flags and nooses, as offensive as they are, must not deflect us from this purpose.   An overwhelming majority of white Americans (Paris, Texas included) will condemn crude, Mississippi Burning racism; but that doesn’t touch the real problem.

Alan Bean

Friends of Justice

 

Racism bedevils Texas town

Allegations of discrimination in plant are latest flare-up in Paris

By Howard Witt | Tribune correspondent
February 25, 2009

HOUSTON – Only a few weeks ago, race relations had reached such a low point in the troubled east Texas town of Paris that federal Justice Department mediators were called in to try to bring together black and white citizens, but the public meeting quickly dissolved into rancor.

Now fresh racial tensions are erupting inside one of the town’s biggest employers, the Turner Industries pipe fabrication plant, where black employees charge that hangman’s nooses, Confederate flags and racist graffiti have been appearing throughout the workplace for months.

One worker, Karl Mitchell, took pictures of the offensive symbols in early February and filed a formal complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last week. Other African-American employees assert that they’ve repeatedly complained about the racist symbols to their bosses, only to be ignored or told to keep quiet.

“Somebody had to step forward,” said Mitchell, who also alleges a pattern of wage and promotion discrimination at the plant stretching back nearly two years. “They are so wide-open with [the racist displays] and so certain that African-Americans aren’t going to say anything about it.”

 Officials at Turner Industries’ headquarters in Baton Rouge, La., say they only learned of the discrimination allegations last week, when photographs of the racist symbols began circulating on the Internet. They say a noose and other inflammatory depictions and graffiti have been removed and a company investigation has been launched.

“All of us in management find all of that offensive,” said John Fenner, the company’s corporate general counsel. “We do not condone any displays of this type. I can promise you that in the event we uncover that any of our people participated in the display of any of those matters, they may very well lose their jobs.”

Fenner also denied that blacks, who make up 11 percent of the Paris plant’s 660 employees, are discriminated against in either pay or promotions.

The racial flare-up at Turner Industries comes just as Paris leaders were hoping to finally fall out of the spotlight after several troubling racial incidents focused national attention on the town of about 26,000.

“Obviously, this isn’t going to play well,” lamented Pete Kampfer, president of the Lamar County Chamber of Commerce, who said he e-mailed the troubling photographs to Turner officials in Baton Rouge last week as soon as he was alerted to them. “We’ve had a lot of recent racial discussions in Paris, and you better get a heads-up if you see another storm working.”

Paris first drew national scrutiny in 2007, the year after a 14-year-old African-American girl, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced by a local judge to up to 7 years in a youth prison for shoving a hall monitor at Paris High School.

Three months earlier, the same judge had sentenced a 14-year-old white girl to probation for the more serious crime of arson.

Less than a month after a Tribune story contrasting the two cases triggered national civil rights protests and petition drives, Texas authorities ordered Shaquanda’s early release from prison.

Then last year, a 24-year-old African-American man, Brandon McClelland, was slain, allegedly at the hands of two white men who authorities charge dragged him beneath a pickup truck until his body was nearly dismembered.

The accused men are awaiting trial for murder, but McClelland’s family and civil rights leaders have pressed prosecutors to add hate-crime charges as well.

hwitt@tribune.com