George Allen: The Bullying Roots of His Racism

Last week, Sen. George Allen of Virginia made a lot of news with the "macaca" epithets he directed at an Indian-American journalist. There's not much doubt that it's racism on Allen's part. He has a long history of collecting Confederate memorabilia and lynching images.

So, where does Allen's racism come from? He grew up in Southern California, is smart enough to have gotten top grades in law school at the University of Virginia, and would have spent some time around black people as the son of George Allen, the legendary football coach.

There's some evidence that Allen's racism grew out of his bullying personality. Yesterday, Ryan Lizza of the New Republic published some excerpts from a book that Allen's sister Jennifer Richard wrote about growing up in the Allen family.

What's interesting about Allen's bullying is that it was both style and behavior. Allen's behavior was the kind of rough stuff that's no longer tolerated by the authorities--hanging his sister over the rail at Niagara Falls, beating up his brothers and sisters regularly, and persistently vandalizing an out-of-place Green Bay Packers fan. His sister's term for Allen's style is "country thug." Allen loved "Hee Haw" and especially the dumbest character on the show. According to Allen's sister, "[George's] favorite character was the big, slow-witted Junior. Junior tried to tell jokes yet always failed to remember the punch line. There was also something mildly country-thuggish about Junior that I think George felt akin to."

That's Allen in a nutshell--the super-smart guy who got a huge kick out of feeling superior to the ignorant hick stereotype, such a kick that he adapted the country thug style for himself with its "pork-chop sideburns, greasy-haired scalps, and almost the same broken-toothed look as the inmates on George's favorite album, Johnny Cash, Live from Folsom Prison." By adapting the determined ignorance of the "hick" style, Allen could always feel superior to his environment even as he identified with the environment. It looks like George Allen was somewhat like George Bush in always feeling uncomfortable with equality. Unlike George Bush, however, Allen was successful in adapting a persona that eliminated equality from his life.

Allen's racism must have come easily to him. The bullying personality, the refusal of equality, the country thug personality--post-sixties white racism speaks to all of that. Unlike the racism of the post-segregation South, a significant strand of the white racism that emerged after the sixties was more of a reveling or celebration of refusing equality to blacks more than anything else. Allen's romance of the Confederacy did not develop because his ancestors had fought for Robert E. Lee or had emotional commitments to segregation. In Allen's commitment to the Confederacy, racism served and continues to serve as a celebration of bullying and ignorance.