George Allen's Head

This week's George Allen crisis involves a college teammate at the University of Virginia saying that Allen often used the n-word with other whites on the UVA football team. According to Dr. Ken Shelton's interview with Salon, Allen once took the head of a deer that had been killed by a member of his hunting party and put it in the mailbox of a nearby black resident.

Everything about the incident was vintage racism--looking for an opportunity to intimidate and disgust his friends, employing blacks as a kind of "favorite target," and then treating it as a huge joke. Dr. Shelton decided to go to the press after he saw clips of the "macaca" incident: "When I saw the look in his eye in that camera and using the word 'macaca,' it just brought back the bullying way I knew from George back then," Shelton said.

For George Allen, racism was attractive because traditions of white racism in the United States provided what was for him an extremely appealing outlet for his bullying. Unlike a lot of "passive racists" who react to things they see and hear about blacks, Allen went out of his way to engage in racial harassment and surround himself with Confederate flags and other symbols of white supremacy. For Allen, the virulence of his racism was an outlet for the aggressive bullying at the core of his personality.