Rick Perry, Racism, and Mirrors

Rick Perry called Bill White a racist the other day.

It was a really odd comment to make, but Governor Rick Perry went ahead and made it anyway.

To answer Bill White’s oft-repeated tagline, that “we need a governor who's a servant, as opposed to Rick Perry, who wants to be treated as master,” Rick Perry’s spokesman played the race card.

From the Austin American-Statesman: 

“Perry campaign manager Rob Johnson said White's comments to an African American audience in Dallas were "insensitive" and "racially motivated.”

Apparently no one checked the BS meter when they decided to put that one out there.

Bill White has been using that tagline for weeks now. He says it to all of his audiences, not just ones that are heavily attended by African-Americans.

He says it to Texans.

But the Perry campaign pounced when White repeated the line to a luncheon attended by mainly African-Americans, and got one of his Railroad Commissioners, Michael Williams to affect moral outrage over this “simply ignorant and offensive” remark.

Williams is African-American.

But it didn’t work. People pretty much saw it for what it was, ginned up moral outrage that itself reflected back on the Perry campaign. It wasn’t insensitive and racially motivated when Bill White delivered the remark to a Corsicana audience of Texans, nor was it so when he laid it out in front of a Palestine audience of Texans. But when Bill White said it to a Dallas audience of Texans it became racially charged and insensitive.

Because Rick Perry noticed that those Texans were special. State Rep Garnet Coleman said it best and also more diplomatically than I want to say: 

“The governor needs to stop trying to use African Americans as a wedge for his divisive and partisan political campaign.”

I’ll say. Rick Perry revealed that if you scratch below the surface you discover the undeniable fact that Rick Perry is, himself, a racist. White spoke the tagline to Texans, Perry saw White say it to African-Americans, and then propped up one of his minions, also African-American, to parrot his remarks.

That is, when Rick Perry leveled his accusatory finger at Bill White and called him a racist, he didn’t realize that everyone else who saw him do that also saw that Perry was staring into a mirror.