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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

N****rhead: Rick Perry's Hunting Camp

The Washington Post has a story relating to a hunting camp in West Texas that Rick Perry and his father have rented for 30-plus years.

“I thought, ‘This is going to embarrass Rick some day,’ ” said this person, who did not want to be named, fearing negative consequences from speaking on the subject.

The hunting camp was identified by the following word painted on a rock:

N****rhead.

Rick Perry claims that he asked his father to do something about the painted rock shortly after seeing it.  But several people offer accounts that disagree with Perry’s version.

Some who had watched Perry’s political ascent recalled their reaction to the name on the rock and their worry that it could become a political liability for Perry.

“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”

Brooks, who said he holds Perry “in the highest esteem,” said that at some point after Perry began bringing lawmakers to the camp, the rock was turned over. Brooks could not recall exactly when. He said he did not know who turned the rock over.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

Herb Cain says that this displays insensitivity on Perry’s part.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

http://thinkprogress.org/polit…

Update: Perry disputes story; WaPo sticks by its account.

On Sunday, Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan released a statement saying that the offensive name was obscured in the early 1980s, soon after Perry’s father, Ray, leased the rights to the property. He said Perry has not been to the property since 2006.

“A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous, including the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible,” Sullivan said. “The one consistent fact in the story is that the word on a rock was painted over and obscured many years ago.

“Perry’s father painted over offensive language on a rock soon after leasing the 1,000-acre parcel in the early 1980s. When Governor Perry was party to the hunting lease from 1997 to 2007, the property was described as northern pasture. He has not been to the property since 2006.”

Sullivan also specified that the family has never “owned, controlled or managed” the property.

Post National Editor Kevin Merida said, “Our story was carefully reported and handled with great sensitivity. We submitted detailed written questions to the Perry campaign, and included in our story all of the points Gov. Perry wished to make. We stand by our story.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 96 Comments

96 comments

  1. anna shane

    where our culture seems to be different year to year, and way different decade to decade, there remain signs of what used to be socially acceptable among southern white people. If it’s shocking, it’s because we’ve lost track of that history.  Not everyone is under forty, and in some states under twenty, many voters grew up in those bad times and retain the stain.  It harkens back to times when having dark skin was a common danger. It’s not as common anymore, but around some groups of so-called white people it’s still a danger.  

    I wish Perry could have lost his bid without me having to read that he belonged to this culture.  Now he likely wishes otherwise, and he hopes this will just go away, but Mr. Cain, who has called him out on it, might notice that this sort of skeleton isn’t uncommon in the party he claims doesn’t get the black vote because of brainwashing.  

    Maybe if we didn’t have an African American president it would not have been reported in the papers.  There was certainly a time not long ago when it would not have been considered news, let alone shocking news.  

  2. creamer

    no one has come forward to say they refused to go on a hunting trip with Perry because of the rock. A few have commented that they thought it might cause Perry embarassment in the future. But no one said “no thanks , I’ll just take my gun and go home”.

      Without looking up dates, I’m pretty sure Perry was a Democrat in the 80’s and early 90’s. If nothing else it seems to play to the stereotypical white southener.

      And that might not be fair, but this guy is a polititian with a capital “P”. After birthers, brownshirt portraits and “liar”, what goes around comes around.

  3. November 5

    I thought the header was going to be “fishing trip” , not “hunting camp”.

    …and it’s Herman, not Herb Cain.

  4. Aji

    I’m posting this as a separate comment, because it’ll be incoherent if I try to do it in response to individual comments.  

    Now, Shaun, I am not doing this to single you out, or to accuse you of anything, or to criticize you personally.  But your exchanges with Adept here are useful, I think, in highlighting the disconnect between how we (people of color) experience certain things as opposed to how white people do – and why it generates the responses that it does from us.  So I’m going to excerpt certain passages from your comments, merely as an example of what white people so often say, and what we – in the context of our experience every single day – hear.

    And Adept, I’m not presuming to speak for you, my brother.  You don’t need my help there.  This is all on me, and me alone.  And it’ll probably piss folks off a bit, but it may wind up helping folks understand some things a little better, so I’ve gotta figure that it’s worth the attempt.

    Okay, here we go:


    I don’t see where this is Rick Perry’s doing, specifically.  I can understand the brouhaha over it, to be sure, but given that he didn’t name it and that the name was “retired” a quarter-century ago, so the story goes, it seems a bit of a low-ball to hold him responsible.

    And we think:  Why the hell not?  Especially when this represents a distortion of the evidence.  First, this allegedly happened in the ‘7-s and ’80s, by which time Perry was fully adult, and also by which time he had no excuse for being unaware of the implications of the name.  yet he chose to become a member.  He could easily have gone to a different hunting lodge.  But he didn’t think the inherent racism of the name was important enough to keep him away.  (And by all accounts, he was already thinking entirely politically by then, too.)  Here’s a personal example:  My black blood comes from Mom’s side of the family (which identifies as White); Dad’s was strictly Indian and White.  Dad was, quite frankly, a racist.  He held virtually every negative stereotype about African Americans, although he made personal exceptions for “the ones who aren’t like the rest.”  But if he’d been invited to join something called “N*****head?”  He’d have told them to shove it.  Because even he could recognize, long before the ’70s, what a racist term that was.  And it was not permitted in our household. By anyone.


    on the strength of the evidence of this incident so far all I think you can say with confidence is he’s a Texan from Paint Creek.  If that means he’s a racist well then you’re also almost saying it’s an accident of birth.

    No.  As noted above, he was fully adult, and he chose freely to be a member of this lodge, knowing the name.  That alone is enough to make the point to people of color.  He was willing, at a minimum, to countenance the ugliest, most overt verbal expression of anti-Black racism in our lexicon.  that has nothing to do with “being from Paint Creek,” or any “accident of birth.”  And while I haven’t seen most folks call him racist based on his membership, there does come a point at which, if someone continually countenances/participates in racist behavior, the only logical conclusion becomes that s/he is racist.


    It seems a bit egregious in both cases.  If we keep freighting this issue with wholesale condemnation at every turn we’re not doing ourselves any favours.  I’m not saying it’s a non-issue but I’ll bet dollars to donuts it hasn’t done anything to raise the conciousness of anyone the way it has been dealt with in the media or by partisans on either side.

    I see no way any honest comparison can be made to the Rev. Wright here.  Leaving that aside, what the corporate media choose to do while pimping for sensationalistic ratings is completely divorced from what we people of color choose to do in calling out bigotry.  There’s no logical comparison there, either.  Now, as to the point about consciousness-raising:  Actually, it has done quite a lot of that.  You’d be surprised at the number of online discussions I’ve seen over the last few days where White folks have acknowledged that they either didn’t know about such geographic names, or at least didn’t realize that a lot of them still existed.  It’s been an eye-opener for a lot of White Americans, particularly of the younger generations.  That alone makes it valuable, from our standpoint.


    Frankly, this whole episode seems like an intentional take-down of Perry by someone who doesn’t give a fig for improving our national awareness of race and the usual suspects just bought into it, the whole nine yards.  Sometimes we are just a bit too predictable.  Fox never would have run this story if they weren’t attempting to undermine Perry and laying traps for Cain as well.

    And Black liberals should care about this . . . why?  If it gives us an opportunity to teach about these issues, then I’m all for taking it.  Fox, et al., are gonna do what they’re gonna do regardless.  I’m for getting something useful out of it.  And while it may be making a whole hell of a lot of White folks out there uncomfortable, that discomfort alone means that it’s having an effect.

    Now, here is where I am going to call you out:


    I’ve had a snootful of the manufactured controversies and I won’t be a tool of them either, where I can avoid it.

    Really?  you know, we’ve had much more than a snootful of RACISM, over 500 years and every single day of our lives.  So you’ll have to understand when we say that we don’t give a flying fuck about the notion of “manufactured controversies.”  And while certain GOP ops may indeed have “manufactured” the news of this for their own gain, racism is NEVER a “manufactured controversy,” and labeling it thus is trivializing and belittling in the extreme.  Keep in mind that in this country, now matter how rich or powerful you are, if you have Black skin, you will be treated to racism every single day of your life.  World without end, forever and ever, amen.  For too many, it means a literal early death by a million microscopic cuts, day after day  after day.  It is something that no person in this society with white skin can experience first-hand, and so we get a little testy when we’re told that this is just a “manufactured controversy.”  Not to us.  To us, it’s just one more example of what we face on a daily basis.  And now we have not only the teabagger GOP saying it’s nothing?  Now we have to have those allegedly on our side saying it, too?

    That, to me, is the crux of the disconnect here.  I what Adept has faced elsewhere in the blogosphere – and I know that there comes a point when you just don’t want to dissect the words, explain the language, countenance it any more.  Not when it comes from those who call themselves our allies.  We’re tired.

    And with that, I think I need to call a halt.  One, because I have a great deal to do IRL today; two, because this is way too long for a comment already; and three, because I find myself getting angry, and that doesn’t help anybody right now.

  5. janicket

    Kos’s loss has been the Moose’s gain in so many ways.  The passionate, powerful, mind-opening dialog in this thread alone is

    Ah, crap.  I’m too blown away by the new expanded Moose; the thoughts churned up by this thread are too inchoate to order them into anything approaching coherence.  Carry on; I’ll join in when I can manage to compose anything worth reading.  Got to pick the jaw up off the keyboard first.

    Always a great place, but now…………

    Wow.  Thank you all.  You guys rock.

    Wow.

  6. scribe

    ..after reading this entire thread, the first thing I wish I could do is hug every single person who has participated in it. Then I’d want to say “Well done, so far, so good!” and “Hang in there. Stay with it, no matter how hard it gets.” Because that’s the ONLY way to do this: one tough step at a time. One person at a time. One conversation at a time.

    We’re all learning how to listen with the intent to understand first, then to be understood. Takes practice, and not a small amount of self discipline.  

  7. Rashaverak

    I thought that I should come back in and offer my observations.

    At the outset, for what it is worth, I am white.  Complexion-wise, one can’t get much whiter than me.

    I spent my early years in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, about two blocks from where Denise Oliver Velez spent her early years.

    The neighborhood was, as the expression went, “changing.”  We moved to a whiter neighborhood, East Flatbush.  Several years later, that neighborhood also started to “change,” and we moved again, deeper into Flatbush.

    I recall seeing civil-rights marchers in front of the construction site of the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, but I can’t say that I understood at the time why they were picketing there.

    I was exposed to racial prejudice from the white side of the tracks, and no doubt absorbed some of it.  Over the years, I’ve tried to grow beyond the prejudices that were floating around in the environment in which I was raised.

    I posted the diary not to throw a stink bomb into the middle of the dinner table, but rather because I thought that the story was a legitimate one.

    I disagree with Shaun that this story is akin to the Reverend Wright brouhaha.  The Reverend Wright episode was driven by endless looping of a handful of things that he said from the pulpit.  In the end, Reverend Wright did not help his own cause, and candidate Barack Obama was compelled to repudiate him.  I’m sure it was painful for both of them.

    The immediate issues in the case of the hunting camp are:

    — when did Rick Perry become aware of the marking on the rock;

    — what, if anything, did he say or do about it, when did he say it, and to whom;

    — what and when did anyone else say anything to him about it, and what was his reply?

    These questions are relevant to the Presidential campaign because it speaks to what kind of person Rick Perry is.

    I would not be surprised if he grew up in an environment that was less than enlightened when it came to racial matters.  Heck, I grew up in a large Northern city with a significant minority population, and racial attitudes among many in Brooklyn, New York were hardly enlightened.

    I also would not be surprised if he absorbed some of the prejudice that was floating around in his childhood environment.  To a significant degree, that would not really be his fault.  What matters is not that he grew up in a small town with an all-white or nearly all-white population, with a small-town mindset, but rather whether he has reexamined the values and attitudes that he absorbed, through osmosis, from that culture, that environment, that upbringing, and what the results of that reexamination have been.

    Whoever leaked the information to the Washington Post, and what his or her motivation was, is irrelevant to that issue.  I suspect that it was someone associated with the Romney Campaign, or someone associated with Karl Rove.  Maybe even Rove himself.  But whatever the source and whatever the motivations, there is a real issue here.

    I recently had an exchange with someone almost the same age as me, with a similar ethnic background.  The person, let’s call him “Bob,” is a college graduate with a degree in engineering.  So, he has native intelligence.

    Here’s some of the exchange…

    Bob:

    My only comment is that Perry’s Father & later himself leased the land and at that time it was already named N..Head.  There appears to be a disagreement as to when the name was painted over 1985s or 2008 – big difference.

    Presumably he went there a few times a year.  Lets assume 12.

    President Obama went to Rev. Wright’s church for some 25 years and presumably more than 12 times a year.

    So if that was not a problem for Obama then why is this a problem for Perry.

    Because racism is always one way.

    Perry at most was insensitive and given his political ambitions a little stupid.

    Now explain Obama – GOD DAMN AMERICA from Wright.

    Me:

    Obama sez that he was not in attendance when Wright gave that sermon.  Are you calling him a liar?

    Reverend Wright is hardly the first preacher to say that God will hold the USA accountable for sinnin’.

    E.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

    Bob:

    I find it hard to believe that Wright only said it once.  And his hatred appears to have been around for a long time.  Given that Wright was an “advisor” to Obama – you will never convince me Obama did not understand and accept his views.

    All politicians by definition are liars.

    Me:

    I find it hard to believe that Wright only said it once.  And his hatred appears to have been around for a long time.  Given that Wright was an “advisor” to Obama – you will never convince me Obama did not understand and accept his views.

    1. Without evidence, all that you have is supposition/speculation.

    2. What Rev. Wright said that was caught on tape reflects hatred of things that America has done, not of America itself.  America has done some hateful things, you know…. things that, if done to us, would have had us up in arms.  We do not always get things right.

    But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that what he said reflects hatred of America, or of white people, or of both.

    Have you ever known any Irishmen who have harbored hatred for Englishmen?  If so, what have you thought about that hatred?

    Did Falwell harbor hatred?  What about Robertson?

    All politicians by definition are liars.

    Perhaps.

    “Bob” has not responded further.

    I realize that race remains one of the hottest of hot-button issues.  I appreciate the fact that we can explore the issue here and learn from each other.  So often, people just talk past each other or even just try to shout others down.

  9. Chris Blask

    But that in the end it is the large that will be the influencing factor. Perry cannot walk through a presidential campaign with that hanging around his neck without the chord strangling him.

    It would have been quite a positive for Perry or his dad to have immediately stood up and overtly erased the name. For conservative hunter types of their sort that would have stood as something to be proud of. Because most folks who fit the profile that they do would do the same thing – moderately and eventually gloss over it without making a point of it – because they never found anything intrinsically offensive about the name.

    That’s the point. They never found anything intrinsically offensive about the name.

    That one fact simply defines who they are. It doesn’t mean that they are rabid racists who would treat black folks intentionally badly, just that they don’t see any problem being at, taking possession of, and inviting friends to someplace with that name. That they probably never invited anyone to visit who would in any way be directly offended by the name.

    Maybe him and his father are basically good and nice folks with no actual conscious intent to promote racist memes. But they would still be rich white hicks without the first clue regarding what goes on outside their backwoods, redneck fishing hole.

  10. Rashaverak

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

    “I think there were very much some strong inconsistencies and just misinformation in that story,” the Republican presidential candidate told Fox News. “I know for a fact that in 1984, that rock was painted over. It was painted over very soon, my family did that.

    “I have no idea where or why people would say that they had seen that rock, because that’s just not the fact,” he added.

    Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) today introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives demanding that Perry apologize. Republicans blocked the measure from consideration by the full House.

    Former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive Herman Cain initially said that it was “insensitive,” but he later tempered his reaction. “They painted over it,” he told reporters. “I’m not playing the race card.”

    Former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) offered mild criticism, saying that “it was poor judgment if he did leave it up there.”

  11. Adept2u

    We can’t name our camps niggerhead we’re oh so oppressed.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) defended Rick Perry against accusations of racism Thursday, following the revelation over the weekend that a Perry family hunting camp in Texas had the word “Niggerhead” painted on a rock at its entrance.

    “Rick Perry is not a racist. Rick Perry has produced jobs in a Texas in a very impressive way. He is a good man, and this is not going to work,” Graham said on “The Mike Gallagher Show.

    ”

    Because to the Southern White man there are so many more important things then flat out racism,hell he’s a job creator!

    After the story broke, even Perry’s political opponents defended the governor against charges of racism. However, Perry has had periodic trouble with the subject of race since he won statewide office as agriculture commissioner in 1990, including remarks about promoting states’ rights that some deemed racially insensitive.

    I’m going to say it again.  THE BLACKVOTETM WILL BE CLOSING.  WE WILL NOT HOLD OUR NOSE AND VOTE FOR PEOPLE TO DEFEND CALLING US NIGGER AT ANY POINT IN THEIR LIVES WITHOUT SOME KIND OF GOOD EXPLANATION AND THIS SHIT AINT IT.

    If you’re a Democrat and depend on the votes at all of Black Americans, if you can’t condemn this without reservation or defense you better STFU.  And in the meantime what are these White southerners doing?  THIS SHIT!!!!!!

    I shall now quote the Reverend Wright.  Goddamn America when it treats it’s citizens as second class.  2011 and they want to move the goalpost back.  I thought they wanted us in the 1950’s they want us in the 1850’s.  Ask me again why I’d prefer to see this country fail then allow Republicans back in power.

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