The racial side of the Cain situation

Ken Hechtman writes:

You wrote: “If it were 1950 and this came out it would be seen as disqualifying.”

If it were 1950 and this came out it would be seen by some people as grounds for hanging Herman Cain from a tree.

Today, the grandchildren of those people are having calm, rational, room-temperature conversations about whether they’re still voting for Cain or switching to someone else.

Am I the only one who thinks that’s a big deal?

LA replies:

Well, you’re bringing in the racial aspect of the Cain sexual harassment charges which I haven’t focused on at all. And I suppose that the fact that I haven’t focused on it at all demonstrates your point.

However, the context must be considered, and the context lessens your point. Cain was CEO of the National Restaurant Association, and whatever the exact nature of his behavior toward these women, it was very mild in the scale of things. It bears no comparison to black men raping white women, which was a rational fear under the old system and, as I’ve written, a rational reason for keeping blacks under control, which is not to approve of every aspect of the pre-1960s treatment of blacks. Proving that it was a rational fear, when society let go of those controls, black on white rape greatly increased and continues, a fact to which our society never refers—which is also part of the change that you call a big deal and consider as a big positive, but that I see as a big negative. Of course that’s a subject I’ve written about a lot, but I don’t see Cain’s alleged behavior in that context at all.

For example, in the first concrete charge we’ve heard against him, from Sharon Bialek, the moment she told him to stop, he stopped. So this is not a not a dangerous man, not a predator. In my view, the most important element in the Cain situation is not black man / white women, but the whole idea of sexual “harassment” which the liberals are now using to try to destroy him, after they dismissed far worse sexual harassment charges in the case of Clinton, including an entirely believable charge of rape. When we think of the likes of Clinton and Ted Kennedy, there are have been notorious white users/abusers of white women who have much worse than Cain, so Cain’s race does not leap out as a significant factor in this story.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 08, 2011 09:05 AM | Send