The Minister of Minstrelsy (Page 3)

Immigrant-basher is only one of the many hats Peterson wears. And thus, "illegals" aren't the only savages he sees wreaking havoc across America. "What else can you call black-on-black crime? Anytime you kill an innocent child, it is savagery," he told me. During a February 26 appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, he was only slightly less vitriolic: "Most black men are very weak and insecure." (The unmarried Peterson's views on black women are bluntly summarized by the title of Scam's thirteenth chapter, "Why Black Women Are So Mean.")

Rhetoric like this may not win any black Democrats over to the GOP, but it serves an important purpose for the right. "Jesse Lee Peterson gives the racists in the Republican Party deniability. He let's them say, 'What I'm saying can't be racism because black people are saying it,'" George Curry, editor in chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service and the Chicago Tribune's former New York bureau chief, told me.

Curry, who has been a guest on Peterson's radio show, likens Peterson to Armstrong Williams, the disgraced black conservative radio host who admitted to having accepted taxpayer-funded bribes from the White House to promote its policies. "The bottom line with people like Peterson and Armstrong Williams is, if these people were not conservative, nobody would have ever heard of them," Curry said. "They're undistinguished, so they go to the short line, where there's plenty of payoff."

Indeed, though Peterson has no constituency to speak of, Washington's conservative elite have rolled out a welcome mat for him. He has become a fixture at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative influentials often referred to as "the unofficial Republican convention." According to People for the American Way, during the 2002 conference Peterson used his speaking slot to declare the civil rights movement "the worst thing that could have happened to the black community." This year, when Peterson returned, he was given the honor of introducing Zell Miller, who presented the "Courage Under Fire Award" to the anti-John Kerry front Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Just a week later Peterson was down the street, moderating the Heritage event, which was titled "Responding to the Call: The New Black Vanguard Conference." Heritage is bankrolled largely by reclusive oil baron Richard Mellon Scaife and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a group that made hefty grants in the early 1990s for studies intended to prove the genetic inferiority of blacks and other ethnic minorities. Besides Peterson, the few who actually responded to Heritage's call included Roy Innis, a longtime supporter of Holocaust-denier Lyndon LaRouche and an apologist for the genocidal African dictator Idi Amin; and Gloria Jackson, whose sole distinction is being Booker T. Washington's great-granddaughter. "I think the best times for black people were during those periods of darkness," Jackson said, harking back fondly to the pre-civil rights era.

Given their apparent nostalgia for the Jim Crow South, the "New Vanguard" of black conservatives represents a novel trend in American politics. There have always been black Republicans, but never before have they been able to reach an anti-civil rights consensus. Richard Nixon's Assistant Secretary of Labor, Art Fletcher, and William Coleman, who was Secretary of Transportation for Gerald Ford, ascended through party ranks despite, and possibly because of, their vocal support for civil rights. Yet by 1996, when delegates at the Republican National Convention heckled Colin Powell for praising affirmative action, it was clear the GOP's internal dynamics had changed.

"The Republican Party has chased out its moderate voices, both black and white, and now they're captive to the far right wing," explained Curry. "So today the litmus test [for black conservatives] is, you must be against affirmative action or the Republicans will have no use for you."

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