EW
ROCHELLE, N.Y.
EW
ROCHELLE, N.Y.
IN Washington, all the rituals of a career on the ropes are in play. The apologies. The protagonist tying and retying the knot of his own fate. The talk-show condemnations. The party maneuvering. The gentle nudging of Trent Lott to just go.
But forgive people on Main Street here, in a town with a sizable black middle class, if they're not riveted by Washington's current drama. They are still stuck on the first act, when the curtain opened to Mr. Lott's brief but unnerving soliloquy on race relations.
After all, they benefited from the cracking of segregation, which must make them some of "these problems" the Senate majority leader alluded to in his devotional to the bygone era of the still-here Strom Thurmond.
It's not that they were shocked. What is perhaps most painful about the Lott Affair is that those most hurt by his comments are the least surprised.
But their voices have been lost amid the huffing and puffing of television talking heads and the politicians strategizing under cover of moral outrage.
"It's not a shocking situation," said Ramon Verdejo Jr., a financial aid officer at the Monroe College campus here. "People feel that way. He just got caught with his mouth open."
Down Main Street, Addison Cornelius, a Republican who owns a men's clothing store, cannot feign shock, nor can he hide the hurt.
"Being a black in America, it makes me feel a little despondent," he said. "For a guy with those thoughts to sit in the Senate so long, that's what surprises me. It seems very un-American. Maybe it's not un-American."
If Trent Lott has revealed a racial split, it is between the white establishment that sees him as a relic of the past and blacks who see him as accidental spokesman for a more insidious modern racism.
"He's not a vestige of the past," said W. Franklyn Richardson, the pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon. "He's a vestige of what we would like to be in the past."
A few members of Grace Church agreed to watch Mr. Lott's latest apology Monday night, on Black Entertainment Television, and share their reactions.
When Mr. Lott began talking about having black friends, Kimberly Davis, a managing director at J. P. Morgan, had had enough.
"It's exhausting," she said. " `Yeah, my best friend is black.' It's the overtness of it. You know it's there. We deal with it every day. But we feel like we've moved beyond hearing nonsense like this."
WE'LL always have nonsense, like Mr. Lott calling his comments a mistake, even
though they are utterly in line with a career's worth of words and deeds. Mr.
Lott's defenders can treat him like a politician who stumbled into a racial
morass. But people here have to live in it.
"I still have trouble catching a taxicab in Manhattan," said Adolphus Lacey, a 34-year-old associate pastor at Grace Church. "And that's just a taxicab driver. All he can do is not pick me up. What can a majority leader do to me?"
At the church, there was an assumption by the end of Mr. Lott's performance on Black Entertainment Television that he was cooked, more because of politics than because of race. The Republican Party cannot win the fight for minority voters with one of its leaders doing a routine fit for SNL on BET.
"How can you say we're going to have a different face and this is the face?" said Ms. Davis, who described herself as a fiscal conservative who votes for both Democrats and Republicans.
Orchid Burnside, an executive at an Internet company in Mount Vernon, said the Lott ordeal recalled the subtle racism she knew growing up. Her parents, who are in their 50's, remember segregated lunch counters and movie theaters. Ms. Burnside, who is 30 and went to school in Scarsdale and at New York University, never knew anything that blatant.
"But then I knew things would happen because I'm black," she said. "I wasn't chosen for projects or I wasn't invited to someone's house because it wasn't acceptable."
Mr. Lott seems to her like more of the same. "He really didn't say anything that was racist," she said. It was implication and innuendo. Covert, as she said.
"I think the majority community is more shocked by it than the African-American community," Ms. Burnside said. "My white friends say, `Orchid, I can't believe he said that.' I'm like, `I can.' "