Update: New York Republican Jim Russell brings real, pure racism from the right.
The midterm elections have been pretty zany: Christine O'Donnell dated a witch! Jan Brewer goes mute! Richard Blumenthal lied about fighting in Vietnam! But none of those sideshows compare to news that Republican Congressional hopeful Jim Russell in 2001 wrote an especially off-color missive decrying interracial relationships and celebrating eugenics. Should we laugh, or cry?
Sometimes people flippantly say, "Oh, so and so is a racist," or inaccurately generalize, "Republicans are all racist." This is not one of those cases: Russell, who's hoping to unseat incumbent Democrat Rep. Nita Lowey, qualifies in almost every sense of the word.
The Republican-backed candidate in 2001 penned an essay for "Occidental Quarterly" called "The Western Contribution to World History." And in this essay, discovered by Politico's Maggie Haberman, Russell celebrates American eugenicists, praises anti-Semitic leader Kevin MacDonald and praises segregation as a "biological function." [Update: The GOP has officially denounced Russell. That's a step in the right direction, clearly.]
"It may be suggested," Russell writes, "that the biological function of human language and culture is… to keep discrete groups apart." Parents, therefore, must "instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage."
He goes on: "[Culture] must establish a sense of group identity so that the individual knows whom to act altruistically toward and whom to mate with. In short, among humans, culture functions sociobiologically as an isolating mechanism."
Russell's theories lend themselves nicely to his assault on media, which he vilifies for "scour[ing] the gutters of the ghetto for the most vile filth imaginable and then serv[ing] it up to our children as 'their culture.'" This "ghetto" culture includes movies like "Save the Last Dance" and "O," both of which starred Julia Stiles, coincidentally, and both of which, insists Russell, propagandizes integrated "sexual imprinting."
"The sociobiological warfare that our youth is subjected to is likely to be even more diabolical since it appears to deliberately exploit a biological theory of sexual imprinting at the critical period of sexual maturity," he rants.
"Movies like this past year's spate of miscegenationist titles, "Save the Last Dance," "Crazy / Beautiful" and "O," a parody of Othello, appear deliberately designed to exploit the critical period of sexual imprinting in their target audiences of white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women." Yes, like so many Western racists in the past, Russell's argument rests on "protecting our girls."
In 1955, 14-year old Emmett Till was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The killers were acquitted, although later admitted to the murder, and explained they wanted to teach other black people a lesson: white women and black men don't mix. Russell takes it to a whole new level: according to him, this separation is Biblical in nature.
"The current of misdirected altruism that permeates contemporary Western society is dangerous when it is divorced from biological reality," he writes. "It would be better to ignorantly adhere to the laws of human evolution, as do most primitive peoples, than to understand these laws and yet deliberately disobey them." He goes on to insist that if people fail in maintaining segregation, "Our beleaguered descendants will mock us in our graves."
It's some pretty wild stuff. Unlike some of this election season's other wacky candidates, however, Russell doesn't look like a likely winner: he tried to best Lowey in 2008, but she ended up trouncing him with 68% of the vote. Meanwhile, Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told Haberman Russell's racist leanings won't win over many voters in his area.
"In American politics when you have a moment of anger and real economic [uncertainty], you have people running for office who can take advantage of the moment's bigotry," but that won't work, he said, "in the Lowey district." The sad implication here: Russell's believes would work elsewhere.
