Only a week ago, Rand Paul rode high as the winner of the Republican Senate primary in Kentucky. We all learned how Teabagger support was key to Paul's victory and to his nomination as the Republican candidate for the seat being vacated by Republican Jim Bunning.

Then we learned that Rand Paul cannot bring himself to endorse the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It's not that Rand Paul supports segregation in public places, but his Libertarian beliefs compel him, he says, to uphold the right of private businesses to choose those patrons with whom they want to do business. In the world of Libertarians, Teabaggers and right-wing Republicans, that right is called personal freedom. In American history, it's called Jim Crow.

When I was young and my family lived in New Jersey, outside of New York, I remember one Sunday after Church in the mid-1960s, we went to the Rahway train station. My father must have needed to buy tickets. We went into the station and did whatever it was we needed to do and returned to the car. But apparently, we forgot something, and my mother jumped out and went back to the station. My father parked in front of a barber shop.

A barber's pole was mounted on the building outside of the shop, along with a sign that said "Colored". I hadn't seen a sign like that before, but I knew what it meant. Through the door, I could see only Black people were inside.

While we waited in the car for my mother, a dog barked in front of the shop the whole time. The dog was tied to a street sign. My father said the dog was barking because Black people had a strong odor (he did not say "a bad smell") – which struck me as strange, because the dog seemed to belong to one of the Black people inside the shop.

That memory touches on the economic and associated social dynamics that Rand Paul values and wants to increase: (1) The operation of businesses for particular classes of patron; and (2) The application of bias to define the distinguishing characteristics of different classes of patron. All of which is consistent with the Libertarian/Republican effort to privatize private intercourse. (Don’t be fooled by Rand Paul's smarmy abhorrence of Jim Crow returning to the public square – Paul's interest is our freedom to discriminate in private.)

Keep in mind how funny it is that right-wingers vehemently deny the operation of racial bias at the level of whole populations (at the level of the individual's racial affiliation), right up until that time when the right-winger claims the holy personal freedom to act upon such bias for business purposes.

Many Kentuckians – it turns out – don't see things Rand Paul's way. The report I've cited above describes the results of a poll that shows Kentuckians have withdrawn their support for Rand Paul, after learning what he stands for.

For a gallery of segregationist photographs of how businesses once operated – as Rand Paul thinks they should – and catered to different races, prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, see the Library of Congress Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination: Documentation by Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographers.


Stay informed about Republican racism ― Election 2010