Matt Yglesias rounds up the problems with and the responses to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's comments on the Citizens Council in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi. Citizens Councils were more moderate white supremacist organizations than the KKK, and used economic and social pressures rather than violence to dominate and suppress blacks. Barbour's statements were evidence, again, of misunderstandings, especially among white Southerners, of what it means to be racist. "Promoting" white organizations over black ones isn't racist, in this definition, because racism only consists of more extreme forms of violence like lynching. (Even that, though, is often questioned. There's no such thing as a moderate white supremacist organization. Poverty is violent, and it's been the goal of many white Southerners to keep nonwhites mired in poverty as long as possible. Blindness to this is racist, and not calling it out as such cedes ground to a too-restrictive definition of racism. Barbour and his press people are doing a two-step around his statements that, on first blush, sure read like support of what we know to be a white supremacist organization. We shouldn't let them. -- Monica Potts
