"Ku Klux Klan Duke Should Not Win"

"Ku Klux Klan Duke Should Not Win"

In this labored, first column about race, sophomore Steven Crisp attempts to lay out his conservative views about racial equality and the status of race relations in the 1990s. Crisp uses the potential election of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to the governorship of Louisiana to lay out his discomfort with current-day racial politics and the welfare system. While Crisp denounces Duke as a candidate, he also blames the potential election of Duke on the overly radical politics of many African American and other minorities who have alienated white voters by their demands for structural changes to support racial equality, such as greater acces to welfare. Crisp acknowledges that most welfare recipients are actually white, but he continues to rely on racialized tropes of the lazy and ungrateful minority to explain why white voters are inclined to support David Duke. He ends the article by suggesting that minorities have in some cases taken advantage of political oppression to gain an advantage over the "majority" and that programs like affirmative action should be ended in favor of selections truly based on quality. This is the first of many incendiary columns by Steven Crisp in 1991 and 1992 and is typical of his political conservatism and often abrasive editorial style.

Steven Crisp

Steven Crisp, "Ku Klux Klan Duke Should Not Win," The Technician vol. LXXIII no. 31 (November 4, 1991): 6

1991-11-04

Cheryl Dong

newspaper article

On Nov. 16, Louisiana Republicans will vote to determine if David Duke will be their candidate in the next governor’s race.

Duke is a former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. His stance on white supremacy led him to organize the National Association for the Advancement of White People in 1980. An avowed Aryan supremacist, Duke supports the tenets of Nazism and has taken a pro-Hitler stance.

Duke detests interracial marriage, U.S. immigration by minorities, integration, non-Christian religion, and any political thought to the left of ultra-conservatism.

And he will probably win, but not because the people of Louisiana expressly agree with his opponent, former Governor Edwin Edwards.

He will win because the voters of Louisiana are tired of the liberal intrusions into their pocketbooks, families churches and schools, because they don’t take his extremist views as potentially enforceable.

The people who elect David Duke will do so because they are hard-working, patriotic Americans who hear in his dogma the parallels of their frustrations but fail to hear the impact of the context in which they are made.

They are sick of blacks on welfare, although they don’t or choose not to, realize that the overwhelming number of welfare recipients in this country are white. They despise the Jews or Asians who, because of their strong cultural sense of work ethic, have been generally successful in their economic assimilation into our society.

These “Aryans” blame the ethnic minorities for the majority’s own economic problems although the blam rests with their own stupidity and lack of drive. They are intolerant of other religious beliefs, although the Christian attitude is to be tolerant. They are looking to Duke to “set things right” while failing to realize that they themselves elected the people who created their perceived problems.

Let’s admit that minority interest groups have, in some cases, tiped equitability in their favor to the detriment of “the majority.” Let’s get rid of the inequitable favoritism, not the racial or ethnic minorities. And let’s quit demanding things that we want but don’t want to pay for or work toward.

newspaper article