By Roy S. Johnson, Guest Columnist
This is an opinion column.
There are errors. And there are mistakes.
What happened in Lawrence County may have been an error. It wasn’t a mistake.
Shanon Terry chairs the county Republican party, recently replacing long-time chair Daniel Stover. Terry announced the transition on the party’s Facebook page on Sunday, August 15. He thanked Stover for his “diligent work” serving the party. And made an error.
Terry decorated the post with an illustration of the GOP’s symbolic elephant, an illustration he found in a “google (sic) search,” he shared later. An illustration in which three KKK white hoods are drawn in the gaps between the beast’s four legs.
Oops. Terry called it an “error,” noting in an apology the following day that it appeared “temporarily” until it was “later found to have hidden images…”
Error? Certainly. Mistake? Nah.
See, the KKK hoods aren’t “hidden” at all. Sure, there’s a bit of Rorschach eye/mind-trick thing going on—an homage to the famous inkblot tests originally designed by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach to discern disorder in patterns of thought in schizophrenia and now widely used in research on emotional and personality disorders and intelligence. But hidden? Not one bit.
Not to those who see.
It accompanied an article with the headline: “The Republican Party Is Racist And Soulless. Just Ask This Veteran GOP Strategist.”
Stuart Stevens is the strategist; he played the role for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential bid. In the article, he said Republicans were “weaponizing” bigotry during the 2020 campaign. (Duh.) “We created this. It didn’t just happen,” he said.
Hidden? Please.
Not from those who discern.
Before the illustration took center stage and truly became the Google search algorithm’s favorite “GOP elephant”, I showed it to a few folks. I asked: What do you see? “Klan hoods” or “an elephant and…Klan hoods?” were pretty much the two categories of responses. My research wasn’t exactly scientific, I confess: All my respondents were Black.
Terry is not.
The county GOP chair is a longtime member of the Lawrence County School Board, representing District Four. I’m sure someone in that system teaches the dangers of plucking an image from the Internet. There are copyright laws (the GOP elephant/KKK image is indeed copyrighted)—and more subtle pitfalls. Like how one sees (or doesn’t see) an image being an unintentional Rorschach, a reflection of emotional and personality disorders and intelligence.
In his apology, Terry said—in classic attorney-crafted prose—the “[KKK hoods] … do not represent the views or beliefs of the Lawrence County Republican Party…As chairman, I take full responsibility for the error.”
Error, okay. Mistake? Not in this life.
Not when the Republican party continuously demonstrates how blind it is to racism.
So blind it cannot (or refuses to) see how its incessant rants over critical race theory are attacks on the truth, on education, on teaching the fullness of our nation’s history because some parts make them (not their children) “feel bad”.
So oblivious, so obtuse to how its obliteration of the rights of women to make their own health and life decisions impact low-income women of color. (White women of means will always find a way.)
So ignorant it ignores the fraud in its haughty legislation combating non-existent election fraud—bills blatantly crafted to squash voter turnout in Black and brown precincts.
So afraid to even acknowledge racism—let alone sit down, listen to how it affects the lives of too many Americans and help craft ways to squash that—it puppeteers even its most prominent Black Republicans into publicly declaring “America is not a racist country.”
That Terry— just one in 10 Lawrence County residents are Black, but come on!—did not see three KKK hoods starkly embedded in the illustration he selected reflects the national GOP’s blindness to the racist effects of its policies and the national racism it staunchly ignores.
And this: If the KKK hoods truly “do not represent the views or beliefs of the Lawrence County Republican Party” then Terry should relinquish his school board seat and step aside as the party’s county face. Truth: Alabama GOP chair (and butterfly farmer) John Wahl, who’s been blindingly silent on the “error,” should demand Terry step aside—if the hoods do not reflect….
Errors happen; mistakes don’t.
Anyone can see that. Well, almost anyone.
