Mississippi Voters Could Make History in Yet Another Race About Race
Who knew Cindy Hyde-Smith was such a comedian? The Republican senator from Mississippi, appointed in March to replace the ancient and ailing Thad Cochran, has been on quite a roll in the run-up to next Tuesday’s runoff election against Mike Espy, who was the state’s first black congressman since Reconstruction before serving in Bill Clinton’s cabinet.
At a campaign event earlier this month, Hyde-Smith chose the following quip to praise the cattle rancher who’d introduced her to the assembled white folk: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” The next day, campaigning at Mississippi State, a student asked her about voter suppression. “There’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools that maybe we don’t want to vote,” she said. “Maybe we just want to make it a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”
The “public hanging” remark, Hyde-Smith said in a statement, was merely a common “expression of exaggerated regard.” Espy was among the many Mississippians, white and black, who were puzzled by this: “I thought I’d heard every kind of Southern colloquialism ever uttered, but I’ve never heard anything about any sort of public hanging.” One thing everybody in Mississippi does know, though, is that “public hangings” were euphemisms for lynchings — and according to the NAACP, more blacks were lynched in this state than in any other.
But come on, y’all: Lighten up! “It’s OK to still have a sense of humor in America isn’t it?” Hyde-Smith’s twitter account begged after the damning video clips were released last week by a Louisiana blogger. The campaign’s tweet depicted the senator in a light moment with students at Mississippi State, saying they’d “enjoyed a laugh with Cindy despite out-of-state social media posts trying to mislead Mississippians.”
But the video shows nobody laughing at her voter-suppression “joke.” And the black student in the photo, far from amused, demanded the photo be taken down. “I am disgusted,” wrote J.R. Coleman, who said he’d come out to hear the senator because he’s a political-science major, not because he supports her. “She is trying to show herself in a different light by using this photo of me. We were not laughing in regards to her terrible statements.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mississippi-senate-race-758960/
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