When Don Yelton, North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee Member and GOP Precinct Chair of Buncombe County, NC tried to explain to The Daily Show that the state’s new polling place Photo ID restriction law wasn’t racist at all, things went from bad to worse.
Mind you, the “bad” was when he (actually!) claimed that one of his best friends was black! So…you can only imagine what the “worse” was…
Yeah. Pretty amazing. In an interview with Mountain Xpress after the show aired Wednesday night, Yelton said he was pleased with the way the Daily Show had edited the conversation. “The comments that were made, that I said, I stand behind them. I believe them,” he told the paper. “To tell you the truth, there were a lot of things I said that they could’ve made me sound worse than what they put up.”
But the Republican Party — currently fighting in court to support the most restrictive voter suppression law to be passed in the nation since the Jim Crow era — is not quite as pleased. The Buncombe County GOP said in a statement on Facebook, that “Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon.”
And, late Thursday, as Prachi Gupta at Salon reports, despite initially standing behind his comments, Yelton has now stepped down as the GOP precinct chair in Buncombe County:
Nathan West, Communications Director of the Buncombe County GOP, told Salon over the phone that he is worried about the “artificial damage” Yelton has caused the party.
Um, artificial damage?
Gawker reports that Yelton has now also stepped down from his state Republican Party leadership position as well. Moral for Republicans: It’s okay to think it and pass laws based on it, just don’t say it out loud, please and thanks, and certainly not in front of a TV camera!
UPDATE: Yelton has a new story. He now says The Daily Show took him out of context (in contrast to what he said previously, as seen above), then goes on to use the n-word to defend himself and calls his local Republican Party “gutless” because says they could have “turn[ed the interview] into a positive” by using it to show they accept all points of view. Seriously. See TPM for more…
“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me? You don’t ever admit the existence of this thing. Ever!” ~ Frank Vincent, The Sopranos
my state. oh well.
Some still live in a time warp.
This is just too funny! The Daily Show did a great job.
Yelton exemplifies what we described in Mississippi’s Passage of Polling Place Photo ID Law Reveals Still-Burning Vestiges of Jim Crow, relying upon Kathryn Stockett’s novel-turned-award winning movie, The Help, the fundamental problem that arises from point of view, there by way of the women who hire and command the maids and from the maids themselves.
The most powerful distinction occurs by comparing a remark made by Hilly Hollbrook to Skeeter Phelan (portrayed by Emma Stone) and another remark made by Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer) to Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis).
“Believe it or not,” Hilly tells Skeeter while holding up Skeeter’s copy of Mississippi’s segregation laws, “there are real racists in this town. If the wrong person caught you reading this, you’d be in serious trouble.”
“We living in Hell,” Minny tells Aibileen, shortly after a terrified Aibileen stumbled in the dark to Minny’s house on the night of Medgar Evers’ murder.
In the first remark, we see a form of denial of her own racism coming from perhaps the most racist of the women in the film. In the second, we see how fundamentally different the reality of 1963 is seen through the eyes of an African-American maid.
Here, we have Yelton denying his own racism, even as he derided “lazy blacks” during an interview with Tim Malloy of The Wrap. Demonstrating a total lack of self-awareness, Yelton added: “When a n”””“ can use the word n”””“ and it not be considered racist, that’s the utmost racism in the world, and it’s hypocrisy.”
Hello!!! Ordinarily, when one African-American uses the “N”-word with another, it’s understood as humor, perhaps inappropriate humor, but humor nonetheless. When a white racist like Yelton drops the “N”-bomb, it’s with malice aforethought.
Being old enough to remember the vicious response to the 60s civil rights movement, George Wallace and Bull Connor’s dogs, I can only come away shaking my head. So much from then we continue to see now.
a veritable work of art!
I wish I could say “unbelievable,” but, sadly, Yelton’s attitude is all too real, and present in more people’s consciousness than I’d like to admit.
Daily Show did its usual hilarious bang-up job.