See Ya Later, Buckwheat!

I am convinced, after watching politics for years and years, that there are little gremlins who run around planting idiotic things in candidates' minds just to enjoy the chaos that results. One of them hit Trent Lott a few years back when he lamented that Strom Thurmond had not won the presidency as a Dixiecrat in 1948.

The same gremlin just prompted a white Democratic Louisiana state legislator to thank a loyal African-American supporter for her help turning out the vote, ending her conversation, "Talk to ya later Buckwheat!."

My initial thought was that there was an intimacy here, the kind of joking relationship where this kind of thing is sometimes allowed in private, such as when young men call each other the N-word. But nope. The target of the comment was ... not amused, and the local NAACP is apparently now working to get her Republican opponent elected.

"I've never had no one talk to me that way and I considered it a racial slur," Hazel Boykin said. "I know the meaning of it, it's just like the N-word."

Jerome Boykin said Monday he planned to ask voters to cast ballots against Dartez, who faces Republican Joe Harrison in Saturday's runoff.

"At this point, the NAACP is not concerned about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. If a Republican is elected because of her racist remarks, that's her responsibility," he said of Dartez.

For those of you who missed this part of your cultural history education, Buckwheat was a character in the 1940s "Our Gang" series, whose character became synonymous with the racial stereotype of the funny/bumbling "pickaninny".

The candidate apologized, profusely, but the damage has been done. As with the Lott affair, it's not the kind of "mistake" you can easily back out of, precisely because everyone knows that it's a kind of Dr. Strangelove impulse that reflects something deep within.

As is often the case with such motifs, Buckwheat came full circle with Eddie Murphy on SNL: