The candidate from Paint Creek forgot to paint the rock. That is, the eponymous rock that designated the Perry family hunting lease as "Niggerhead."
When, exactly, the offensive place name was painted over is of little importance. What matters is that the Perry family leased the ranch and hunted on it while the rock said what it said.
The Page-1 Washington Post story was no surprise to me. I've spent most of my working life as a reporter in Texas. Nor is Rick Perry the first Texas governor associated with racial insensitivity that seems like everyday life in Texas — until it jars the sensibilities of outsiders.
Bill Clements, the Republican governor who was Karl Rove's first big play in 1979, was a member of the Koon Kreek Klub, an East Texas fin-and-feather camp within a half-day drive from Dallas, in Athens, Texas. As were 150 other patrician Texans, including most of the Dallas Social Register. (Membership at Koon Kreek has been closed for years; before running for governor, G. W. Bush bought a membership in the less offensive — but just as exclusively white — Rainbo Club, almost adjacent to the KKK.)
The candidate from Paint Creek forgot to paint the rock. That is, the eponymous rock that designated the Perry family hunting lease as "Niggerhead."
When, exactly, the offensive place name was painted over is of little importance. What matters is that the Perry family leased the ranch and hunted on it while the rock said what it said.
The Page-1 Washington Post story was no surprise to me. I've spent most of my working life as a reporter in Texas. Nor is Rick Perry the first Texas governor associated with racial insensitivity that seems like everyday life in Texas — until it jars the sensibilities of outsiders.
Bill Clements, the Republican governor who was Karl Rove's first big play in 1979, was a member of the Koon Kreek Klub, an East Texas fin-and-feather camp within a half-day drive from Dallas, in Athens, Texas. As were 150 other patrician Texans, including most of the Dallas Social Register. (Membership at Koon Kreek has been closed for years; before running for governor, G. W. Bush bought a membership in the less offensive — but just as exclusively white — Rainbo Club, almost adjacent to the KKK.)
When I was reporting a Koon Kreek Klub story for the Texas Observer, locals in Athens eagerly told me that the KKK was an intentional brand. The 9,000-acre private club was founded in 1905 by a retired Confederate officer, and the only African-Americans allowed on the grounds were the help. A white woman I interviewed told me that she was offended by the use of "Koon" — derived from a Southern racial epithet still heard in East Texas.
None of this concerned the club's wealthy white patrons. But it suggests the quotidian indignities with which blacks in Texas lived, even after Jim Crow laws were dismantled in the 1970s.
Dallas continues to make progress. The city elected its its first African-American mayor in 1995. The obituary of Bill Clements' son, who was tragically shot to death on an East Texas ranch last year, mentioned family weekends at "Coon Creek Club." And in reporting on the club and its Dallas patrons, Texas Monthly has moved on from "Koon" to "Coon." (The Perry family must have been slow to catch on.)
There is a bigger Rick Perry "race" story, and it involves public education.
Twenty years ago, parents of students attending underfunded public schools prevailed in the Texas Supreme Court and forced the Legislature to more equitably fund the state's 1,000 school districts.
In a series of hearings during 10 years of litigation, expert witnesses often referred to students who are "expensive" to educate — that is, economically disadvantaged kids who lack the support that middle-class and wealthy families provide.
Governor Ann Richards started to address the court's equity ruling. After George W. Bush defeated her in 1994, he built on what the courts had put in place.
In short, Governor Bush had an education program. Schools weren't then, and still are not, equitably (or adequately) funded, but Bush made them a priority.
"I disagree with almost everything George Bush did regarding public education," a member of the Texas House Public Education Committee told me last month. "But he made an effort, he made public education a priority. Perry hasn't assigned a single, high-level staff member to public education. It's not an issue for him."
There's more to the story than what Perry didn't do. What he did was to insist on cutting about $6 billion from public education funding last year, when he could have made up the budget shortfall with money still sitting in the state's Rainy Day Fund.
The result is larger class sizes, fewer teachers, and less support staff in the state's public schools.
Not a big problem for kids in white suburban enclaves, such as the "Park Cities" in Dallas, where the Clements family lives, or Tanglewood in Houston, where the senior Bushes live. In the courtroom argot of equity litigation, kids who are "inexpensive" to educate. (Many of them show up for kindergarten as competent readers, because of the time and money parents have to invest.)
The kids who are harmed are the "high-cost" and high-risk kids in big urban districts like Houston, or semi-rural districts such as Crosby and Cleveland (the latter two were integrated by federal court order in 1971.)
I mention these three districts because I've taught in each of them, and quickly came to understand that some economically disadvantaged students did (and still do) face almost insurmountable odds.
It's those kids, many of them black and Hispanic, who were stiffed by Rick Perry when he stood in front of the door and blocked access to the state's Rainy Day Fund last May.
From Bush's sincere concern about the "soft bigotry of low expectations," the state has moved to Perry's programmed "hard bigotry of underfunding."
Perry's hardened position on education funding will do a lot more harm than an odious epithet painted on a rock on his hunting lease.
