Helms was whistling dixie in front of Carol Moseley Braun. Come on man. Some behavior is just completely unacceptable from a U.S. Senator.
So Helms is to be considered a racist if others within earshot interpret racial malice in words that are not themselves racist? That seems to open a slippery slope into the nonsense of
microaggression.
Helms (likes limited government, sound money, and opposes political correctness)
Political correctness is better than overt racism.
Even assuming that Helms may have actually been racist (which seems suspect, given the most common examples of such seem to be removed from their proper context), if there any evidence that such a predisposition mainfested itself in his record as a legislator? To my knowledge, Helms never introduced legislation proposing to infringe upon the rights of African-Americans, or any other ethnic group, but merely opposed the granting of special favors to certain groups.
He's one of the worst in modern American politics. The fact that he served so long astounds me, but what astounds me even more are the people that would consider voting for him.
None of the anecdotes in that Wikipedia article are inconsistent with my opinion of Helms. Given that Helms's views in favor of limited government have been misconstrued as racist, it would be helpful if the article actually cited some of this "racially-charged language" so that the reader could decide for himself the alleged racial undertones contained therein, rather than simply taking the Wikipedia editor's word for it that the content must have been racist.
But, in any case, it seems that the animosity towards Helms merely uses racism as a red herring for opposing his political views. It is more convenient to simply accuse an opponent of racism than to have an intellectual debate about the merit of affirmative action or granting special privileges to extant members of a demographic minority based on discrimination of others of that same minority in the past, at the expense of those who did not perpetrate the original injustice.
Poll
