College Teammates Recall Allen’s Racism

Boy, this guy is a real charmer. Three former teammates on Allen’s college football team remember Allen regularly using the N-word to describe blacks, and one of them recalls:

…that the future senator gave him the nickname "Wizard," because he shared a last name with Robert Shelton, who served in the 1960s as the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.

Egad.

He also recalls a hunting trip he took with Allen.

After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. "He proceeded to take the doe's head and stuff it into a mailbox," Shelton said.

Some of the other former teammates interviewed for the story say that Allen was not a racist, citing as evidence that he treated black and white players exactly the same. The thing is, treating people of different races the same in public is not actually proof of one’s belief in their intrinsic equality. I’ve known plenty of white people who would never call a black person a nasty epithet to his or her face, but regularly used the n-word to talk disparagingly about black people behind closed doors (read: with other whites). It’s entirely possible that Allen was clever enough not to let himself be known as a racist to people of color, yet showed his true colors (no pun intended) to his white intimates. I would argue that, since the Civil Rights Act, that formula is, in fact, the most typical of practicing racists.

In any case, I look forward to the Swift Boating of Shelton, whose closets are no doubt being searched for skeletons by the right-wingers as we speak.