The truly tragic delusion of Herman Cain

14th November 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Guest Columnist

In a way, I feel bad for Herman Cain. It looks as if he was naïve enough to believe that being the Black CEO of Godfather’s Pizza actually granted him entry into the good ol’ boys club.

That’s a place, or rather, a state of mind, in which men expect sexism to either be accommodated or blown off with a wink and a smile. It’s a place occupied mostly by white men, a place where they feel free to dispense with having to show any respect or sensitivity toward anyone they see as being either an inferior or, in President Obama’s case, an “other.”
Cain, with all his talk about racism being a thing of the past, probably felt like he was part of that club.

Then along came Sharon Bialek.

Bialek is one of four women who claim Cain made unwanted sexual advances toward them when he was president of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s.

Two of the women received financial settlements from the association and have remained anonymous, while late yesterday, another one, Karen Kraushaar, announced that she, like Bialek, would go public with her story.

And Bialek’s account of what happened is troubling.

Bialek said that in 1997, she went to dinner with Cain to talk about a job after she had been let go by the National Restaurant Association’s Education Foundation. While in the car after dinner, she said he reached up under her dress, tried to pull her head toward his lap, and when she objected, he responded: “You want a job, don’t you?”

Of course, conservative pundits have tried to play their own race card here by using the old tired, Clarence Thomas rhetoric about Cain being a victim of a high-tech lynching. But besides abusing an analogy that is obscene in that it simplifies the horror of lynching — I’m of the belief that Black people ought to get as angry when the word lynching is tossed around negligently as Jewish people do when the word holocaust is tossed around — what they’re ignoring here is that if the charges force Cain to drop out, it’ll be his own fault for actually believing that he was a part of their club.

And that’s where Black men get tripped up all the time.

For the record, let me say that I don’t believe that Bialek or Kraushaar or any of the other women who have accused Cain of harassing them are racist. There obviously is a pattern of behavior reflected here that cannot be ignored — and Cain can’t seem to get his story straight on what happened. Yet, the timing of these revelations is curious.

Someone saw Cain becoming the front-runner. Someone knew that even if GOP voters might not care about the issue of sexual harassment, a number of them might be troubled by the thought that Cain might have a thing for white women.

That doesn’t sit well with many of the people he is trying to appeal to.

Last August, Gallup polled Americans about interracial relationships, and Republicans, conservatives and Southerners were far less likely to approve of such relationships than any other groups.

And look at what happened to Harold Ford Jr.’s 2006 U.S. Senate campaign in Tennessee after his Republican opponent ran a commercial in which a blond woman claims she met him at a Playboy party, winks and breathlessly urges Ford to call her.

The ad was denounced as appealing to racist sentiments — and Ford lost.

At first, Cain suggested that Curt Anderson, an advisor who worked with him on his 2004 Senate campaign but who now advises Perry, leaked the charges. He’s also claimed that the “Democratic machine” manufactured the controversy.

I doubt that. Cain’s Republican rivals have more to fear from him than the Democrats do. Virtually every recent poll has Obama beating him.

But if the controversy forces Cain out of the race, he’ll have no one to blame but himself.

He’ll have himself to blame for believing that his success entitled him to emulate the worse of the ol’ boy behavior. He’ll have himself to blame by thinking that it was beyond anyone to rely on the stereotype of the oversexed, white-woman lusting black man to bring him down.

And most of all, he’ll have himself to blame by validating it.

This article was originally published in the November 14, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper