To build on Jeff Fecke’s last post, I wanted to point out that Katon Dawson, current chair of the South Carolina Republican Party and, more importantly, candidate for the chairmanship of the RNC, belonged to a whites-only country club for 12 years, resigning his membership just 4 months ago, when he realized that it just might become an issue.
I kind of hope he takes the chairmanship, actually. As Steve Benen put it:
The symbolism in 2009 would be pretty powerful wouldn’t it? We could have as chairman of the RNC a former member of a country club that would exclude the president of the United States.
So we may actually have the most recent Republican President moving to a recently whites-only subdivision and the chair of the RNC only recently resigning from a whites-only country club?
Gosh, I just can’t fathom why African Americans generally vote Democratic.
Don’t comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
I thought these kind of clubs were illegal by now. I feel ignorant now. I hope he wins too, than the GOP will restrict its potential voter pool to about 60% of the population, good for us, bad for them.
Alison,
From my understanding these clubs are legal as long as they don’t recieve any federal support what-so-ever.
Charming. It’s as though Mr. Dawson knew his membership wasn’t acceptable, but wasn’t going to change anything until he thought it would hurt further advances in his political career.
Nice.
So how do these “white’s only” clubs work?
Does it actually say somewhere in their membership rules applicants must be white?
I just don’t get it.
So these hifalutin clubs here. Are they actually saying they would deny membership to the President of the United States?
IANAL, and all of this is just my understanding of things. But to my knowledge, private organizations can set whatever discriminatory rules they want. The operative word is private — the instant the organization starts to serve a public purpose, they open themselves up to legal challenges. So the Klan can be whites-only because most people don’t consider what they do to be useful/necessary to society (though from what I understand, the Klan doesn’t explicitly forbid entry by non-whites; they just require them to work for white supremacy). However men’s-only clubs, cigar bars, etc. have been challenged because a lot of professional networking goes on there — networking that is useful and necessary to any woman who wants to achieve equal access to high positions in business, politics, etc. Basically, the case has to be made that a given organization’s discriminatory rules are preventing a class of people from having equal access to useful opportunity.
I think country clubs qualify, personally — lots of professional networking goes on there. But maybe nobody’s challenged this one.
There’s also the “functional” vs “legal” aspect. It is very easy to skirt this law.
You can make a club which does not have a particular rule against admitting whites, but in which a majority of the members have to vote in a newly proposed member. Voila: a whites-only club. Or you can make a club which admits a couple of token POC and then ostracizes them to such a degree that they leave or warn everyone else not to join (remember, there’s nothing illegal about being an asshole) and therefore have an all white club. And so on.