Many of us were introduced for the first time to George Felix Allen by the public flap and the ample controversy over just what "macaca" means and why it was said. Perhaps different things stand out for some who learned of him in this fashion. For some, the things that stand out about Allen's history may be his father, the famous football coach;, his college history of Confederatophilia, and his being a Republican Governor and now Senator from Virginia. For others, perhaps one of the things that stands out most is that Allen, who is not from Virginia, was insulting a man, Siddarth, who was born and bred in Virginia. Welcome to Virginia? Hold on a sec.
Who is the real outsider here? Siddarth is a first-generation American. Well, so is Allen. Siddarth's parents are from India. Allen's mother, Henrietta Lumbroso, is a Sephardic Jew from French Tunisia. Allen, who is ethnically Jewish (it's the mother's side that counts in this case), was insulting a man who is ethnically Indian using a French slur for Africans. How does this make sense?
This slip is revealing. Allen grew up in a household with an archetypal macho American father and a mother who was ashamed of becoming American. What sort of things did she tell him as a child, and in what language? Did she tell him about being imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp in French? What did she tell him about Africa and Africans in French? And how did he feel about being Jewish? Lumbroso is a respected lineage - but maybe not in chi-chi Palos Verdes, where he was suspended from high school for painting racist graffiti. Palos Verdes was built as a whites-only gated community, and his mother seems to have been a little outré.
Etty was, in fact, French, and, as such, she was a deliciously indiscreet cultural libertine. She would do housework in her bra and panties. She wore muumuus and wraparound sunglasses and once won a belly button contest. According to Jennifer, "Mom prided herself for being un-American. ... She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile." When her husband later moved the family to Virginia, Etty despised living in the state. She was also anti-Washington before her son ever was, albeit in a slightly more continental fashion. "Washingtonians think their town resembles Paris," she once scoffed. "If Paris passed gas, you'd have Washington."
http://kerrylibrary.invisionzone.com/...
Now why would the son of a cosmopolitan, French Jew like Etta become an aficionado of Hee-Haw who drove around his whites-only gated community with a Confederate license plate?
Why would Allen idolize the Confederacy? Was it because of his father's violence - he once broke his son Gregory's nose in a fight - or was it a desperate attempt to become `whiter than thou?' There wasn't a lot of racial conflict in whites-only Palos Verdes. Even after desegregation, the 2000 Census lists it as 1% black. Did Allen even know any black people? Were there any black students in his class? Also, were there any other Jewish students there? And did anybody even know his mother was Jewish?
There's a specific history to Allen's high school racist vandalism.
It was the night before a major basketball game with Morningside High. The mostly black inner-city school adjacent to Watts was coming to the almost entirely white Palos Verdes High to play. When students arrived at school on game day, they found graffiti spray-painted on the school library and other places. All five people who described the incident say the graffiti was racially tinged and meant to look like the handiwork of the black Morningside students. But it was actually put there by Allen and some of his friends. "It was something like die whitey,"
What was he trying to say? When there's no "them" there, shouldn't we understand the statement to be about "us?" What does it mean for a Jew to go out and paint racially provocative graffiti in a white community except "I AM WHITE!!!" What else does it mean for this boy to wear a Confederate flag pen in his senior class photo, so far away from the South?
Allen's attraction to the idea of the Confederacy was so strong - he displayed the Confederate flag on his person, in his car, and in his room throughout college - that eventually he wanted to become a Southerner himself, and he transferred from UCLA to UVA. Did Allen move far away from his past, from his ancestry, from his childhood and his Jewish mother, in order to make it go away? Did he "whitewash" himself? The Confederate flag is a divisive symbol; the group that loves it is strongly divided from the group that hates it. How strong was Allen's need to belong to the group that loves it? And why did he have this need? Why wasn't it enough to be a Californian? Why did he need to pretend to be Johnny Reb?
Even at Virginia's own state school, Allen stood out for his showy brand of good ol' boyness. Under the headline "allen and country living," a 1973 profile in the school paper noted his penchant for country music had earned him the campus nickname of "Neck." He drove a pickup truck (paid for by the Redskins). He wore cowboy boots. He supported Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam. He once shot a squirrel on campus, skinned it, ate it, and hung its pelt on his wall. "He was trying to be more Virginian than the average Virginian," says Sabato.After graduating, Allen stuck around UVA for three years of law school. Professors remember him as the guy in the back row of class spitting tobacco into a cup.
The big question is, what is the prime motivator of such a peculiar obsession? Allen has been utterly fixated on appearing to be a true Son of the South for his entire adult life. Why? Why would a wealthy boy who grew up in a beautiful Italianate chateau in exclusive Palos Verdes want to spit chaw in a cup and hang a noose in his office? Why would this man, at an all-white gathering for his reelection, taunt an outsider with a French-language racial epithet? Was Siddarth the "return of the repressed" for Allen that would cause his tongue to slip and the ugly monster of racial insecurity to rear its head? Wouldn't it just make sense that this repressed neurosis would return in its native language? Comme ma mere avais dit, vous etes un sale macaque! Pas moi! Je suis blanc, je suis plus-que-blanc! Je ne suis pas juif!
What does "macaca" really mean? Perhaps what it really means, for Allen, is: "I AM NOT A JEW!"