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New York Senator Hillary Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention in Denver yesterday earning widespread praise for her words of unity and conviction. While her main goal was seen as healing the rift between herself and Barack Obama, she also took a moment to critique Republican presumptive nominee, John McCain:

…we don’t need four more years of the last eight years. More economic stagnation and less affordable health care? More high gas prices and less alternative energy? More jobs getting shipped overseas and fewer jobs created here at home? More skyrocketing debt and home foreclosures, and mounting bills that are crushing middle-class families. More war and less diplomacy? More of a government where the privileged few come first and everyone else comes last? Well, John McCain says the economy is fundamentally sound. John McCain doesn’t think 47 million people without health insurance is a crisis. John McCain wants to privatize Social Security. and in 2008, he still thinks it’s okay when women don’t warn equal pay for equal work! Now, with an agenda like that, it makes perfect sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities, because these days they’re awfully hard to tell apart.

But what Hillary Clinton left out of her critique of McCain, and what virtually everyone has left out this year, is McCain’s racist background. When John McCain campaigned for president in 2000, he told reporters on his bus, “I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” McCain used the racist pejorative in describing the Vietnamese people who were targets of the brutal US war he is proud to have fought in. McCain apologized for using the term explaining that he was only using it to refer specifically to the prison guards in Vietnam who beat and tortured him. Now, author Irwin Tang has written a book about McCain, called “Gook: John McCain’s Racism and Why it Matters.” In describing the book’s thesis, Tang asks, “war fertilizes racism, and racism justifies wars and the killing of civilians. This dynamic thrives within the most dangerous leaders of the world. Is John McCain one of them?”

GUEST: Irwin Tang, author of “Gook: John McCain’s Racism and Why it Matters,” “Asian Texans,” and “When Invisible Children Sing”.

For more information, visit www.irwinbooks.com.

Rough Transcript

Sonali Kolhatkar: Thanks so much for joining us. So, as I mentioned, this is not something that comes up very often at all about John McCain. You would think the Democrats would pick up on it, but they don’t. Remind us a little bit of the backdrop of what happened in 2000. I quoted him and what he said about his experience in the Vietnam War. How did he justify his racist statement?

Irwin Tang: Well, he distorted the truth. He said that he was only referring to the prison guards who kept him captive and in reality he referred to Vietnamese in general as gooks. And so, in essence, he lied. Now, we have very few precise quotes concerning John McCain’s use of the word gook over 27 years. We rely on some of his own writings where he refers to the Vietnamese as gooks. But during the campaign, we mostly have to rely on a few exact quotes and the general understanding, well, the reporting of European reporters, who have the guts to write that hey, John McCain is still using the word gook to refer to Vietnamese people in general. No one said he was using the word only to refer to the Vietnamese prison guards until John McCain himself said “I only talked about the prison guards,” and he also stated that he would only stop using the word gook to describe the Vietnamese because “he didn’t want to feel the heat.”

Sonali Kolhatkar: During his campaign?

Irwin Tang: Right. He didn’t want to jeopardize his presidential campaign, and so we see the real heart of John McCain. He is racist, deeply racist at worst, and hateful at best.

Sonali Kolhatkar: So I understand that his spokespeople, his campaign, tried to, in a way, apologize for him by saying that, you know, he, and this is a story that comes up over and over again where we never forget, whenever we hear about John McCain, we always hear about how he was tortured in a POW camp in Vietnam. And was that sort of used as a justification, you know, the fact that he was tortured in a way justifies his use of the term?

Irwin Tang: Of course that was a justification. It’s the justification of many things, apparently. And more importantly that’s the justification in people’s minds. But there are some veterans out there who have the guts to come out and say look, you know, there are a lot of us. There are a lot of veterans who have suffered a great deal through the Vietnam War or through the Iraq War or other wars. And we don’t use the word gook. We are not racist. We are totally against that type of language. We are not against the Vietnamese people. We are not against an entire race of people. And they have the guts to say: “This really concerns us about John McCain. There is something wrong with him.”

Sonali Kolhatkar: Now, how do you feel about the fact that this is not making much of a blip? It didn’t make much of a blip in the media in 2000 and it is certainly not being raised now.

Irwin Tang: Well, to tell you the truth, I think one of the problems is the Democratic Party. They are not making this an issue. It’s a softball thrown straight over the plate. It’s an easy issue to bring up. Secondly, the media, the American media, has traditionally thought that issues of Asian American identity or pride or dignity are not issues. So, if John McCain had said, you know, I hate the N-words, we would not be considering him as a presidential candidate.

Sonali Kolhatkar: In fact, compare him to what happened in 2006 to Republican Senator George Allen.

Irwin Tang: Well, yeah, exactly, George Allen used a pejorative that refers to people of African descent, the word “Macaca,” and he was a presidential hopeful for the Republican Party at that time. That word was, interestingly, he used it against a person of South Asian descent, actually, but it is a pejorative used against blacks. And he immediately ended his political career. He was no longer presidential hopeful and he is no longer a member of the Senate.

Sonali Kolhatkar: If the use of the word gook is the only instance of John McCain’s racism, you know, the case might not be as big and you might not have a whole book about it, but you have a broader case than the use of that term in the few instances. What else can you point to, to build the case, you know, you say he is a racist. Why, specifically, or why, more broadly, I should say?

Irwin Tang: Well, he supports three different types of white supremacist organizations in the United States, including the traditional white supremacist/KKK organizations, the neo-Confederacy movements and the racist religious anti-Semitic right. And the most interesting part to me, right now, is his monetary support for the neo-Confederacy movement. He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to a man named Richard Quinn for his political advice. And Richard Quinn is one of the top leaders of the neo-Confederacy movement, former editor, long-time editor of the Southern Partisan and now one of the owners of the Southern Partisan, a journal that justifies slavery, justifies the violence of the KKK, sees Nelson Mandela as a bad egg, Martin Luther King and Gandhi as mentors of violence and so forth. And that’s disturbing in and of itself, and then you add on top his political support and his endorsement of people like George Wallace, Jr., who was a popular lecturer among white supremacist organizations, and I speak specifically of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which sprung out of the White Citizens’ Councils of the South, which have been largely considered the uptown KKKs. And John McCain, in 2006, this is just two years ago, endorsed George Wallace, Jr. and went on a speaking tour for George Wallace, Jr. throughout Alabama, three cities in Alabama, not a big state, and raised tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for George Wallace, Jr. Now you consider this, if you add up those hundreds or millions of dollars with the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of dollars raised for Rich Quinn and you see that John McCain is a pillar, a foundation, a monetary foundation for the white supremacist movements in America. And then you put on top of that his endorsement and support for and endorsement by John Hagee and Rod Parsley, two of the leaders of the racist Religious Right, who have been outspoken in their racist comments concerning Muslims, their very peculiar and dangerous anti-Semitic statements, and their statements against gays and women, and you come up with a portrait of John McCain which is extremely disturbing. He is behind the scenes in three different branches of extremist racism in America.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let’s talk about the issue of immigration. Recently, Reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee endorsed John McCain for what he says is John McCain’s supportive stance towards immigrants, but you have an interesting take on that. What is John McCain’s real position on immigrants to this country and how does it also, in your mind, build the case that he is a racist?

Irwin Tang: Well, I look at his English-only policy and one of his heroes is Teddy Roosevelt, he even said that recently, he used the word hero to describe Teddy Roosevelt, and of course, Roosevelt was one of our most racist, anti-immigrant presidents. And John McCain had his chance to support immigrants of all nationalities in this country when the Inhofe English-Only amendment was up for a vote in the Senate. And he voted for the English-only amendment, which essentially encourages federal agencies to stop providing services in languages other than English, because it states specifically that no one has the right to services in any language except for English. It doesn’t necessarily say we need to get rid of these languages in our federal offices, but it gives a lot of federal offices in the South and such, where these things are more likely to happen, gives them the freedom and the support to just stop hiring interpreters and translators and such.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Irwin, I want to end this interview with a broad question. Of course race, just by virtue of Barack Obama being a major party presidential candidate, is naturally going to be a big part of this presidential race, whether it is overtly mentioned or not, and John McCain’s attitudes are, as I mentioned and we’ve talked about, really not being raised by the media. What do you see happening between now and early November in terms of these issues being raised and also do you foresee John McCain using racist ads or using coded language, the kind of thing that we have already seen a little bit from his campaign, do you see that worsening between now and November?

Irwin Tang: Absolutely, I see it worsening. John McCain has admitted that he has a deep ambition to be President and Terry Nelson was one of the architects of one of the most racist ads in recent political history. It was the ad against Harold Ford, which involved filming a blonde white actress saying that she had met the black senatorial candidate at a Playboy Mansion party and saying “Call me, Harold.” And it was obviously a race-baiting ad that Terry Nelson put together and Terry Nelson was actually fired by Wal-Mart for doing this racist ad, but he was immediately hired by John McCain after that to be John McCain’s national campaign manager. And so we see that John McCain is very much willing to hire the people necessary to create the race-baiting ads, the racist ads to make him President, and so it was not surprising to see Paris Hilton and Britney Spears on yet another Republican campaign ad, because John McCain is very conscious of this and very much willing to do what it takes. Now, what concerns me now is when we talk about John McCain and Barack Obama, they might be very, very directly linked at some point in a very sad way, because John McCain, through his monetary support, his political support and his words, has supported the white supremacy movement in the United States and that, to me, is directly linked to the possibility that there were three white supremacists arrested recently in Denver who may have been trying to assassinate Barack Obama.

Sonali Kolhatkar: I mean, are you saying that he sort of encourages this kind of thing?

Irwin Tang: I’m saying that through his money, his words, I mean, obviously John McCain has not said, I think, you know, someone should go shoot Barack Obama, but by his endorsements of white supremacists, his endorsing words, his praise of people like George Wallace, Jr. and his praise of people like Richard Quinn and John Hagee and Rod Parsley, he is basically saying, and he is an American hero. When you hear an American hero praising white supremacists and the supremacist movements that also endorsed the arming of white Americans against the dangers of immigration and the dangers of “black thugs,” these are the type of people that George Wallace, Jr. supports and through that John McCain supports.

Sonali Kolhatkar: So you are saying in a way it condones that sort of behavior?

Irwin Tang: It encourages it indirectly, I believe. John McCain’s support of white supremacy encourages white Americans to arm themselves and commit crimes.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Irwin, where can listeners find out more about your book?

Irwin Tang: You can go to irwinbooks.com.

Sonali Kolhatkar: And you can order a copy directly through there?

Irwin Tang: Yes, people can buy the book directly there or go to amazon.com.

Special Thanks to Claudia Greyeyes for transcribing this interview