The Enigmatic Man Claude Allen’s Desire to Rise in the GOP Puzzled Some, but His Fall Confounds Them More

Here is an interesting article in today's Style Section of the Washington Post called 'The Enigmatic Man' Claude Allen's Desire to Rise in the GOP Puzzled Some, but His Fall Confounds Them More  written by Lynne Duke. The article gives us a more in depth look at what use to be one of the President's most trusted and high level advisers, Claude Allen. 

The author of this article as well as co-workers, classmates and old acquaintances of Allen found him to be enigmatic.  I am not an expert, but I believe that he had issues with being black.  At least from reading this article, it was apparent that every time he encountered a racial incident while at Duke, he shut down.  For example, in the Post article, his former Duke classmate's girlfriend Amy Kraham (who is white) recalls an incident where Allen accompanied her to purchase a new dog.  They became lost, stopped to ask for directions and the white man Allen approached was very cold towards him and did not respond to him.

Allen stepped to the counter. A white man was there. Allen asked for directions. The man just stared at him, said nothing.

The man seemed "challenging and somewhat angry," Kraham says. She felt "nervous and scared." She'd never encountered anything like this in her New Jersey youth.

She spoke up, repeated their request for directions. The man turned to her and obliged.

Once they arrived at the house where Kraham was to retrieve her new puppy, they ran into another racial incident.  The seller (a white women) became reluctant to giver her the puppy.  Kraham reassured the seller that her and her fiance can give the puppy a good home and that she had nothing to worry about. 

She told the woman how she and her fiance had a house with a fenced yard. They'd provide a good home, Kraham assured her.

Round and round they went, until the exasperated woman asked, "Why do you keep referring to your boyfriend in the third person when he's standing right here?"

"And I said, 'Oh, that's not my boyfriend; that's a friend.' And I was immediately given the dog."

Kraham was shaken and disturbed by the incidents of that day. Allen on the other hand, did not say a word, and acted as though it did not happen. Was it not that big of a deal?  I think it was he just couldn't handle it.

This self destructive self rejection led him to make up a false sense of security in main stream America.  For example, he attended a private majority main stream University, became a Republican and supported Senator Jessie Helms, the Republican conservative who fought the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Bill. During confirmation hearings, it was revealed that Allen believed that Martin Luther King was involved with the communist movement. 

The last incident that the Post article discusses was in 2000.  The NAACP was fighting to abolish the state of VA's commemoration of Confederate History Month, when Allen delivered a tube to Virginia NAACP Executive Directer King Salim Khalfani.  It was a poster of General Lee's Surrender.

Allen "was a gentleman, always cordial, always respectful," but he was "quite the ideologue," says Khalfani.

"For him to give the executive director of the state NAACP a portrait of Robert E. Lee was just so . . . so . . . Claude!"

Asked what he knew about the Confederate poster, Gilmore made a few phone calls to find out about it and learned that Allen had intended the poster of Lee's surrender to be "a gesture of goodwill and relationship-building."

Allen had bought into the notion that slavery really did end with the civil war.  Lee surrendered only after being defeated and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed.  Lee's surrender end racism or even slavery for that matter.  So this so called peace offering that he gave was null and void. 

One of Allen's law school classmates said that:

Perhaps Allen, as a black man, possessed an extraordinary level of tolerance or even forgiveness, Ricciardi thought. Now a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., he was never able to square it.

I am not coming down on Allen because he is a republican.  Political affiliation is only a tool Allen used to hide from his reality.  Allen is not displaying an extraordinary level of tolerance or forgiveness, he is displaying an extraordinary level of self hate and denial.  It appears that Allen tried his best to get away from his black skin, so much that he became this "Enigmatic" being;denying himself of himself and his culture.  His denial or inability to cope with himself as a black man in a society where racism and discrimination still exist, is eating him up alive.  He needs to find himself again.