All-White Idaho Legislature Struggles With Sensitivity

At 89%, the Idaho Legislature is the nation’s most Republican. At 100%, it also is the whitest.

Many of the 105 lawmakers pressing to conclude their 2001 session represent constituencies with small but growing minority populations.

But not a single legislator belongs to a minority group, perhaps contributing to the rash of racially and ethnically insensitive statements some of them have made this year.

The House State Affairs Committee rejected a Senate-passed bill to eliminate from Idaho place names the word “squaw”--the derivation of which is unclear, but a term that many American Indians find vulgar and offensive.

One legislator who voted against that change defended his earlier use of the term “Jew ‘em down” during a committee debate.

And in a House floor debate on eliminating the agriculture industry’s exemption from the $5.15 minimum wage, one lawmaker referred--by reading a letter from a constituent--to farm workers who live on welfare and food stamps and send their paychecks home to Mexico.

Away from the Legislature, there was Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s decision not to attend Capitol ceremonies for Martin Luther King Jr.-Idaho Human Rights Day, and a misunderstanding over state GOP Chairman Trent Clark’s comments about high arrest rates among blacks in Washington, D.C.

The state spends $100,000 a year trying to counter its reputation as a haven for extremism, earned primarily because the white supremacist group Aryan Nations is based there.

On the other end of the diversity spectrum, state Sen. Robbi King-Barrutia, a Glenns Ferry Republican, succeeded this year in winning approval of legislation recognizing the third Saturday in June as “Juneteenth National Freedom Day.”

The date roughly marks the anniversary of the day in 1865 when black slaves in Texas learned they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation more than 2 1/2 years earlier. Idaho is only the fifth state to officially recognize the day. But it took two years of work to get the measure passed.

“A lot of the legislators . . . have never lived anywhere but Idaho, so their understanding of some of the sensitive issues is probably just a little bit uneducated,” King-Barrutia said.

Still, Clark said the Republican Party is making sensitivity a priority. The Idaho GOP is emphasizing its ad hoc minority advisory committees, working to increase minority representation in government and seeking a Republican National Committee grant to enhance its Latino outreach efforts.