Goode ‘smearing’ Perriello

Virgil Goode, the hard-right GOP candidate in my own district’s congressional race has come out with a television ad that literally tries to “smear” Democratic candidate Tom Perriello as being dark-complected and wearing a bushy full beard. (HT Satyam at Think Progress.)
What kind of deep-held, atavistic fears of “the negro men rising up against the whites” is Goode playing to here?
Tom Perriello as Nat Turner, anyone?
Turner was a deeply religious (Christian, Baptist) man who organized a violent uprising of Virginia’s enslaved negroes in 1831. Even earlier than that, though, white Virginia slaveowner Thomas Jefferson penned numerous warnings about the possibility of the enslaved people– who in many parts of the state decisively outnumbered the whites– rising up against their “masters.” Those fears of the autonomous, untrammelled activity of Americans of African origin may have sprung in some part from the slaveowners’ guilt. But they still run deep in the psyches of some white southerners today.
For what it’s worth, Tom Perrillo is a light-skinned man of Italian heritage.
Virgil Goode should be ashamed of himself.
(But does this mean he’s running a bit scared of losing what until recently looked like a fairly safe seat?)