Joe Lieberman's Son Is Running For Senate. He Also Wrote A Book Filled With Racist Tropes.
A Democratic Senate candidate in Georgia wrote and self-published a deeply bizarre novel in 2018, featuring a main character who believes that for most of his life he owned an imaginary slave who could communicate with plants and animals.
The candidate, Matt Lieberman, is a lawyer, former educator and the son of former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. Lieberman is running in the all-party special election to replace Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired in 2018.
Lieberman told HuffPost he wrote the book, titled “Lucius” after the name of the imaginary slave, in the wake of the 2017 white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “an honest examination of enduring racism against Blacks — which is real, harmful and totally infuriating.”
The main character, an elderly white southern man named Benno, regularly deploys the N-word and says some members of the Ku Klux Klan were “basically good people.” The 213-page novel, in which the racist main character tells the story of his life to a narrator with a biography similar to Lieberman’s, ultimately suggests Lucius functioned as a sort of pet for Benno.
“I know my approach to this delicate subject is not palatable for every reader,” Lieberman wrote in a statement. “I expected some readers to react with disgust.”
On that front, Lieberman was right. James Woodall, the president of the state NAACP chapter, told HuffPost in a phone interview the book contained “racist tropes.” He said Lieberman should drop out of the Senate race.
“In my personal opinion, this would just exacerbate a tough time for us as a state. He should drop out of the race,” Woodall said. “If he wants to be an author or a writer, he should just do that.”
Lieberman is one of two prominent Democrats running in the all-party primary, which is set for Election Day and also features two high-profile Republicans. If no candidate earns a majority of the vote ― the likely outcome ― the race will be decided by a...
