Her party is identified in the second sentence, a practice usually reserved for Republicans but forced upon the AP here by the electoral ramifications of the incident. The curious thing is that it wasn’t said in anger; on the contrary, she said it at the end of a conversation expressing her gratitude for the subject’s GOTV efforts on her behalf. One of the stranger racist incidents you’ll ever hear of:

Rep. Carla Blanchard Dartez, a Democrat, acknowledged that she ended a Thursday night conversation with Hazel Boykin by saying, “Talk to you later, Buckwheat.” Dartez had been thanking Boykin for driving voters to the polls…

Boykin, 75, helped desegregate restaurants and the parish school system in the 1960s. Her son, Jerome, is president of the Terrebonne Parish chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

“I’ve never had no one talk to me that way and I considered it a racial slur,” Hazel Boykin said. “I know the meaning of it, it’s just like the N-word.”

Jerome Boykin said Monday he planned to ask voters to cast ballots against Dartez, who faces Republican Joe Harrison in Saturday’s runoff.

“At this point, the NAACP is not concerned about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. If a Republican is elected because of her racist remarks, that’s her responsibility,” he said of Dartez.

The question left unanswered by the AP article: Was “Buckwheat” some sort of Freudian slip as Dartez was trying to say “Boykin”? Or was it intentionally uttered in some bizarre half-assed attempt at camaraderie? WAFB supplies the terrible, improbable truth:

Boykin says, after his mother told him about the conversation, he called Dartez and she acknowledged she had used the “Buckwheat” reference. He says Dartez started to cry and apologized. “She said she’d gone to Walmart a couple of days ago and bought an Eddie Murphy tape and that’s what they said on the tape.” He says Dartez indicated she did not realize that the term could be interpreted as a racial slur.

Exit question one: Is Dartez really this stupid or is this just her equally half-assed cover story? Exit question two: Assuming she doesn’t resign, which WAFB says is a possibility, does she defeat the Republican anyway? (Exit answer: Yes!)