Post-Racial in D.C.? Not Yet
Posted By The Editors | September 24th, 2010 | Category: Hot Topics | No Comments »
Print This Post By Lee A. Daniels
Both mayoral candidates in Washington D.C.’s Democratic primary earlier this month were black. But that didn’t prevent the contest from becoming a heated referendum on race relations and racial politics at the local level of the nation’s capitol.
And when the vote-counting ended, Adrian Fenty, the erstwhile wunderkind who four years ago swept into the Mayor’s office on the wings of a citywide, multi-racial coalition, had been solidly defeated by D.C. City Council Chairman Vincent Gray.
The 67-year-old Gray, a career public servant, benefited from the stunning defection of the bulwark of Fenty’s erstwhile coalition: black voters. That defection was led by the city’s black middle class – the very voting bloc which had been the foundation of his remarkable electoral success as a city councilor and as a mayoral candidate. Gray even bested Fenty in the latter’s solidly black-middle-class neighborhood, garnering 56 percent of the vote.
To be sure, the Fenty-Gray vote wasn’t completely split along racial lines. But overall, the voting tally broken out by race was stark. A Washington Post analysis showed that Fenty won 53 of the city’s majority-white census tracts but only 10 of the predominantly-black ones. By contrast, Gray won just 5 majority-white census tracts but 108 predominantly-black ones.
Some have characterized Fenty’s defeat as black voters’ decisive rejection of a mayoralty and a city government based on competence, government efficiency and ‘best practices,” as one analysis in the Post stated, which it defined as the credo of an “Obama-style, post-racial black politician.”
That’s not a correct assessment, of course.
For one thing, the rise of the Tea Party and the deluge of racist anti-Obama comments since his inauguration; the anti-Latino reaction; and the new surge in anti-Muslim-American bigotry have proved conclusively that America is nowhere near a “post-racial” status.
For another, black politicians building multi-racial electoral coalitions by pledging their commitment to “competent” and “efficient” governmental practices is by no means a new phenomenon. For Example, it’s how Edward W. Brooke, in getting elected in 1962 as state Attorney General in Massachusetts, became the first African American elected to a statewide office in America since the Reconstruction era. It’s how Carl Stokes in 1967 became the first black American elected Mayor of a major American city.
Furthermore, the “black post-racial politician” notion has always had a peculiar, one-sided definition to it: none of its proponents has ever suggested any need for white politicians to adopt a “post-racial” posture, too.
In fact, it was apparent from the moment that particular boomlet began that the so-called post-racial black politician was merely a straw-man, a figment of those who would require black politicians to appease whites by surrendering any identification with black voters that would produce tangible benefits for the myriad problems afflicting black Americans.
Black voters in Washington overwhelmingly rejected Adrian Fenty’s bid for a second term, not the goal of a competent, efficient city government, because once in office, he had turned his back on them in myriad ways — most spectacularly by appointing a schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, whose abrasiveness and errors in judgment in pushing education reform for the schools became a major factor in his defeat. “Fenty was elected by us, and Fenty forgot about us,” is the way one black Washingtonian put it.
In other words, the black vote against Adrian Fenty was the second stinging rebuke – after the stunning loss of Rep. Artur Davis, D-AL in that state’s Democratic primary — black voters delivered this year to a highly-visible black politician they had previously overwhelmingly supported but came to feel had pushed them and their concerns to the back of the bus.
The message, in Washington as in Alabama, was the same: That black voters won’t stand for second-class treatment from black or white officeholders. They know how to play the political game and won’t hesitate to use their power to discipline as well as support those who seek to represent them.
Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.
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