Last fall semester I wrote a column titled “Blacks loyal to corrupt candidates.” Even more unfortunate than the headline was my exposition.
I tried to articulate the idea that while the black skin of a candidate did not suffice to explain how they earned the support of the black community, black Americans had to be careful not to play into a stereotype and had a duty to be particularly circumspect of black candidates for public office.
That is what I tried to articulate but I did so poorly at the time.
In the previous column I named representatives Maxine Waters of California, Charlie Rangel of New York and former representative Jessie Jackson of Illinois as black officials who represented substantially minority districts and who were under investigation for corruption. And yet they all continued to win elections handily, with the support of their black communities. The whole affair represented the stereotype.
The loyalty these candidates garnered had much more to do with their party affiliation than their skin color, but they all deserved the mutiny of their black communities. They were poor representatives. Most of them were accused of corruption and unworthy to represent a community that has to do battle to be represented in the first place.
“It was as sad as it was appalling: a black city in which the most prominent leader plundered, pillaged and lied, all the while presenting himself as its guardian angel against the White Devil,” wrote Charlie LeDuff of Kwame Kilpatrick in “Detroit: An American Autopsy.”
The Detroit city council members play into the unfortunate stereotype as easily as the former mayor does. All of them black, none of them prepared to run a city in ruin. Detroit is not a city where it suffices to be just a concerned citizen; you must be a concerned citizen who wields some kind of expertise that is relatable to city government.
Citizens of Detroit and other black communities must find leaders, black or white, who are exemplary. The city needs leaders who are informed on matters of local economic development, municipal finance or criminal justice.
When black citizens elect black leaders, who certainly do their part to play on racial politics, it creates a bad narrative. And the narrative matters.
Because of that narrative, people blame the black residents of New Orleans for the city’s squalor rather than the hurricane and the broken levees. Because of that narrative, people blame the black residents of Detroit for its current state of destitution, rather than the titans of industry who left their fiefdom without a castle.
Because of that narrative, people incorrectly think you can win the black vote if you have black skin, and subsequently the real needs and voices of the black electorate and black communities are ignored.
