Racial Politics

The whole race argument around Governor Blagojevitch’s  appointment of Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to the US Senate is tiresome and unfounded.  Even Burris himself was quoted by Senator Harry Reid as saying “Hey, this is nothing racial. Do you understand that?”

So, why is there this mist of racial politics hanging around this thing?

Well first of all, part of this has to do with the media, which are always looking at news through the lens of racial conflict which tends to draw eyeballs whenever mentioned.  I’ve bitched and moaned about this media bias ever since I was a freelancer for the BBC and British newspapers in the late 1980’s.  But rational arguments on behalf of balanced coverage be damned – “if it bleeds, it leads” as newspaper editors like to say.  And nothing bleeds like racial conflict.

It’s also really easy for cable news talking heads to ask the question “is there a racial component to this problem?” and punt it around with grave seriousness for a few news cycles without any definitive yes or no conclusion.

But, the question of the Senate having a racial bias against Burris also has a hell of a lot to do with who brought it up in the first place; none other than Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, who used the racial hot-button codeword “lynching” in Burris’ press conference.

(email continues here...) Now, I have nothing against Rush at all and apparently he’s been serving his constituents in Chicago’s South Side – which has a higher percentage of African Americans than any other congressional district in the nation – very well. Hell, they’ve been returning him to Congress every two years since 1993.

But, we should also take note that Rush was co-founder of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and very active in the civil rights movement.  And, right before the Burris appointment, he also made it abundantly clear that an African American – not just any old qualified candidate, but specifically an African American - should fill Obama’s vacant Senate seat.

Basically, what I’m saying is that Rush, like each of us, looks at life through a number of different lenses – one of which is most certainly about how African Americans have gotten the proverbial shaft every which way to Sunday since the founding of this great country.  And the fact the nation’s most exclusive club, the US Senate, could really benefit from more diversity, adds some fuel to this fire. Fair enough.

But, on his own merits, and according to everyone who knows anything about these things, Roland Burris is eminently qualified to replace Barack Obama in the Senate.  If Gov. Blagojevitch wasn’t such a fool (see my previous post: Stickier and Stickier Fools) then we wouldn’t be discussing Burris’ appointment at all.  It would have been a done deal last year and we’d be on to other nonsense.

So, if we’re going to ask “Who’s behind the racial debate around the Burris appointment?” it’s just really important for us all to bear in mind that old saying… “Consider the source.”  In this case, it’s the media and Congressman Bobby Rush.