ismh:

Geoff Calkins nails it. Herenton is right about the all-white representation being a bad thing, but wrong about being the right guy to change it.

I disagree that Memphis having all-white representation in Congress is, based solely on that fact, a bad thing. If the best man or woman for the job is white, or black, or Hispanic, or Middle Eastern, or, hell, purple with pink polka dots, that person should be who is elected.

This notion that Herenton will be a better U.S. Representative than Steve Cohen just because he’s black and Cohen is white is (of course) ludicrous, but equally dangerous (and pernicious in Memphis’s political culture) is this notion that because there are more black people than white people in Memphis, the government must necessarily be run by black people as well.

We’ve got to figure out a way to change the politics in this city, away from not only racism (on both sides of the apparent racial divide) but also away from revenge and you people are too different from us to understand and/or live with us, on both sides of the racial divide. It’s like the violence in Palestine: retribution and retribution and retribution, and without standing up, without choosing not to just “let black people also have power” but to cease to see racial identity as a criterion for judging a candidate, Memphis will never be better. It just won’t.

Posted at 10:37am.