In what may go down as the anti-white-bashing piece of the year, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd opened her July 24 op-ed column with this sentence: “The Obama White House is too white.”
Dowd is a talented writer, but who knew she was an absolute hoot as well?
It’s one thing to take a president to task because he or she may not have enough black advisers, but can you believe a white woman chiding President Obama for not having black advisers “who are descended from the central African-American experience”?
And exactly what, Ms. Dowd, is the “central African-American experience”? Ask 20 different black Americans and you might get 20 different answers.
But Dowd didn’t write her column without consulting with black elected officials first. She’s too good a columnist for that. She quoted someone she described as a “top black Democrat” who knew exactly what the “central African-American experience” is. Obama, according to Top Black Democrat, needs black advisers who “understand the slave thing.”
Let me dispose of this nonsense here and now: Top Black Democrat has no better understanding of “the slave thing” than you or I do because he — or she — has never been a slave. TBD and I do know that our ancestors were slaves, and that the experience was brutally dehumanizing. We know the history after slavery supposedly ended in 1865 was pretty gruesome as well. Other than that, we have no understanding of “the slave thing.”
In fact, I may have one up on TBD in understanding the slave thing. I have black ancestors who were slaves, and at least one white one. She was my great-great-grandmother, who, in 1852, married what was called a “free man of color” in Southern Maryland. She was an indentured servant from France, one of many European female immigrants of that era who were indentured servants as well. I suspect TBD would dismiss their experience with a snort and a sneer.
But back to Dowd: She quoted South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and District of Columbia House of Representatives Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton to bolster her case. Obama, Clyburn and Norton contended, needed to consult at least one black adviser to avoid the embarrassing fallout from the Shirley Sherrod affair. Dowd ended her column by suggesting that the Obama administration not give Sherrod that “unique position” in the Department of Agriculture, but a job as “Director of Black Outreach” instead.
I give Sherrod a thumbs down when it comes to that position. Her statement about conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, black Americans and slavery clearly shows she needs to spend more time with her brain in drive and her mouth in park. But I have a perfect candidate for a proposed “Director of Black Outreach” in the Obama administration.
That would be Pookie from lower Park Heights in Baltimore. Or it could be Bey Bey from Southeast Washington, D.C. What are the advantages of having a Pookie or a Bey Bey as a director of black outreach? Oh, several.
1. Pookie or Bey Bey might — or might not — have an understanding of “the slave thing,” but they probably wouldn’t give a tinker’s dam about it either.
2. Pookie and Bey Bey would be more concerned about adequate schools in their communities.
3. They’d be more concerned about the drug dealers and criminals ravaging their communities.
4. And they might understand that poor black folks need firearms for their protection.
Sherrod as Obama’s “Director of Black Outreach”? Better go with Pookie from lower Park Heights.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
