Racial rhetoric has been increasingly used in the fight to free the District from federal oversightas city officials gear up for a sustained battle with Congress.
“When we celebrate Emancipation Day in the District, wouldn’t it be nice if we were emancipated ourselves?” D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray said Thursday during a news conference focused on his fight against a congressional push to revive a city school voucher program. The District celebrates the day about 3,100 slaves were freed in D.C. on April 16, 1862. “Many of their successors live in the District of Columbia today who are not emancipated,” Gray said.
Congress approved a measure attached to a budget bill Thursday that will bring the school voucher program back to D.C. Funding for the program that provides federal dollars for student to attend private schools was discontinued in 2009. It’s one of a series of items attached to the federal spending bill that has outraged local officials. A ban on the city spending local dollars on abortions led Gray and a half-dozen council members to get arrested in protest Monday. Since then, the mayor has been beating a drum for D.C. rights every day. He’ll continue Friday by joining a midday protest on Capitol Hill.
Gray isn’t alone in using slavery as a link to the city’s plight under federal control.
On Wednesday, at-large D.C. Councilman Michael Brown used the phrase “massuh” in an interview on WMAL radio. It refers to how black slaves would address plantation owners. Brown was among the 41 arrested during Monday’s protest.
“They can treat us as their guinea pigs, they can treat us as a Petri dish, and as I called it, they treat us as a colony or a plantation. … What’s next, we have to call them massuh?” Brown said.
In a Thursday interview on WAMU, Brown explained that he used “massuh” in the context of how “some folks on the Hill treat us like a plantation here in the District of Columbia.”
The idea of the city being used as a “Petri dish” for federal experiments resonated at Thursday’s news conference, where officials and advocates argued against the voucher program.
As Gray put it, “what [the voucher program] represents is the use of the District and her 600,000 residents as … guinea pigs for the favorite social experiments of important congressional leaders.”
