By jonetta rose barras Examiner Columnist
Vincent C. Gray has revived for his mayoral campaign the “One-City” slogan he used three years ago during his council chairman’s race. But, instead of uniting people, his rhetoric frequently exploits divisions and promotes victimhood.
“Often the District is likened to Charles Dickens’ ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ ” he said during his campaign kickoff last month. “One [is] a place of prosperity, opportunity and bustling life; the other, more evident as we travel east in the city, where life is hard, educational underachievement is routine, poverty is rampant, health care inadequate, large numbers of people out of work, housing patterns contributing to epidemic levels of social pathology, and places were hopes and dreams are snuffed out by the absence of a fair chance.”
Gray and others, who sing from the same worn hymnal, blame the government for those problems. But, he is the government.
Can we talk?
In the 1990s, during Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly’s administration, Gray headed the Department of Human Services. He represented Ward 7 from 2004 to 2006. He has been chairman since 2007.
African Americans, with their hands on the purse string, have controlled the District government for 30 years. They decided which programs were funded; how much was spent on health care; what kind of housing was built; and what jobs were offered to whom.
Gray’s two-cities jargon sounds like Marion Barry’s lost, last, least mantra, often used to stir anger among blacks against whites or those perceived to advocate the concerns of whites and the wealthy.
Ironically, following the election of Mayor Anthony A. Williams, communities Barry and Kelly failed began to receive unprecedented attention from the government. But Gray was one of Williams’ critics.
“Our current mayor is perceived as not being friendly to people,” Gray told me in 2004. Now, he has stapled that unfriendly, uncaring label to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and his administration.
The narrative Gray and his supporters peddle ignores the billions of dollars invested during Williams’ and Fenty’s terms in poor and working-class communities. Worse, it strips African Americans of the power they have acquired in this city and the country to effect change in their lives. It asserts their futures are totally dependent on government; if they can’t change it, they are doomed.
Gray’s own hardscrabble beginning defies that assertion. His parents never went to high school. The family of four lived in a one-bedroom apartment. “We were rich in values, in character and in integrity. [My parents] knew how to raise their kids right,” he said. His parents were masters of their destines and those of their children.
Why isn’t Gray selling that story of black self-determination even during segregation, when there really were two cities?
It would be nice if politicians who care about poor and working-class communities engaged in straight talk. But that wouldn’t fit Gray’s political agenda. Certainly it wouldn’t promote Fenty and his government as the city’s resident evils.
Jonetta rose barras can be reached at [email protected].
