A little more on Kwame

Anant Gariola commented on my last post, "You make some good points, but something I never really understood was how after all the corruptions scandals, after being in Time magazines worst 4 mayors in the U.S. Kwami got re-elected? I am by no means (at all) an expert on race relations or racial politics but is the point you're trying to make that Kwami is no better or worse then any white mayor, its just that because he is black he doesn't get a break?"

Those are some good questions and I might have answers...to some of them.  I think that the reason why Kwame Kilpatrick got re-elected is very different from the reason  why he gets so much crap from white suburbanites.  Kwame got re-elected for many of the same reasons that Marion Barry (so near and dear to my heart from my hometown in DC) got re-elected. He is a man of the people.  While many people from the suburbs (and from Northeast DC) could not understand how a man who ran a blatantly corrupt government and  was caught in a cocaine racket (televised for weeks after the scandal) during which he exclaimed, "Goddamned bitch set me up!" could possibly be re-elected.  But he was. 
Possibly because he wasn't a tool like many thought the always bow-tied Mayor Anthony Williams to be. He did his own thing and the people of DC (who are, as a general rule, screwed over in many ways) liked that he wasn't taking shit from larger political pressures.

I guess the point that I was trying to make is that by no means would I consider Kwame to be a good mayor.  But look at what he has to work with: A bankrupt city with an powerful history of racial tensions, boom and bust job markets, awful schools and a nonexistent regional government with a habit of supporting suburbs and new infrastructure rather than supporting the city and updating the old.  I imagine that there are some worse mayors with better towns, and probably some equally bad mayors with equally bad towns (though they are probably on a smaller scale). 

Finally, the fact that many suburbanites believe a main reason for Detroit's downfall was the "driving out" of white people--as if it is the fault of the black people who were unable to move out of the city that all the white people left (and as if the only problem was white people leaving)--rather than the public policy that perpetrated an unbalanced/unfair housing market and encouraged racism along with numerous other economic factors (like partial abandonment by the auto-industry), gets me a little upset.  Sorry about the run-on sentence.

What do you all think?

~bEckY