Bush appointment is really a step back for diversity.

[undergroundrailroad]

CIVIL RIGHTS: Bush appointment is really a step back for diversity

December 15, 2004

President George W. Bush will surely hold up his appointment of African-American attorney Gerald Reynolds to head the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as another example of the diversity in hisadministration. But there's no diversity beyond skin shade reflected in the naming of the conservative Reynolds, an avowed foe of affirmative action who has said that racial discrimination is generally an overblownissue.

As such, Reynolds is a questionable choice to head an agency that was spawned by the civil rights movement and is charged with serving as the government's conscience on issues of race and equal opportunity.

However, a conservative president is empowered to name conservative appointees. Reynolds will certainly take the commission in a direction more to the liking of a president, who has been demonstrably tone deaf on civil rights issues.

The commission's main job is to investigate and to publicly highlight charges of racial discrimination

[msgadget]

1. His brown self is a step back to denial

This one just made me tired, girl. I mean, how much can one woman rant? But considering this:

The commission's main job is to investigate and to publicly highlight charges of racial discrimination.

After hearing him say, basically, he hadn't noticed if he'd ever experienced said racial discrimination in his lifetime...'nuf said.

OF COURSE, I realize he was trying to illustrate that 'his brown self' just pushed ahead without using race as an 'excuse' but I know his true intent is to marginalize race as an issue.

[rogue emissary]

2. Why do conservatives always find

. . . lightweights to fill the jobs of great African Americans? They did the same thing when they put Clarence Thomas into Thurgood Marshall's seat. Now, they've not only replaced Mary Frances Berry with conservative Gerald Reynolds. Bush fires her specifically because she continues to fight for us.

Some Reynolds quotes, from a http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/10/national/10reynolds.html">New York Times article.

"I just assume somewhere in my life some knucklehead has looked at me and my brown self and said that they have given me less or denied me an opportunity," said the chairman, Gerald A. Reynolds, 41, an African-American lawyer. "But the bottom line is, and my wife will attest to this, I am so insensitive that I probably didn't notice."

. . . Though he took pains to say racial discrimination exists, he also said it is surmountable with fortitude and made no bones about his belief that traditional civil rights groups - which he has sharply criticized in the past - overstate the problem. He plans a more skeptical approach.

"Somebody can look at disparities in income and home ownership and conclude that it is due to discrimination, but before you can do that you have to perform an investigation because there are other factors that could explain these disparities," he said. "The disparities could be the result of discrimination or it could the result of something else that has no relation to discriminatory conduct."


What doesn't make since to me, is you have to perform investigation before you call disparity racism. Then how do you get them involved to perform the investigation in the first place, if you can't call it racism to start the investigation? :grr: