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There are profound lessons to
be learned from the ongoing travails of Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), under siege by white America at
large, the leadership of her own party, and the chairman
of her own caucus.
In the aftermath of McKinney’s
run-in with a Capitol Hill police officer, we have
witnessed an orgy of unadulterated defamation that is
actually directed at Black women in general. In
rejecting and denouncing McKinney’s defense, her
tormentors demonstrate that the very concept of racial
profiling was never sincerely accepted among most white
Americans, and that 9/11 is just an excuse for undoing
decades of legal and political struggles against the
abominable practice.
So virulent and shameless have
been the attacks on McKinney – spewing caricatures of
the six-term lawmaker that reflect whites’ own
hallucinatory visions of Black people – it leads us to
conclude that racists are conducting a kind of ritual,
an exorcism to cast the “militant Black” out of the
national polity, once and for all. Disgustingly, a
number of Black voices have joined mob, in order to
prove that they are reasonable and trustworthy Negroes
who won’t intrude on white folks’ illusions of
innocence.
Most distressingly, the
McKinney affair dramatically demonstrates that the
Congressional Black Caucus has been eviscerated as a
body. The CBC is revealed as collectively gutless,
devoid of any semblance of Black solidarity, without
which it has no reason for being.
CBC Hits New Low
We at BC had previously
believed that April, 2005, when 37 percent of the 42
Black House members voted for Republican bills, was the
lowest point in Congressional Black Caucus history. A
year later, the CBC has found a new nadir. On the
evening of April 5, undoubtedly on orders from House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, CBC chairman Mel Watt
gathered twenty or so members to browbeat McKinney into
firing her legal team and cease appearing before the
media. Watt absented himself from the beat-down, so that
it would not appear to be an “official” CBC event.
As congressional aides wandered
in and out of the room, some Members dutifully echoed
Pelosi’s demand that McKinney not frame the March 28
confrontation with the policeman as a “racial” incident,
and that she issue an apology on the House floor the
following morning. According to several sources who
spoke with BC on condition of anonymity, and based on an
account given by McKinney staff assistant Faye Coffield
to a weekly Atlanta meeting of the Georgia Coalition for
the People's Agenda, a “consensus” was reached that
McKinney would deliver the apology and abandon efforts
to defend herself in the media (although not her legal
team).
The next morning, at the
appointed hour, McKinney was prepared to offer her
apology to the House. But Mel Watt had already put the
word out that CBC members were to renege on their part
of the deal. The Caucus must not stand with McKinney
when she stepped to the microphone. Mel Watt, Nancy
Pelosi’s poodle, attempted to enforce his Mistress’s
wish that McKinney appear utterly isolated and alone.
Nothing should distract from the Democrats’ non-strategy
of doing and saying nothing until mid-term elections in
November. The Republicans must be allowed to
self-destruct without interference. McKinney’s charge of
racial profiling was a distraction from the Democratic
non-strategy – so she must be shunned. Mel Watt was the
enforcer – the designated shunner-in-chief.
Pelosi appears to harbor a deep
hatred for McKinney, whom she cannot control. Most
recently, the 51-year-old Georgia lawmaker defied the
Leader’s orders, voting in favor of a Republican bill,
cynically modeled on Democrat John Murtha’s measure for
a quick exit from Iraq. She was among only three
Democrats, and the only CBC member, to do so. McKinney
also ignored Pelosi’s order that Democrats boycott
hearings on Katrina and leave the field to
Republicans.
However, Pelosi has been the
aggressor all along, bent on bringing the CBC and other
progressives to heel as she pursues her spineless
non-strategy for victory by default over the GOP – a
scenario that by definition requires African Americans
to mute their own demands, to be quiet and compliant.
When McKinney returned to congress in January 2005 after
a two-year hiatus, Pelosi denied her seniority, bumping
her down to freshman status despite her previous ten
years on The Hill. Not a peep from the CBC, cowed by
their Leader and, recent events have shown, packed with
members who are themselves fearful that McKinney’s
militancy will raise the bar of constituent expectations
for their own performances on Black people’s behalf.
On the House floor, the morning
of April 6, Pelosi/Watt had set McKinney up for further
humiliation. Not only would she be required to deliver
an apology that would be seen as an admission of guilt
(by those who had already condemned and defamed her),
but the absence of CBC members at her side would mark
her as a lone “extremist,” a “loon” whose politics could
be dismissed out of hand. Why, even McKinney’s own
colleagues won’t stand with her. She’s crazy (like the
rest of those darkies who cry racism).
According to several
congressional sources, McKinney confronted a gaggle of
CBC members, reminding them of the consensus agreement
of the night before, in which they had promised a
display of physical solidarity at the microphone in
return for her concessions. White Congresswoman Marcy
Kaptur (D-OH), seeing the commotion, hurried over to the
Black circle: “I’ll stand with you, Cynthia.” Others
stepped forward to fulfill their pledge, despite CBC
chairman Mel Watt’s treacherous machinations.
Here is a partial list of those
who were videotaped standing with McKinney when she read
the words of apology that had been demanded of her:
* Elijah
Cummings (MD)
* Carolyn Cheeks
Kilpatrick (MI)
* Barbara Lee
(CA)
* Alcee Hastings
(FL)
* Maxine Waters
(CA)
* Bobby Rush
(IL)
* Corrine Brown
(FL)
* Major Owens
(NY)
* Sheila Jackson-Lee
(TX)
Marcy Kaptur
(OH)
Dennis Kucinich
(OH)
Jose Serrano
(NY)
Bob Filner
(CA)
*CBC members
Only nine of the 20-plus CBC
members who had reached “consensus” on standing with
their sister the night before, bucked Pelosi’s petty
dictatorial edict – and straw-boss Mel Watt’s attempt to
enforce it.
Once upon a time, the CBC could
collectively call itself “the conscience of the
congress.” No more.
Multi-Profiling and Sheer
Malevolence
By bowing to Pelosi, Black
congresspersons reinforce her and other white’s belief
that they can pick and choose the African American
leaders and representatives they deal with, and isolate
the rest, while still retaining mass Black support for
the Democratic Party. Such Blacks are enablers of
racism, and must eventually pay the price at the hands
of their constituents, who are no different than the
Black Georgia voters who sent McKinney to Washington six
times. Worse, in urging McKinney to drop the “racial”
aspect of her defense – to pretend that she was not
racially profiled, when they know that police profiling
is near-universal – they do grave injury to fundamental
Black interests.
Days after his attempt to pound
McKinney into dust, the duplicitous Mel Watt related to
the Charlotte Observer his own scary run-in with Capitol
police “a year or so ago”:
"I was
running to the floor to vote and an officer said, `Can I
see your ID?' and I said, `No' and kept running. I
looked back and he had his hand on his gun. Then another
(Capitol) police officer said, `Member.' He recognized
me (as a House member). It just so happened that the
first (officer) was white and the other one was black
... I was probably very rash. In retrospect, I thought
to myself, `You had to be out of your mind.' I was
trying to get to a vote and he had a job to do."
Watt understands very well that
the Black officer, who didn’t go for his gun, but
instead called his white partner off, was intervening in
a case of racial profiling. Yet Watt’s desire to stay in
the good graces of his Leader, Pelosi, drives him to
conspire against a fellow Black congressperson, Cynthia
McKinney, whose recent hair makeover is said to have
made her fair game to be accosted by Capitol police.
Said McKinney:
“Do I have
to contact the police every time I change my hairstyle?
How do we account for the fact that when I wore my
braids every day for 11 years, I still faced this
problem, primarily from certain police officers.”
Nobody knows better than Black
officers that racism is rampant in the Capitol Police
force. Of the 1,200 officers, 29 percent are Black, and
many still have racial bias suits outstanding. "You
have, basically, a renegade police department up here,
that’s been operating under the protection of Congress,"
said Charles J. Ware, an attorney representing the
Capitol Black Police Association.
But it’s not just race. Police
officers, like workers in any organization, spend much
of their time talking shop. For Capitol police, the
subject of their shop-talk is the members of congress
they are hired to protect. Cynthia McKinney is famous –
no less so on Capitol Hill. She is the Black woman
viciously branded as a friend of “terrorists,” the most
uppity African American in the federal legislature. The
cops are quite aware of what she looks like, new hair-do
or not.
A McKinney lawyer got it right
when he told a Howard University press conference that
his client was targeted for reasons of “sex, race and
Ms. McKinney's progressiveness."
The cops know who McKinney is –
they have profiled her politically. Michael C. Ruppert,
former Los Angeles cop and current honcho of the popular
web site From the Wilderness, has felt the police
hostility directed at his longtime friend, Cynthia
McKinney:
” I have
walked the halls of Congress with Cynthia McKinney maybe
eight to ten times. I have walked into and out of the
Cannon and Longworth house office buildings with her. I
have walked to hearings in the Rayburn house office
building with her. I have walked the underground tunnels
from one of those office buildings directly to the edge
of the House floor and its anteroom with her. I can tell
you one thing for certain because I have seen it and I
have felt it. Cynthia McKinney and her staff get treated
differently from just about anyone else on the Hill.
It’s subtle, but so is the taste of dirt when it’s in
your mouth.” | 
