MLK Day's Double Standard

On the very day that the US government has set aside ostensibly to remember the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King's struggle for a color-blind society, the Mayor of New Orleans gives a racially charged speech declaring that:

"It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans _ the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

Mayor Nagin made his declaration before hundreds of spectators, who responded approvingly, and scores of reporters, not one of whom took him to task for it. The remarks were carried - including the "chocolate" remark - on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, without any commentary whatsoever.

Just imagine, for an instant, if the mayor of a devastated town in Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama, whose pre-storm population came out and said,

"This town will be rebuilt. And it will rebuilt vanilla. This town has always been white and will always be white. God wants it that way."

Does anyone want to suggest that such statements would have been anything other than the top news story, reported as evidence of southern racism, eliciting long, tortured commentary by pensive journalists about the problem of American (read: white) racism. Does anyone fail to believe that the very next day Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton & Co. would be on their way to that town to "march for justice," demanding the mayor's resignation in addition to a government funded plan to "de-segregate"the town?

But, no. The mayor of a major US city, one that has been pleading for the help of the entire nation - demanding it, actually - openly declares that his city will remain black, because that's how God intended it. And because Mayor Nagin is black, and because he said New Orleans should be black rather than white, no one will criticize a word of it. And this just a few months after the US Airforce Academy football coach was nearly run off campus because he said his team needed more black players, because black players were better.

And that is how the MSM and the cowed, politically correct political elite celebrate the color-blind vision of Dr. Martin Luther King.