After reading this story (third item) about US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), I had a curious reaction.
The first was along these lines: “Dang, that one is showing her butt again, first with the 1997 musings on the NASA missions to Mars (um..no, sis), then with the block long limousine rides, then with the suggestion that meteorologists give more “black” designations (second item) to hurricanes and now this.
“Doesn’t she know how bad she makes black people, and, specifically, black women look?”
That thought made me pause. As someone who believes that each person should be judged by Dr. King’s proverbial content of character, I had to ask myself why Ms. Jackson Lee’s chronic weird behavior bothered me so much. I didn’t have to go too far to flesh out my discomfort.
On a certain wildly famous website on which readers submit articles for assent, ridicule, etc., many referred to Ms. Jackson Lee and “uneducated,” “stupid,” and a “b-word” in response to this latest incident. Now, she may be one, any two or all three of these and if these reports about her are true, I’d have to pick the third option.
There’s just one little problem. The people that called Ms. Jackson Lee the above also saw fit to add the adjective ‘black’ or the noun ‘negro’ to their estimations of the woman’s character and intellect. Is this significant of anything?
Once, in a conversation on LGF, one of the site’s frequent contributors, who happens to be Jewish, mentioned a familiar phenomenon. She said that when she hears a news report of a human misbehavior, she always hopes that said human isn’t Jewish. Well, guess what? Every single time that some nitwit kills a bunch of people, rapes anyone, or just generally screws up, nearly every black person I know will say to self: “Please don’t let that fool be black.” (Too often, our hopes are in vain.)
So when a public figure who happens to be black repeatedly demonstrates that she is just really not that smart and really not that nice, black people cringe, even rugged individualists like yours truly. We do this because we know that there are still some who erroneously hold black people like Ms. Jackson Lee up as an example of our alleged across-the-board inferiority and incompetence.
We also do this because, unfortunately, it’s the Sheila Jackson Lees of this country that are elected Congress to represent their constituents and, therefore, are representative of those who voted her in.
Open request to Dr. Condoleezza Rice: please come home to Cali and run for office.
