The Ridley-Thomas Vote Plan: Blacks for Blacks and, Yes, Whites for Whites

Lucky is the graduation class that invites Mr. Ridley-Thomas to be its commencement speaker.

But I suspect he was elected more for his legislating than his oratorical skills.

When are the rest of us going to be considered?

The echoes hardly had died down the other day from admitting his interest in still another political job when he was stirring the racial pot again.

Crassness is not the issue here or you would have to reserve the Coliseum for a night.

The problem — and the senator is a problem — is that Mr. Ridley-Thomas shleps around Sacramento wielding a giant hammer inscribed with four gold letters” r-a—c-e.

He may not make legislative news. But he knows the exact temperature in the black community at all hours.

So Typical of Him

He dashed off a classic Ridley-Thomas letter to the editor that ran in last Saturday’s Los Angeles Times.

Subtle as a machine gun where race is the subject, the senator revealed himself in his first five words.

“Race matters in representative government,” his letter began.

A white supremacist could not have been more direct — or hurtful or “exclusionary,” as Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s fellow liberals love to say.

Where is the mantra of inclusion that liberals swing around their calculating heads like a Wal-Mart boomerang, senator?

Let’s Serve a Few People

I interpret his declaration to mean that when, for example, the senator signs off on a dam bill, he first calculates whether the water and the transportation factor will benefit more blacks, more whites?

That must be a justification for members of the California Legislature to milk the calendar and remain in session longer than most other states’. The heavily ethnic legislators do their daily racial arithmetic.

Actually, Mr. Ridley-Thomas was defending the unseemly scramble in the black community to succeed the late Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald — darned near before her body was even cold.

The Silly Season

This is another one of those cartoonish Congressional districts.

Only Democrats are permitted to compete.

(Don’t ask about free speech or choice. Those values only are applicable to non-Democrats.)

Ms. Millender-McDonald’s district covers Long Beach, Carson and Compton. As far as Mr. Ridley-Thomas is concerned, the problem with the field of candidates is that the contenders are of more than one color. Oops.

Who Is Bad and Who Is Good?

State Sen. Jenny Oropeza — who is Hispanic — is the enemy in this case.

In the crowded field, she will be bidding mainly in next month’s special election against Assemblymember Laura Richardson, who is black, and Ms. Millender-McDonald’s daughter, who views the seat as a family heirloom to be deeded only to her.

This is another one of those ethnic seats that makes politicians and “community leaders” go bug-eyed, allowing them to act like little boys and little girls again.

It has been ruled, irreversibly, by black power brokers that ward bosses and ordinary voters shall not allow this seat to go to a non-black in the special election of June 26.

But It Is Racist

Defending this ludicrous, fiercely racist thinking, Mr. Ridley-Thomas has twisted himself into such a pretzel that he looked as if he had three stomachs in his three-paragraph letter.

He pins his tissue-thick logic on the Voting Rights Act of four decades ago. To say it differently, the senator believes:

Once a victim, always a victim.

Now we come to the liberal Democratic mantra that animates Mr. Ridley-Thomas:

There shall be no recovery from victimhood.

Brimming with amazing thoughts, Mr. Ridley-Thomas not so deftly puts a modern spin on the voting philosophy that the KKK and other white supremacists have been propagating for more than a century:

“Voters routinely cast ballots for candidates they feel are like themselves and share their concerns.”

The stupidity of a black man supporting that view is staggering.

Is the correct point too subtle to identify?

How Could He Forget?

Apparently, the senator has forgotten one of the worst episodes of the black historic experience in America.

In his next sentence, Mr. Ridley-Thomas shows us how he has been spending his long and empty days and nights. Helpfully, he identifies the four leading ethnic groups in Ms. Millender-McDonald’s district:

26 percent African American, 49 percent Anglo, 19 percent Latino, 5 percent Asian.

Therefore what?

It seems to me Mr. Ridley-Thomas never has recovered from the job he held when he came to wide public attention a quarter-century ago, promoting blacks.

But That Was His Job Then

As regional director of the estimable Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was committed to seriously assimilating ordinary blacks into the voting process and brainier blacks into leadership roles.

To no one’s surprise these days, Mr. Ridley-Thomas, a veteran job-changer, is talking job change again. Why not? He already has been a state senator for six months.

He climbed from the Los Angeles City Council to the state Assembly. When termed out, he jumped over to the state Senate last November.

Serving Piping Hot Sups

Just last week, he acknowledged his right eye is on what is known as the black chair on the County Board of Supervisors, the seat long held by Yvonne Brathwaite Burke who apparently is going to retire next year.

We wish Sen. Ridley-Thomas a speedy recovery.