(The Root) — Mayor Adrian Fenty’s loss in Washington, D.C., last week was a crying shame. Black wiser heads muse about how the system prevents black people from voting “their interests” — Harvard Law’s Lani Guinier comes to mind — and yet black D.C. residents kicked out a mayor who, along with schools chief Michelle Rhee, was making the first serious difference in decades in the city’s notoriously decrepit school system.
Last time I checked, public education was supposed to be pretty high on the list of black people’s “interests.” Especially among what Guinier termed “authentic” black people — by which she meant ones rooted in the black cultural experience. D.C.’s pretty “authentic,” no?
The official post-mortem is that Fenty’s reforms required firing and stepping on the toes of too many black people themselves, including ones in the teachers unions. But let’s face it: There would be no way to change an urban school system without doing those things.
