• Councilman-elect Mike Barber: "Most people have moved on from this race issue in the past forty years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, except for people who want to titillate and exploit."

YesWeekly's Jordan Green has done some digging and unearthed parallels concerning voting patterns of Greensboro's City Council.  Entitled City Council votes, in black and white, Green's article looked at three hot-button issues that have landed in front of our Council in recent years.

The article quotes Guilford College professor Barton Parks' testimony before the Truth & Reconciliation Commission on conclusions that might be drawn from three recent racially divided City Council votes - namely, this year's vote to oppose the T&R Commission, the 2000 vote on adopting a 'living wage' ordinance and another 2000 vote to empower a subpoena equipped 'citizen's review board' for police oversight.  Parks sees a pattern...

"Whenever you have the lower classes or the people of color in Greensboro asserting their rights, the behavior of the white members of the city council has reflected the interests of corporate Greensboro and the racially prejudiced middle and upper classes... It's a combination of considering themselves better people and being fearful of lower-class people of color getting any power."

But Green went even further and asked each of the three newly elected Council members how they would have voted if they had been on the Council at the time.  Sandra Anderson declined to speculate, but District 2's Goldie Wells says she would have voted in favor of all three issues.  Then it was District 4's Mike Barber's turn. 

In comments that portend a probable continuation of a racially and economically disconnected Greensboro, Mike says he would have voted against endorsing the T&R and the living wage ordinance, and the review board.  He gives his reasons why and offers that such votes splitting along racial lines should not be surprising and blames the district system for such divisions...

"If a body is elected in totality in an at-large framework then decisions are made with the best interests of the community... district representatives will analyze the demographics of their district and vote accordingly."

What is Councilman-elect Barber trying to say here?  Is he insinuating that the adoption of the district system is a bad thing for doing the City's business?  Does he believe that black representatives vote in a way that is not "in the best interests of the community"? 

And exactly whose 'community' is he speaking of, anyway? 

Professor Parks may have nailed it.

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Some angry children have taken over the comment section of Doug Clark's Off the Record blog.

Today, Clark posted about how PETA has a problem with UNC's use of labaratory animals.  It didn't take long for the twelve-year-olds to turn the conversation to the crux of the problem - the High Point school lottery.

Yesterday, the N&R editorialist was wondering about some attendance numbers for October's furniture market.  That post was commented on primarily by 10 and 11 year-olds who put much of the blame for the High Point Market's waning buyer attendance squarely on the shoulders of - you guessed it - the High Point school lottery.

My concern is that when our School Board finally votes to scrap the High Point 'Choice Plan' (and that day is probably not far off), the vitriolic children who populate the comment sections of some N&R blogs will give each other cyber high-fives convinced that the whole reversal was due to their Tourettes-like repetition of boy's bathroom-speak, when the truth is -  it will have been reversed simply because the ill-advised experiment didn't work.

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