Defining Irony?…

Over the course of the last week or so, much of the Nation has taken time out to pay tribute to and remember the late Rosa Parks. The former seamstress became the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda – an honor that has traditionally been reserved for the nation’s highest leaders.

Outside, thousands waited to pay their respects to the civil rights pioneer who helped spark the modern civil rights movement simply by refusing obey a ridiculous law and give up her seat to a white man in 1955. This started what would end up being a 381-day boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped change the face of America forever…

Or at least that was the plan anyway…

Walking through my office today I stopped for a minute to see what the talking heads on the news channels had to tell me. To my surprise there was Ray Nagin, the mayor of the city formerly known as New Orleans. How he was still able to be “mayor” and pontificate his outlooks on anyone was beyond me – so naturally I was mesmerized and wanted to hear what he had to say NOW…

At a town hall meeting with small business owners, Mayor Ray Nagin said on camera: “How do I make sure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?” Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!?

No shit, true story…Now my initial reaction was to look at one of the officers and the sergeant major (both of whom are African American) that I work with and say “Are you serious – thank God he’s not some WHITE GUY sayin’ that!” I continued to watch simply out of sheer curiosity to see WHERE they were going with this story…of course the story HAD to be asking how can a “prominent” black politician spout off such demeaning statements against another race…

Nope…they were headed in a whole DIFFERENT direction with this…

Here’s part of the transcript and link of the report filed by CBS’s Byron Pitts:
Byron Pitts: New Orleans' distinct American culture, threatened first by floodwaters,
is now threatened again, say locals, by a flood of a different sort. Sunrise to
sunset, both legal and illegal immigrants arrive here by the busload, brought in
by big corporate contractors like Halliburton. While tens of thousands of New
Orleans residents are still scattered across the country, the crescent city's
newest occupants are fed, clothed, and housed in makeshift living quarters
around the city.
"Nuevo New Orleans," they call it, where construction work
and day labor is plentiful, unless you were born and raised in New Orleans.

In disbelief that a report like this was not followed up with outrage over the obvious racial bigotry being demonstrated by Mr. Nagin (and the report itself for that matter), I quickly recalled that last week or so, the headlines out of the very same city were that there was PLENTY of work, but no one willing to do it…not that people there COULDN’T do it – it was that the people there WOULDN’T do the menial labor necessary to clean out a city that was completely ravaged by water.

The pay is low, the work is hard and the people of New Orleans were basically sayin’ “FUCK THAT…I’ll be back when everything’s done – HOLLA!”

So companies were bringing in cheap labor and people willing to do the dirty work…and yes Mayor Nagin…these PEOPLE happen to be “Mexican”…Two months after the hurricane, Hispanics – both legal and illegal – have shown up to clean up and restore YOUR city. So shouldn’t you just be grateful? The fact of the matter is the people of New Orleans weren’t doing it and the rest of the country, for the most part, didn’t agree that it was OUR responsibility to foot the bill. Rather than showing your thankfulness though, you, and some of the citizens of your city, chose to lash out and shed light on what appear to be some rather substantial racist tendencies.

For more than a century, people in this country – black and white – have worked to erase hate and prejudice. And 50 years after the start of the modern civil rights movement a black mayor stands on camera and assertively attacks another race for working to rebuild HIS hometown.

While so many people are afforded the opportunity to do so many things because of so much work over the years, I’m actually very curious to know if THIS is really how far we’ve come.

And more so – where’s the social unrest over THESE comments…like I said at work – can you imagine if some white dude had said this? Kanye’d be back on TV in a flash…

One does have to wonder why there is no outrage over these remarks.

So while we lay a woman to rest who represented SO much of what this country has been able to become socially and morally and "gave every ounce of her devotion" to fighting racial inequality, Nagin and his ilk have apparently missed the point.

I’m eagerly waiting though, for Kanye’s latest proclamation:
“Ray Nagin Hates Mexicans!”