Memo To Bobby: Mau-Mauing Is So Over

ROD, BOBBY AND ROLAND

In 1970, Tom Wolfe published a sublime little book, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, that spoke volumes about race relations in America.

Radical Chic was set in composer Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue duplex where he had invited wealthy socialite friends to meet with Black Panther Party representatives to discuss ways to help their cause. The Bernsteins could not be seen with their usual black butler and maid, so they hired whites. Wolfe labeled the celebrity guests as "radical chic" because of their pursuit of radical ends to assuage their white guilt and be seen as socially hip.

Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers was set in an anti-poverty program office in San Francisco where workers would hand out money to anyone who approached them, be they black or any other minority with a sob story. All had found ways to game the system, my favorite being the mau-mauer who would hand over ice picks, switch blades and other items that he claimed he took from street gangs in exchange for payments from the program.

Wolfe's trenchant send-ups have seemed archaic period pieces for years, while the election of Barack Obama has pretty much rendered moot claims from blacks that they should get special treatment just because they're black.

But Bobby Rush hasn't gotten the message.

The black congressman from Chicago joined Governor Rod Blagojevich and Roland Burris, the black politician whom the disgraced governor had plucked from obscurity and just named to fill Obama's vacated Senate seat, to declare that he gave the appointment his personal seal of approval because Obama's seat just had to go to a black.

Rush was so eager to be a part of Blago's racially-tinged power play that he later declared on a television news show that "The moral issue we face is why in the U.S. Senate there are no African-Americans."

Senate Democrats have pledged to refuse to seat Burris or any other appointee picked by Blagojevich, which prompted Rush to compare Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who in 1963 stood in the doorway of a University of Alabama school building to block two black students from entering.

Rush's complicity in Blago's blackmail stands in contrast to his lack of concern for black empowerment in the past elections.

In 2004, he chaired the unsuccessful Senate campaign of Blair Hull, a white gadzillionaire who made his nut as part of a notorious card-counting ring that operated at Nevada blackjack tables in the 1970s. And in 2002, he supported a party insider white over a white who consistently championed black concerns for Illinois state treasurer.

While Rush deserves a kick in the slats for his hypocritical mau-mauing, the historic lack of black representation in the Senate -- and myriad other places as well -- is neverthless shameful. But Rush is not summoning bitter memories of past injustices; rather, he is conveniently forgetting that the Senate's sole black is moving on to the Oval Office after a watershed election in which tens of millions of Americans renounced racism and racial stereotyping.

Playing the race card is especially odious in this instance because it assumes that blacks are so monolithic that they will automatically oppose anyone who doesn't support a black candidate.

But most importantly, it doesn't take into account that a skinny black guy from the Land of Lincoln has opened the door wide for other people of color to succeed at the highest levels of government on their own merits, as they should, and not because they kiss the ring of a throwback hack like Bobby Rush.

Top photograph by Paul Beaty/The Associated Press