[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 135 (Friday, December 8, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2191-E2192]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      THE McKINNEY AFFAIR--RAMPAGING RACISM AND A COWARDLY CAUCUS

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CYNTHIA McKINNEY

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, December 8, 2006

  Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the Record.

              [From the Black Commentator, Apr. 13, 2006]

      The McKinney Affair--Rampaging Racism and a Cowardly Caucus

                    (By Glen Ford and Peter Gamble)

       There are profound lessons to be learned from the ongoing 
     travails of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), under 
     siege by white America at large, the leadership of her own 
     party, and the chairman of her own caucus.
       In the aftermath of McKinney's run-in with a Capitol Hill 
     police officer, we have witnessed an orgy of unadulterated 
     defamation that is actually directed at Black women in 
     general. In rejecting and denouncing McKinney's defense, her 
     tormentors demonstrate that the very concept of racial 
     profiling was never sincerely accepted among most white 
     Americans, and that 9/11 is just an excuse for undoing 
     decades of legal and political struggles against the 
     abominable practice.
       So virulent and shameless have been the attacks on 
     McKinney--spewing caricatures of the six-term lawmaker that 
     reflect whites' own hallucinatory visions of Black people--it 
     leads us to conclude that racists are conducting a kind of 
     ritual, an exorcism to cast the ``militant Black'' out of the 
     national polity, once and for all. Disgustingly, a number of 
     Black voices have joined mob, in order to prove that they are 
     reasonable and trustworthy Negroes who won't intrude on white 
     folks' illusions of innocence.
       Most distressingly, the McKinney affair dramatically 
     demonstrates that the Congressional Black Caucus has been 
     eviscerated as a body. The CBC is revealed as collectively 
     gutless, devoid of any semblance of Black solidarity, without 
     which it has no reason for being.


                            CBC Hits New Low

       We at BC had previously believed that April, 2005, when 37 
     percent of the 42 Black House members voted for Republican 
     bills, was the lowest point in Congressional Black Caucus 
     history. A year later, the CBC has found a new nadir. On the 
     evening of April 5, undoubtedly on orders from House Minority 
     Leader Nancy Pelosi, CBC chairman Mel Watt gathered twenty or 
     so members to browbeat McKinney into firing her legal team 
     and cease appearing before the media. Watt absented himself 
     from the beat-down, so that it would not appear to be an 
     ``official'' CBC event.
       As congressional aides wandered in and out of the room, 
     some Members dutifully echoed Pelosi's demand that McKinney 
     not frame the March 28 confrontation with the policeman as a 
     ``racial'' incident, and that she issue an apology on the 
     House floor the following morning. According to several 
     sources who spoke with BC on condition of anonymity, and 
     based on an account given by McKinney staff assistant Faye 
     Coffield to a weekly Atlanta meeting of the Georgia Coalition 
     for the People's Agenda, a ``consensus'' was reached that 
     McKinney would deliver the apology and abandon efforts to 
     defend herself in the media (although not her legal team).
       The next morning, at the appointed hour, McKinney was 
     prepared to offer her apology to the House. But Mel Watt had 
     already put the word out that CBC members were to renege on 
     their part of the deal. The Caucus must not stand with 
     McKinney when she stepped to the microphone. Mel Watt, Nancy 
     Pelosi's poodle, attempted to enforce his Mistress's wish 
     that McKinney appear utterly isolated and alone. Nothing 
     should distract from the Democrats' non-strategy of doing and 
     saying nothing until mid-term elections in November. The 
     Republicans must be allowed to self-destruct without 
     interference. McKinney's charge of racial profiling was a 
     distraction from the Democratic non-strategy--so she must be 
     shunned. Mel Watt was the enforcer--the designated shunner-
     in-chief.
       Pelosi appears to harbor a deep hatred for McKinney, whom 
     she cannot control. Most recently, the 51-year-old Georgia 
     lawmaker defied the Leader's orders, voting in favor of a 
     Republican bill, cynically modeled on Democrat John Murtha's 
     measure for a quick exit from Iraq. She was among only three 
     Democrats, and the only CBC member, to do so. McKinney also 
     ignored Pelosi's order that Democrats boycott hearings on 
     Katrina and leave the field to Republicans.
       However, Pelosi has been the aggressor all along, bent on 
     bringing the CBC and other progressives to heel as she 
     pursues her spineless non-strategy for victory by default 
     over the GOP--a scenario that by definition requires African 
     Americans to mute their own demands, to be quiet and 
     compliant. When McKinney returned to congress in January 2005 
     after a two-year hiatus, Pelosi denied her seniority, bumping 
     her down to freshman status despite her previous ten years on 
     The Hill. Not a peep from the CBC, cowed by their Leader and, 
     recent events have shown, packed with members who are 
     themselves fearful that McKinney's militancy will raise the 
     bar of constituent expectations for their own performances on 
     Black people's behalf.
       On the House floor, the morning of April 6, Pelosi/Watt had 
     set McKinney up for further humiliation. Not only would she 
     be required to deliver an apology that would be seen as an 
     admission of guilt (by those who had already condemned and 
     defamed her), but the absence of CBC members at her side 
     would mark her as a lone ``extremist,'' a ``loon'' whose 
     politics could be dismissed out of hand. Why, even McKinney's 
     own colleagues won't stand with her. She's crazy (like the 
     rest of those darkies who cry racism).
       According to several congressional sources, McKinney 
     confronted a gaggle of CBC members, reminding them of the 
     consensus agreement of the night before, in which they had 
     promised a display of physical solidarity at the microphone 
     in return for her concessions. White Congresswoman Marcy 
     Kaptur (D-OH), seeing the commotion, hurried over to the 
     Black circle: ``I'll stand with you, Cynthia.'' Others 
     stepped forward to fulfill their pledge, despite CBC chairman 
     Mel Watt's treacherous machinations.
       Here is a partial list of those who were videotaped 
     standing with McKinney when she read the words of apology 
     that had been demanded of her:
       *Elijah Cummings (MD), *Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (MI), 
     *Barbara Lee (CA), *Alcee Hastings (FL), *Maxine Waters (CA), 
     *Bobby Rush (IL), *Corrine Brown (FL), *Major Owens (NY), 
     *Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX), Marcy Kaptur (OH), Dennis Kucinich 
     (OH), Jose Serrano (NY), Bob Filner (CA), (*CBC members).
       Only nine of the 20-plus CBC members who had reached 
     ``consensus'' on standing with their sister the night before, 
     bucked Pelosi's petty dictatorial edict--and straw-boss Mel 
     Watt's attempt to enforce it.
       Once upon a time, the CBC could collectively call itself 
     ``the conscience of the congress.'' No more.


                 Multi-Profiling and Sheer Malevolence

       By bowing to Pelosi, Black congresspersons reinforce her 
     and other white's belief that they can pick and choose the 
     African American leaders and representatives they deal with, 
     and isolate the rest, while still retaining mass Black 
     support for the Democratic Party. Such Blacks are enablers of 
     racism, and must eventually pay the price at the hands of 
     their constituents, who are no different than the Black 
     Georgia voters who sent McKinney to Washington six times. 
     Worse, in urging McKinney to drop the ``racial'' aspect of 
     her defense--to pretend that she was not racially profiled, 
     when they know that police profiling is near-universal--they 
     do grave injury to fundamental Black interests.
       Days after his attempt to pound McKinney into dust, the 
     duplicitous Mel Watt related to the Charlotte Observer his 
     own scary run-in with Capitol police ``a year or so ago'':
       ``I was running to the floor to vote and an officer said, 
     `Can I see your ID?' and I said, 'No' and kept running. I 
     looked back and he had his hand on his gun. Then another 
     (Capitol) police officer said, `Member.' He recognized me (as 
     a House member). It just so happened that the first (officer) 
     was white and the other one was black . . . I was probably 
     very rash. In retrospect, I thought to myself, `You had to be 
     out of your mind.' I was trying to get to a vote and he had a 
     job to do.''
       Watt understands very well that the Black officer, who 
     didn't go for his gun, but instead called his white partner 
     off, was intervening in a case of racial profiling. Yet 
     Watt's desire to stay in the good graces of his Leader, 
     Pelosi, drives him to conspire against a fellow Black 
     congressperson, Cynthia McKinney, whose recent hair makeover 
     is said to have made her fair game to be accosted by Capitol 
     police. Said McKinney:
       ``Do I have to contact the police every time I change my 
     hairstyle? How do we account for the fact that when I wore my 
     braids every day for 11 years, I still faced this problem, 
     primarily from certain police officers.''
       Nobody knows better than Black officers that racism is 
     rampant in the Capitol Police force. Of the 1,200 officers, 
     29 percent are Black, and many still have racial bias suits 
     outstanding. ``You have, basically, a renegade police 
     department up here, that's been operating under the 
     protection of Congress,'' said Charles J. Ware, an 
     attorney representing the Capitol Black Police 
     Association.
       But it's not just race. Police officers, like workers in 
     any organization, spend much of their time talking shop. For 
     Capitol police, the subject of their shop-talk is the members 
     of congress they are hired to protect. Cynthia McKinney is 
     famous--no less so on Capitol Hill. She is the Black woman 
     viciously branded as a friend of ``terrorists,'' the most 
     uppity African American in the federal legislature. The cops 
     are quite aware of what she looks like, new hair-do or not.
       A McKinney lawyer got it right when he told a Howard 
     University press conference that his client was targeted for 
     reasons of ``sex, race and Ms. McKinney's progressiveness.''
       The cops know who McKinney is--they have profiled her 
     politically. Michael C. Ruppert, former Los Angeles cop and 
     current honcho of the popular web site From the Wilderness, 
     has felt the police hostility directed at his longtime 
     friend, Cynthia McKinney:

[[Page E2192]]

       `` I have walked the halls of Congress with Cynthia 
     McKinney maybe eight to ten times. I have walked into and out 
     of the Cannon and Longworth house office buildings with her. 
     I have walked to hearings in the Rayburn house office 
     building with her. I have walked the underground tunnels from 
     one of those office buildings directly to the edge of the 
     House floor and its anteroom with her. I can tell you one 
     thing for certain because I have seen it and I have felt it. 
     Cynthia McKinney and her staff get treated differently from 
     just about anyone else on the Hill. It's subtle, but so is 
     the taste of dirt when it's in your mouth.''
       Although the Capitol police have failed to produce a 
     surveillance tape of McKinney's confrontation with their 
     officer, the congresswoman captured one incident in the 
     movie, ``American Blackout,'' now being screened at sites 
     around the country. The film depicts McKinney's investigation 
     of voting irregularities in the 2000 elections. One segment 
     shows the congresswoman being accosted by police as she and 
     her party approach the Longworth building of the Capitol. 
     McKinney turns to the camera and reports that police subject 
     her to such treatment ``all the time.''
       Does that happen to 535 members of congress ``all the 
     time''? Not hardly.
       California Rep. Tom Lantos, according to the web reference 
     site Wikipedia, ``ran over a teenager in the Capitol parking 
     area and refused to stop despite screams from the crowd. He 
     never apologized for the hit-and-run either.'' The Boston 
     Globe reported that Lantos was not charged with hit-and-run, 
     but was only fined $25 for ``failure to pay full time and 
     attention.'' However, a teacher accompanying the student 
     was threatened with arrest by Capitol police when she 
     chased Lantos' car, demanding that he stop.
       Apparently Capitol police are quite zealous in protecting 
     their lawmakers--if they are white.
       In an otherwise inane, anti-McKinney article, Black 
     columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson gave some historical 
     perspective to recent events:
       ``In past years, the Caucus raised heck when a white 
     Republican Congressman punched a black Capitol police officer 
     and a year later Ohio Democratic Representative Louis Stokes 
     was hassled by Capitol police. And the Congressional Black 
     Caucus rushed to their defense.''
       Not this time, not for Cynthia McKinney. The Congressional 
     Black Caucus is broken.


                        Sex and the Federal City

       Around midnight on April 8, Saturday Night Live's Kenan 
     Thompson performed a grotesque, bewigged skit in which he 
     conjured up a fat, sloppy, dull-witted, belligerent, loud-
     talking, no-listening, from-deep-in-the-ghetto character who 
     was supposed to be--Cynthia McKinney. Of course, this TV 
     minstrel's interpretation bore no resemblance to the 
     congressperson--daughter of one of Atlanta's first Black 
     policemen, a former faculty member at Clark Atlanta 
     University, world traveler and sought-after speaker, six-term 
     legislator. But that did not matter. Although SNL does superb 
     work caricaturing public personalities, its usual standards 
     did not apply in McKinney's case. The skit was a dehumanizing 
     assault on Black women as a group, with ``Cynthia'' standing 
     in for the female gender of her race.
       A specific profile of Black women exists in the minds of 
     vast sections of white America. As Dr. Abdul Karim Bangura 
     relates in this issue of BC, in ``an analysis of White 
     students'' stereotypes of Black women by professor of women's 
     studies and sociology Rose Weitz at Arizona State University 
     and Wakonse fellow Leonard Gordon at the same university, the 
     students primarily characterize Black women as loud, 
     aggressive, argumentative, stubborn, and bitchy.''
       White men (and women, and some Black men) on and off 
     Capitol Hill are eager to vilify and diminish McKinney, to 
     call her a ``bitch,'' a ``racist,'' ``crazy'' and all manner 
     of epithets. This abuse is actually directed against the 
     defamers' twisted idea of who and what Black women are. So 
     diseased are their minds, they see only their sickness-
     induced delusions. White supremacy allows them to translate 
     their delusions into public policy. September 11 gave them a 
     free pass to run buck wild, with no apologies, under the 
     umbrella of ``homeland security.''


                        Black Voters Will Decide

       It can be no consolation to Rep. McKinney, that she is just 
     a convenient target for what we now recognize as a great 
     resurgence of racism in the United States. The South rules a 
     South that is not defined geographically but socio-
     politically. White Americans have become much more homogenous 
     in the electronic and high-mobility age--to the detriment of 
     sanity. Their never-forsaken dreams of domestic and planetary 
     racial conquest were given a Frankenstein-like jolt and boost 
     by the Bush regime, which spoke directly to the predatory 
     core of American myth and historical practice. Emboldened, 
     they have snared Cynthia McKinney in one of their IRTs: 
     Improvised Racist Traps. She awaits the decision of a grand 
     jury.
       The moral and political collapse of the Congressional Black 
     Caucus could not come at a worse time--but it has occurred. 
     Corroded by corporate money dependent on corporate media--
     with the near extinction of independent Black media--adrift 
     in the gulf between the needs of the Black masses and the 
     narrow aspirations of the minuscule hyper-mobile Black 
     classes and still steeped in rank male chauvinism much of 
     Black ``leadership'' cannot abide a genuinely progressive, 
     charismatic female in their midst. Many also look on in 
     sulking jealousy at the burgeoning unity and militancy of 
     Latinos, whose grassroots are on the move and whose media 
     support their cause.
       The CBC cannot even support each other.
       When CBC members urged Cynthia McKinney to forsake the 
     truth, to hide the ugly fact of racial (and political, and 
     sexual) profiling they gave enormous aide and comfort to the 
     enemy. If there was one victory that African Americans had 
     achieved in the post-Civil Rights era it was to make racial 
     profiling legally, politically and socially unacceptable. 
     This victory was the fruit of countless suitor 
     demonstrations--all manner of political struggles--and the 
     legacy of the legions of dead, maimed, jailed and humiliated 
     victims of profiling who became the focus of sustained Black 
     action.
       September 11 provided the excuse to undo decades of anti-
     profiling victories. Profiling is reckoned to be a good 
     thing. Now the racists seek to reestablish arbitrary and 
     capricious white supremacy, with legislation that would de 
     facto deputize every police officer as an agent of ``homeland 
     security'' who need not respect the constitution in the case 
     of ``suspected'' undocumented immigrants. At that point, all 
     persons of color become grist for the suspicion mill. Just as 
     the Capitol policeman chose not ``recognize'' Cynthia 
     McKinney as a congressperson, any cop could willfully fail to 
     recognize his fellow Americans and strip them of their 
     rights. Such a regime already exists in designated ``drug 
     zones'' in urban America where everyone is suspect.
       Yet the CBC allows Republicans and racist Democrats to jeer 
     and bully Cynthia McKinney into a legal cul-de-sac because 
     she dares to cite profiling.
       The masses of African Americans know the deal--they are 
     profiled constantly in stores, when observed outside their 
     neighborhoods, on the highways, when breathing while Black. 
     McKinney's version of events does not seem bizarre to them. 
     Although the laughing racist hyenas convince each other--with 
     the tacit help of be chair Mel Watt--that McKinney is on the 
     ropes, it is the Black constituents of Dekalb County who will 
     decide if she is ``crazy'' for standing up for her (and our) 
     dignity and rights.
       When McKinney arrived back in Atlanta shortly after her 
     confrontation with the uniformed profiler, State 
     Representative Tyrone Brooks, president of the Georgia 
     Association of Black Elected officials, was among those to 
     greet and support her: ``It's really not about Cynthia 
     McKinney,'' said Brooks. ``It's about African-Americans in 
     America who are victims of racial profiling every day.''
       Much of the Congressional Black Caucus seem to have lost 
     touch with this reality. As a body, they have lost their 
     moorings, and must be rehabilitated, surgically. A bunch of 
     them have got to go.
       BC Co-Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a 
     book to be titled, Barack Obama and the Crisis in Black 
     Leadership.

                          ____________________