The R-Word
The tale of Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon is surely the Grinchiest of this holiday season. Dixon, the first black woman to serve as head of the city, was convicted yesterday of a crime seemingly ripped straight from Dickens: stealing donations intended for the city’s poorest children. These were largely composed of gift cards to popular chain stores, which prosecutors claimed she had used to buy herself presents, including a PlayStation 2.
Setting aside the emotional poverty of a woman who felt the need to splurge on herself at Toys R Us, however, a great deal of the reaction to the trial has focused on race – Dixon, a black Democrat, versus prosecutor Robert Rohrbaugh, a white Republican. As such, many residents of the city asserted that the trial was a witch hunt, despite the clear evidence against her – the defense didn’t even bother to contest that Dixon had, according to the New York Times, “called a developer and asked him to donate gift cards for her to give to city children — cards that the mayor later used for her personal benefit.” Melvin Burgess, a Baltimore resident interviewed by the city’s paper, the Sun, said, “You’ve got people in office doing worse than that…She was targeted. They think we’ve got too many blacks in City Hall.”
Even if it’s true that many politicians are corrupt – and history would certainly suggest that it is – “everyone else is doing it” is not a worthy standard for measuring wrongdoing. A woman who cannot be trusted with donations should not be running a soup kitchen, let alone an entire city. And implying that any African-American politician is better than none at all does a disservice to the black community. Baltimore, like all cities, and black people, like all people, deserve better than someone without the larger community’s interests at heart.
Should prosecutors be better at seeking out corruption among politicians of all races? Surely. That resident’s claims that “we’ve got people in office doing worse than that” are undoubtedly true. But that doesn’t excuse Mayor Dixon – or make it any less sad that we’re still in a state as a country where race remains an issue. Such claims, after all, are rooted in a time when black people were targeted unfairly, and we’ve got a long way to go to make up for those days. Nonetheless, as a society, we need to judge men not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. And in Dixon’s case, we can see that it’s the latter that’s lacking.
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