Black on Black Grime

Why is that every time Miami-Dade’s black political establishment brazenly plays the race card, no one calls them out for being hypocritical bigots? The local media, even Jim Defede, whose days steamrolling our fair county’s most dubious citizens are long behind him, is afraid to denounce the ignorant ramblings spewed by County Commissioner Barbara Jordan and her political godmother Betty Ferguson, both of whom have been sounding off riot bells so Roosevelt Bradley can get his job back. These supposedly revered African Americans don’t deserve any credibility given their track record of holding their own people back. Yet, there they are, whipping up a frenzy, dividing blacks and Hispanics, by portraying Mayor Carlos Alvarez as the Cuban American incarnation of George Wallace.

Just this past Saturday morning, the B&B Gurls (as I’ve come to call them) were the guests on Cheryl Mizell’s Community Voices program on 99 Jamz. Jordan promised that she was going to conduct a review of every department to make sure that Alvarez holds every director accountable as he did Bradley. She never mentioned that the mayor also ousted planning and zoning director Diane O’Quinn Williams and demoted Employee Relations chief Donald Allen, both white people. And she conveniently left out that Alvarez replaced Allen with a black woman.

“The mayor has to man up…bring back Roosevelt Bradley…and apologize to this community if he wants a healing process to begin,” Jordan pontificated. And I’m not even going to repeat the bullshit that oozed out of Ferguson’s mouth. Of course, Mizell ate it all up and pandered to them, never really challenging anything the B&B Gurls had to say.

Had this been Natacha Seijas (not that I sympathisize with the Wicked Witch of the West) on Radio Mambi or La Poderosa ranting about Cubans getting the shaft, the English speaking media would be all over her. The B&B Gurls get a free pass because they’re black. Ferguson gets extra special star treatment because of her late husband Wilkie's legacy in the community, yet she is one of the most despicaple two-faced agitators in South Florida. What’s so laughable is that Ferguson last week participated in Bishop Victor T. Curry’s pastoral sit-in (featuring a token white minister) outside Alvarez’s office where she compared Bradley’s firing to the ouster of ex-aviation director Angela Gittens in 2004.

Now, if there was ever a black government agency head who deserved the unflinching, unyielding support of the NAACP and Miami’s black political leadership, it was Gittens – a black woman who stood against the influence peddlers and the political insiders who have enjoyed making Miami International Airport their own piggy bank. The funny thing is that the B&B Gurls did absolutely nothing to prevent her departure. Why?

Well, Gittens was an interloper from Atlanta and someone who wasn’t going to play the old game of steering minority contracts to the favored black entrepreneurs who helped Ferguson keep her county commission seat for more than a decade and assisted her protégé Jordan assume power in 2004. Gittens was nothing like Bradley, who rewarded his first cousin Wade Jones with a promotion for managing Jordan’s successful election campaign – an inconvenient truth the commissioner always fails to disclose. And Ferguson was counting on Bradley to make sure that the future north alignment of Metrorail (that will run from NW 27th Avenue to Dolphins Stadium) followed her preferred path.

As long as the B&B Gurls continue spreading their campaign of racial disinformation, the ethnic chasm between Miami-Dade’s black and Hispanic communities will only grow deeper. –NA