It shouldn’t be about race
On a late Sunday afternoon in downtown Little Rock, amid a cool mist as darkness falls, nothing much is happening except for the mayor’s race.
Baker Kurrus is in a beer hall on East Capitol Avenue called Fassler’s. His daughter is introducing him as genuine. He’s telling maybe a couple of hundred people—some confirmed supporters and some undecided, all but one or two white—that he’s a man of action, independence and change. He’s saying he’s not seeking an office but a job for which he is ready.
He’s saying that unity—his opponent’s theme—is not something you achieve with talk but by human interaction and caring.
He’s saying he read The Washington Post’s article about no-knock drug warrants by our local police. He’s saying he saw the accompanying video of a young black man’s apartment door getting blown off its hinges and sent flying past his head.
He’s saying the matter was “very concerning.”
He’s saying he got busy the next day and outlined the 15 steps of a process to investigate the matter credibly and authoritatively while attending to everyone’s due process rights.
I head for the door, having heard what I came to hear. I’m thinking per usual that Kurrus is an admirable and thoroughly competent man.
But I’m thinking “very concerning” was an odd and seemingly forced or almost obligatory phrase.
I’m thinking Kurrus is such a confirmed and competent lawyer that he doesn’t know how to balance political rhetoric with cautious legal process. I’m also wondering—I must admit— whether he’s hamstrung about telling off the local police considering that the Fraternal Order of Police has endorsed him.
A woman asks as I leave if I’d heard the explosions from liberal city directors Kathy Webb and Capi Peck—key Kurrus supporters—when I called them “establishment.”
A man asks if I’m headed out to wish “happy birthday to Frank.” I don’t know what he means. Then a woman asks more specifically if I’m headed to the Copper Grill—two blocks north— for comparison and contrast. It turns out that Frank D. Scott Jr., the ticket-leader and Kurrus’ runoff opponent, is celebrating his 35th birthday at a private fundraiser at the Copper Grill, his favorite gathering place.
I drop by. It is a mostly black assembly but contains a few more whites than Kurrus’ gathering contained blacks.
I ask Scott if we can talk and he says he’d rather go outside and walk as we talk.
My interest is that everything in Little Rock seems drawn by gravity to race, and that it’s happened in the mayor’s runoff.
The Fraternal Order of Police smeared Scott with a Facebook post, eventually taken down, of a photograph of him patting the shoulder of a young black man who was a victim of a no-knock warrant and who then, last week, got in trouble for fleeing authorities on another matter in Cross County. The post asked for votes for the police-endorsed Kurrus and against any friend or associate of a fleeing criminal.
Kurrus had responded by asking the police to take down the post, but neither denouncing or renouncing outrightly what the FOP had done.
The FOP had pointedly not apologized.
Little Rock’s place in world history is racial ugliness. Its public school system stands largely abandoned by whites fleeing to suburban, private and charter schools. Its serious crime problem stems from race division, race alienation, race neglect, race disenfranchisement and race disadvantage.
Now the mayor’s runoff between a white progressive with support in west Little Rock and the Heights and a young black banker and preacher with support from long disadvantaged communities has become mired in incendiary and police-fomented racial division.
Scott wants to preach unity and get white votes to go with black votes. He has decried the “divisiveness” of the police action without calling it racist.
He says as we walk that it is true that gravity pulls everything in Little Rock to race. But he says unity could better be achieved by white people calling out racism when they see it than by a politician playing a race card or seeming to do so.
In other words, the city can soar through racial diminishment only by the condemnations by its people, not the rhetoric of a vote-seeker.
So, there you have it, Little Rock readers—an afternoon’s vignette intended to help familiarize you further with your mayoral choices and perhaps make the case that those choices are entirely too good to be burdened with the city’s tired old race wedge.
Kurrus shouldn’t be elected because he’s white, or in spite of that. Scott shouldn’t be elected because he’s black, or in spite of that.
They’re too good for that. This is our chance to be worthy of one’s competence and the other’s message.