ANC Election--Grist for the Mill

Incumbent ANC commissioner Leroy Thorpe has published a letter in the current issue of the Washington City Paper in which he defends Fenty aide Sinclair Skinner, who was the subject of a critical article in the previous week’s edition. The WCP story (full text here) is a bit complicated, but alleges, among other things, that Skinner used race-bating tactics last year to oppose councilman Jim Graham’s efforts to close down black-owned clubs along Georgia Avenue where there had been shootings and other violence by denying their liquor license renewals. In apparent retaliation, the article continued, Skinner mobilized supporters to fight a license for a white-owned bar/restaurant opening up on the street. The thrust of the piece was that Fenty had refused to remove Skinner from his staff despite strong pressure to do so because of Skinner’s tactics.

Thorpe’s letter (not up online yet) accuses WCP of “a long history of attacking African-American politicians and activists, mostly at the expense of hearsay information the City Paper obtains from racially insensitive European-American newcomers to African-American communities who resent African-American leadership to the point that they ostracize themselves from the African-American community and organize their own neighborhood associations, etc.”

He compares Skinner to Nat Turner, Malcolm X, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Adam Clayton Powell, “African-American leaders who are not Uncle Toms and whom European-Americans fear because they have balls. European-Americans hate African-Americans they can’t control and who simply never forget where they came from. Sinclair Skinner scares the hell out of those European-Americans and house Negroes who want to hold on to the status quo of separate but equal in America.
He goes on to say that “Fenty’s light skin and advanced degrees are acceptable socially to European-Americans; however, his loyalty to … Skinner is incomprehensible to European-Americans who think Fenty should act like those European-American-accepted house Negroes Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Sen. Barack Obama.”