2021: A race odyssey
Last week, in a move that surprised many Bostonians, Marty Walsh announced that he will not be seeking re-election this year. Since Marty will resign his office if he is confirmed as Joe Biden’s Secretary of La-bah, his decision not only blows the doors wide open for entrants into a September 2021 mayoral preliminary election, but could also, according to Boston election law, trigger a special election for a more immediate replacement.
No doubt Andrea Campbell and Michelle Wu, the two City Councilors who have already announced 2021 campaigns for Boston mayor, would run in that special election, which their colleague Ricardo Arroyo is working to excise from the realm of possibility. It is likely that at least one other Councilor would join the fray as well: realistic possible contenders include Annissa Essaibi-George, who finished second to Wu in 2019’s At-Large race; Matt O’Malley, who tops the vote totals of district Councilors and who, as the longest continuously-serving member of the body, is fairly well-known outside of his own district. Apparently considering a run is Willie Gross, Commissioner of the Boston Police Department, Roslindale resident, and hat model. A special election might also draw Councilor Mike Flaherty, a candidate for mayor in 2009; or former Councilor Tito Jackson, who ran against Marty in 2017. Jackson, reached for comment on 1/13/2021, and asked if he would be a candidate in a special election, said he had not ruled out the possibility.
In the present environment of strident identity politics, activists appear to be clamoring for a woman of color to lead our City, the Athens of America. They appear to persist in a belief that this sort of change is necessary, and in its own right a desirable measure of progress. To the extent that leftist beliefs on the subject of identity are now influenced by the fashionable so-called “critical” theories, I expect that Boston voters will soon be instructed by pseudo-intellectuals from Boston University about how, in order to be “anti-racist,” we must now vote for the least “white supremacist” candidate. As a few inciteful tweeters have noted, if the two already-declared candidates in the race are both themselves women of color (WOC), it simply would not do for either a male or a white person to run, since in either case he (non-white) or she (white) would clearly fail critical race theory’s intersectional identity test, and would be “hoarding opportunity.” To be both white and male and even to consider running is an act of “white supremacy.”
The critical race theorists, including our local adherents, delight in reminding us that “skinfolk” are not universally acceptable, however: not only must you not be white, and ideally not be male, you must accept their Marxian nonsense: hook, line, and sinker. The hook is identitarian groupism. The line is “intersectionality.” The sinker is, tediously, socialism (the “good” kind, again).
The City Council is already, in the words of Councillor Baker, “heavy on socialists.” Most aspiring American office holders no longer denounce socialism in clear and certain terms: collectivism is perennially popular with the youth, who are inexperienced and easily fooled by smart-sounding and attractive pseudo-realities, and who make up the majority of election campaign volunteers. The youth naturally hope to be the vanguard of progressive change, and today’s American youth have been taught that this change must take the form of critical race theory: this ragged dogma is not only illiberal – opposed to the principles of life, liberty and property that are at the basis of our entire civilization – but also explicitly racist (using the traditional meaning of the term we were taught in the 1980’s). The adherents of CRT are socialists, regularly spouting anti-capitalist catchphrases and fallacies. Indeed, the most influential proponents of CRT are self-proclaimed communists: “trained Maxists” in the words of Patrisse Cullors.