Saturday, January 21, 2006

Chocolate City

On Monday, Martin Luther King day, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said "I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be."

Of course, he later tried to mollify his critics by saying "How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about," he said. "New Orleans was a chocolate city before Katrina. It is going to be a chocolate city after. How is that divisive? It is white and black working together, coming together and making something special."

There was much coverage in the media, naturally, but Nagin largely got a pass on his racist comments. I wonder what the result would have been had he been white and said New Orleans will be a vanilla city.

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