REVISITING CYNTHIA
MCKINNEY'S BITCH SLAP
The Last Plantation

Remember the dust-up last spring about the controversial Atlanta Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney smacking a Capitol police officer because she felt that she was being racially profiled at a security check point? My take at the time was that she had already pissed off scores of people by publicly engaging in speculation that Bush was somehow involved in 9/11, which meant that there was already enough motivation to smear her, so it was best to take a wait-and-see attitude about her guilt. That and the fact that it was an African-American versus a cop, which often leads to complications, to put it lightly.

But then my buddy Matt, who I consider to be smarter than me, and who lives in McKinney's hometown of Atlanta, had this to say in Real Art comments when I originally posted about the subject:

So, 2 cents worth of perspective. Cynthia McKinney is one of our local politicians here in Atlanta. Being Atlanta ("Black Hollywood"), the race card gets thrown down a lot and we have lots of examples of racial splitting on issues. For instance, our former mayor Bill Campbell, is being investigated for corruption by the FBI. It's considered an open fact, and was even mentioned by Andrew Young recently that “No one who’s white thinks he’s innocent. No one who’s black thinks he’s guilty.”

But I have not heard the black community, let alone white Atlantan's, rally around McKinney in this case. She seems to see race in every situation and people seem to be losing their patience. Of course, we'll have to see if her constituents feel that way when elections come around.

To which I responded:

Yeah, I've heard about Atlanta. Well, the flip side to my assertion that McKinny may have a point is that she also may not have a point. I guess it makes sense, especially if McKinny has falsely cried racism in the past, that people are prone to fall into a sort of "boy who cried wolf" mentality. This is not unheard of, either. I really like a lot of what Al Sharpton has to say, for example. But his credibility was forever dealt a serious blow by his championing of a young African-American woman who claimed that the NYPD raped her back in the early 90s. The accusation turned out to be false, but Sharpton still backs her story to this day.

I guess my big problem with everything, OJ, McKinny, you name it, is that both blacks and whites seem to be ready to jump to the conclusion that supports their respective races before they've heard all the facts.

Well, we've yet to hear all the facts, but I did recently watch a video interview, from Guerilla Network News courtesy of AlterNet, with some black cops on the Capitol police force. If what they say is true, and if they really are Capitol cops (their images and voices are distorted for fear of retaliation), the interview paints a devastating picture of chronic police racism on the Hill. Among accusations of general racism against black cops, like a noose being hung on an African-American officer's locker, allegations include white cops purposely and often stopping black Congressmen for ID checks, while letting their white counterparts walk through, when these cops know for sure that they are House members. The Capitol Hill Police's racism has been so ongoing and blatant that, well before the slapping incident, McKinney had written a letter to the Speaker of the House requesting that the force's General Counsel, the man who decided to press charges against her, get the sack: if true, there is, at least, a profound conflict of interest here; at worst, the General Counsel is using his position to extract revenge.

Again, this interview is only one side of the story. But I haven't heard any rebuttal yet. For now, I'd say that, with this interview included in the mix, the story seems to be drifting in McKinney's favor.

Click here to see it.

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