You Can't Make This Stuff Up

God Bless Dallas;
A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.
Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."
That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.
Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster's, is perhaps "the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape."
Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all.
Taken from the DMN Dallas City Hall blog.
Kudos to this Mayfield fellow for refusing to apologize. Too often whitey will bow in and offer the insincere and yet still demeaning pseudo-apology just to avoid the grandstanding, protesting, and bitching the black man will lead. It seems it's just more trouble than it's worth to stand up.
We've always known that John Wiley Price was an idiot, but this just takes the cake. But while we're on the topic of race relations and racial idiocy in Dallas, please allow me a few more moments of your time.
As some of you may or may not be aware, the city conducted what has since been called an "informal poll" about what to rename Industrial Blvd. (I don't understand what's wrong with Industrial.....) with such idiotic names as Eddie Bernice Johnson Pkwy (the only reason the lady is still in office is gerrymandering), a slew of aquatic themed names, and the landslide winner.....Cesar Chavez Pkwy, which of course won because this is Dallas and half the city is now Mexican. At which point the city council predictably bristles (wtf does Cesar Chavez have to do with Dallas? This isn't even an agricultural town) and says no. The Mexican groups of course bitch and moan, citing that what was once Oakland Ave. is now Malcolm X (which was equally stupid....) and so they want to rename Ross Ave for Cesar Chavez.
Nevermind the fact that Ross Ave. is extremely long and runs through downtown and would cost business' tons of money to change every advertisement, sign, piece of stationary, and card with their name on it. Never even mind that Ross Ave. has been a major thoroughfare (unlike Oakland Ave. was) in this city since the freaking 1940s (it was the Greenville Ave. of the 1950s). Let's just say it's a bad idea considering developers have been buying up massive chunks of Ross Ave. with the expressed intention of driving all the Spanish language businesses off of the street, which has been ongoing for the past decade just as it has on Live Oak and Gaston.
It just drives me nuts. Look folks, I'm all about diversity and the fact that we can all co-exist happily and peacefully. There's a reason I moved back to Dallas proper instead of the suburbs or lily white North Dallas like so many people do. But people have got to respect that this city, and it's history, is much bigger than their block and the racial grandstanding just has to stop. And with that, I'm off the soapbox and sending pseudo-apologies to my entire Hispanic readership.
Ok, not really.