What do you think?

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As someone who has spoken to food truck owners for this blog, I’m dismayed that “official” D.C. is so inhospitable to them. They increase the diversity of food offerings in this town, trek out to feed under-served neighborhoods and create a much lower barrier to starting a business– which is helpful if you’re young, a person of color, etc. Thankfully, Kojo points out in the video below that if we want “to be considered a major city”, food trucks are a part of that. The Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis also thinks that trucks are an asset to D.C.

Things got ugly when a black mail carrier refused to take back a letter he’d delivered to a lady in Hingham, Mass. She went on a racist rant and slapped him. He secretly taped it all on his cell phone.

So many people assume that the South has a monopoly on racist behavior. I remember when I told my friends that I was starting this exciting new job at WAMU, and one of them, who was from Massachusetts, said, “It’s a shame that D.C. has so many racial issues.” Inwardly, I felt confused because I had heard the exact same thing about their home state. I didn’t say anything because I don’t know Massachusetts that well. I don’t know it any better after watching what’s below, but I do think it’s unhelpful to stereotype certain regions as “backwards” or prone to racism. The quote I excerpted above is from Gawker, where commenters are already chiming in about their lack of surprise that such a thing would happen in Hingham, MA.

I grew up in sunny Northern California, where I got called the N-word plenty of times. I have friends who grew up in Mississippi who never heard that word, once. Massachusetts doesn’t have a problem with racism; America does. Ignorance is everywhere– so is kindness and fairness. What’s interesting to me is how we live in a time when people can use the power of their mobile phones to record what they are seeing, upload it and allow it to go viral. Ten years ago, no one would’ve seen or heard what you are about to watch.

Gray: “I want a cabinet that looks like the city. And that would be the template that I will try to use.”

See a video of the whole exchange (via The Kojo Nnamdi Show’s YouTube channel), below the fold.

So why are there new tweets about this five-day old plea to retain Fenty? Sarah Godfrey over at TBD Arts analyzed the video and wrote “Don’t Leave Us Fenty”: A study in ’90s hip-hop video imagery. It’s a fun piece comparing the visuals in Moten’s campaign joint to those from Bone Thugs and Common videos.

As for “Don’t Leave Us Fenty”, I don’t know if this tactic will be effective in attracting the African American voters who definitely prefer Fenty’s challenger, Vince Gray. Perhaps Fenty would’ve been better served by borrowing BLACKstreet’s #1 hit, “No Diggity“, instead. An endorsement from Li’l Penny would be so much more impressive than one from the Washington Post, don’t you think?