Tuesday, May 05, 2015

The Go-to Representatives

We're still waiting for decisions about charges in our local "policeman kills black youth" incident. We were told there'd be two days warning.

I know a few of the local black leaders by name (used to work with one lady who died a few years ago) but I noticed that a new group kept showing up in the news stories more frequently than they did: Young Gifted and Black. They were reported as saying some rather stupid things (the prisons should release 350 black prisoners), and I wondered if they were being picked for quotes just because they were noisier and more dramatic than preachers. Then I saw a headline in The Daily Cardinal saying that violence against blacks was a queer issue. I didn't read the story (busy at the time), but thought that somebody was being pretty tasteless in trying to garner support for their pet cause at the expense of Tony Robinson's legacy.

A couple of days later I picked up The Isthmus and discovered that this wasn't an aberration: the leadership of YGaB seems to be almost as heavily into homosexual politics as into black politics.

That left me wondering how they got to be picked as spokesmen so frequently. Most of the black communities I've heard of don't invest a lot of enthusiasm in homosexual issues. The local media do, though. Do I have to wonder who decides who represents who?

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