What's Race Got to Do With the D.C. Cabinet?

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Leave it to The Post to take good news and turn it into a tale of racial divisiveness. In his June 20 Metro column, "In City Brimming With Black Talent, Fenty's Cabinet Lacks Color," Courtland Milloy wrote, "Some of the new mayor's moves can be downright bewildering. In a city overflowing with first-rate black lawyers, Fenty -- himself a graduate of Howard law -- appoints a white man and a white woman to the city's top two legal posts -- legal counsel and attorney general."

Milloy then opined that "after a mere 30-odd years of trying to restructure a government that was designed to oppress blacks, some now fret that progress is grinding to a halt. Worse yet, to them it appears that a black hand is helping turn back the clock."

Why does The Post feel obliged to air the views of bigots? Mayor Adrian M. Fenty should be cheered for hiring people without regard to race.

-- Kevin R. Kosar

Washington

I was amazed by the headline on Courtland Milloy's June 20 column. Can you imagine the outcry if a newspaper in a white-majority city ran a column titled "In City Brimming With White Talent, Mayor's Cabinet Displays Color"?

Why did The Post provide a platform for such thinking?

As our society evolves, we should be working toward colorblindness, toward a condition where being black, white, Asian, etc., doesn't matter. Didn't Martin Luther King Jr. dream of a time when people would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character?

-- Mitchell Stearn

Bethesda

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While Courtland Milloy acknowledged that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's cabinet includes a Korean American, he failed to note that two Indian Americans, Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi and Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra, also play vital roles in the administration.

Apparently, to Milloy, only African Americans qualify as people of color.

More important, I suspect that District residents are more concerned with education, crime and health care than with racial aesthetics. Fenty should be judged by whether his appointments deliver on these and other important services, not whether he complies with Milloy's limited and distracting concept of color.

-- Dawinder S. Sidhu

Washington