That's how it is with the package deal. You pay your money. You collect your votes. You don't ask how it's done.
Nealy would accuse you of racism for even asking. It's not your business. It's the business of That Other Tribe, the tribe across the river. Your tribe has its own rules, and you must hew to them. But don't go shaking your big bony white finger across the river telling That Other Tribe how to act. What are you, a racist?
Chris Gash
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My person on the phone the other day reminded me of another chapter, one in which the Observer played a central role — the vote fraud scandals of 2002. She said she knew of political leaders in southern Dallas who had played a part in exposing vote fraud carried out by the dominant black political machinery. She said some of the reformers ran for office themselves later and naively went to the Dallas Citizens Council types for campaign money, thinking they would love them.
Wrong. She said they got a very cold shoulder from the wealthy white interests, who wanted nothing to do with them. What they had not foreseen was this: The vote-fraud machinery worked against the rich white folks in partisan national elections, but it worked for them in local elections.
"This machine, this illegal voting, was used against them [the rich whites] every other November," she said. "But it was used by them every other May.
"The other thing, and this is an independent feature of Dallas," she said, "it is worse to point out the crime than to have committed it in the first place."
She and I shared a common experience: We both agreed that none of this can be explained to people outside Dallas. If you're speaking to racist white people, they will listen to you exactly and only as long as you are talking about corrupt black officials. They will nod their heads wisely.
The instant you get off into some crap about how this is all a partnership between poor black and rich white cultures — both of which are separatist and unmitigated by the national civil rights movement — you're going to get that cell phone look, the one that means, "Sorry, you're breaking up a little."
If you're talking to progressive white, black or Latino people from outside the city, especially journalists, and if they are people who are unfamiliar with Dallas, they are going to be using the matrix of the national civil rights movement to make sense of Dallas. In that case, the instant you begin to propose that black people in Dallas have any responsibility for the city's screwed-up racial culture, you're going to get the other cell phone look, the one that means, "Excuse me, but just how did you get my number?"
Even in this day and age, it is still racist to blame black people for anything that has to do with race. I don't know that that will ever change. I think that's why you get a Texas Monthly piece suggesting that Dallas' corruption problems have to do with the failure of the Ku Klux Klan to provide meaningful avenues of progress for minorities.
Gotta be more to it.
The whole thing leaves us in a pickle here. We're stuck with a culture subscribed to by power brokers on both sides of the river. Every two years, we find out that the only people who don't subscribe are the ladies and gentlemen of the FBI.
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