Yesterday, Jim Schutze wrote a long post about the Plan Commission’s rejection of the city staff recommendation to change the name of Industrial to Riverfront. Tucked at the end was this:
At today’s meeting, African-American plan commission member Michael Davis made an angry, crazy, rambling attack on the Latino citizens who had spoken in favor of the Cesar Chavez name change. How times have changed. In its offensiveness and petulance, Davis’s speech was at least the equal to any of the old white-guy bigot speeches I used to hear at City Hall decades ago.
That, my friends, is a firebomb. I know Davis a little bit. Mostly from his blog, Dallas Progress. That didn’t really square with what I knew. I suspected, though, that Michael wouldn’t hesitate to retort. He did:
Anybody that thinks that what I said today was racist in any way was not listening. After the vote, people catcalled our committee this morning and called us racists this morning and I let it go. But when similar attacks surfaced at our main commission I felt the need to address it. I said that people of any race shouldn’t be allowed to attack and judge each other without cause. What I did say was that you can’t judge a person and call them racist based on an outcome of a vote, and I was offended by those allegations. I also said that I am one of the first people at our commission that addresses any citizen that makes offensive or racial statements at our meetings. Maybe I rambled a bit, but in no way was anything that I said racist or anything close to it.
There’s plenty more.
