How Important is if for Atlanta to Have a Black Mayor?

Between the soap opera of whether Atlanta will have a non-Black mayor and the indignation of those upset about a non-Black Miss Hampton I wonder if we’ve lost sight of what a colorblind society is supposed to look like. Based on reactions to both sagas you could easily have heard the same rhetoric circa 1960 from southern White men.

Wasn’t President Obama’s election supposed to be all about “transcending” race or letting the best candidate win? Or do we only want whites to be colorblind? Perhaps we could use some “growing up.”

The New York Times reports:

Since 1973, this Southern capital has elected a succession of black mayors, sometimes to the consternation of residents in the largely white, prosperous neighborhood of Buckhead in the north.

But the current race to succeed Mayor Shirley Franklin in the Nov. 3 election has upended expectations here in what Chris Rock, in his new documentary, “Good Hair,” calls “the city where all major black decisions are made.” The front-runner, Mary Norwood, is one of Buckhead’s own, a white Junior Leaguer running as a populist outsider.

The three top candidates in the six-way race have each maintained that Atlanta has moved beyond using race as a qualification for public office. But the ascendancy of Ms. Norwood may also reflect the decline of the city’s black majority and the recession’s sour effect on the mood of the voters.

Is it important for Atlanta’s mayor to be African-American?

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