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5/28/9 We're all a
product of our life experiences.
We have a local official promoting discrimination in
city contracts at
the same time there's a national discussion about President Obama's Supreme
Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayer's 2001 comments at a
University of California-Berkeley lecture.
"I would hope that a wise Latina
woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a
better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life,"
I have been a feminist all my
life, but I have never been a man hater, regardless of his color. Even
just out of college when it was really tough for women to get our foot in the
door, I couldn't blame all the closed doors on men. Frequently, older
women who had climbed a difficult career ladder were not helpful to younger
women.
There are lots of things a woman knows that a man can never understand, but
he's going to have other experiences that are foreign to me. Those
differences and experiences may be significant in subjective reasoning.
They mean nothing in mathematical formulas or interpreting constitutional law.
Truth is
truth regardless of your life experiences.
I am most offended my Judge Sotomayer's use of the label "white male", rather than "white
man". I don't know of many "males" who have served or currently
serve on the Supreme Court or any lower appellate court. They are men,
regardless of their pigmentation. There's a big difference between a man
and a male. To be a man is an earned station in life; a male is a fact of
plumbing that's assigned at birth.
But, I mentioned above that we have a local official promoting discrimination in
city contracts:
The city council's Transportation and Environment Committee yesterday afternoon met for 90 minutes in executive session after Unison Consulting, the city's consultant for Love Field airport, presented a briefing on the benefits of competition for the airport's concessions. Because rent is paid to the city based on a percentage of sales, the city has an interest in improving customer service and increasing profits, two bonuses of opening things up as explained by the consultants.
Star Concessions, the largest operator of food and beverage concessions at DFW airport, is currently the sole concessionaire at Love Field. The concession space will double as a result of the airport's $519 million expansion, and the city is considering a competitive bid process for the new space.
So after two briefings and a lengthy executive session, we assumed the committee would embrace the concept of capitalism -- with competition being a key ingredient -- but the minority council members weren't sold on the idea. Vonciel Hill proposed a motion rejecting the plan to open the bidding and endorsed authorizing extensions of the contracts with Star Concessions and the airport's parking concessionaire until 2014.
Hill's motion failed in a 5-3 vote, with the committee's other minority members (Pauline Medrano and Carolyn Davis) voting with her. It's also noteworthy that two other minority council members, Steve Salazar and Dwaine Caraway, sat in on the meeting, and Tennell Atkins was spotted outside during the executive session.
The issue has clearly become racial as outlined by former DMN'er and Dallas public information officer Pete Oppel, who described the first briefing on this as "not pretty to witness because of its blatant racism." The racial tension relates to minority-owned Star Concessions and its CEO Gilbert Aranza, who Friend of Unfair Park Wylie H. warns us is "a seriously 'connected' guy when it comes to the Dallas City Council." After the jump, find out just how connected he is and also what happened with the booting ordinance. ...
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It is so important to this city to have Sam Merten
and Jim Schutze covering City Hall for The
Dallas Observer. Jim Schutze has
history to understand and uses humor to help the rest of us understand the story
behind the story at City Hall. Sam Merten is one of those guys who gets
off going for details. He can report on an event with such detail that you
might as well have been sitting in the room yourself. Sam takes it all so
seriously, because it is so serious.
The council better be careful about blatant racism in awarding contracts at Love
Field or in any other city bidding process.
When do we get to a color blind world? We have a President who's half
Black/half White, although he seems to be ashamed of his mother's contribution
to his DNA.
Now, we have a Supreme Court nominee who refers to white men as "white males",
who she believes can't make judicial rulings equal to hers as a "Latina woman".
Notice, she doesn't refer to herself as a "Latina female". That's not only
racist thinking on her part, but misandrist thinking. (Yes, I had to look
it up.)
When you label all "white males" as inferior or not a "Latina woman's" equal,
you are a racist and promoting discrimination by inferring that a "Latina woman"
would be a superior judge to a "white male".
As a woman who was single my entire life until 4 years ago, my safety and ability to live an independent life was absolutely dependent
on decent men (white, brown, yellow or black) to stand between me and the bad
guys or bad gals. Many of those decent men wear uniforms, but many of them
are just regular citizens who do the right thing and make the right conclusions
without the richness of my female experiences.
To be alive and contribute to others, is to have rich experiences.
Regardless of your social or economic standings, you have life experiences that
are uniquely yours.
That Judge Sotomayer is special because she had a tough life and hard row to hoe
is ridiculous. By that standard, I'm qualified for the Supreme Court.
My parents divorced when I was 4. My mother raised my brother and me as a
single mom living in the Washington Place housing project (used to be near
Baylor Hospital) until I was 12, when she married my wonderful stepfather, Bill
Boyd (a Dallas police officer). I worked my way through college because
there were two more younger than me at home. So what? That's the
richness of my experiences, but that's just my story!
We all have a story!
The richness of my experiences as a Texas white woman certainly impacts my
decision-making, but my experiences do not make my decision-making superior to a
Texas Black woman or a Texas Hispanic woman or any Texas man of any ethnicity.
However, being a native Texan may make me superior to most non-Texans.
Just saying --
sb
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