Pimps, Crack Whores, And The Congresswoman - Diversity In The Corridors Of Power

Social reformers have reached what seems to be the bottom of the barrel in their search for invitees to the diversity big top.  Every possible combination and permutation of race, gender, and ethnicity has been sampled, sifted, strained and scooped up for membership.  The hierarchy is a marvelously inventive inversion - a last shall be first checklist of misfits, genetic mistakes, outliers beyond any social spectrum, attractions in any side show. 

When one's raison d'etre wears thin especially if the fabric is a cheap quilt in the first place, the canvasser doesn't reach for the highly intelligent, the beautiful, the endowed, and the talented, but continues to scrape up the nasty bits. Sunken costs. 

Every phenomenon in nature is subject to a normal distribution, and human society is no different. Most of us fall under the bell curve while far fewer cluster at the asymptotes, Camelot on one end and Barnum & Bailey on the other.  There is no shame in being dealt a bad hand for there are only so many possibilities even in God's deck, but there is no reason, in the name of inclusivity, to knock the smart and beautiful off their perches.  Diversity means a ticket for all comers, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs just as much as the crack whores of Anacostia. 

LaShonda Evans worked the block on Good Hope Road between 11th Street and MLK Boulevard and did her business in the parking lot of Seven Eleven behind the dumpsters in wheelless Broncos; and it was there that Artemis Jones, aide to Felicia Congdon-Harris, first term Congresswoman from the Bronx, leader of the self-styled 'righteous' crewe of black and Latino women charged with expanding representation of 'The Other' in Washington, trolled for poster girls of the slums. 

'What the fuck you want, bitch?', said LaShonda to the young, well-dressed black woman who showed up at the dumpsters one night. 'You on my patch, cunt'; but Artemis had been well prepared, and answered in turn, all chicken-neck bitchin' attitude learned in her own neighborhood from which, thanks to a smile by Sister Mary Joseph in the vestibule of St. Aloysius The Merciful and the tentative but then hungry reaches up Sister's habit, the church sponsored her education at The Seneca Friends School, one of Washington's finest private schools, and one which had taught Senators and Presidents. 

 

Artemis was a woman of two worlds, alternating at both asymptotes of the Bell curve, an up-and-coming political star on one end and a pimp's delight on the other; and she owed it both to her establishment patrons and to her homegirls across the river to make a difference, 

Thanks to her empathy with the streets nurtured by the radical progressivism of her Congressional patron, Artemis was the ideal interloper, the bridge between the two worlds, and she would bring a black sister into the inner sanctum, the seat of power.  

It took some doing to clean up LaShonda, dry her out enough to make sense in her personal interview with The Group; but it was not to be a remake, just a prison shower, deodorant and a pair of Mary Janes.  After all, Felicia didn't want one of her kind, Brooklyn College educated, high LSAT scores, pretty hairdo.  She wanted her new aide to look not like her but like one of her constituents - dropouts, hookers, pimps, and the homeless. 

 

This was affirmative action at its best, Felicia thought as LaShonda took her seat in the Congresswoman's offices, given no responsibilities as such but prompted to look good, i.e. ghetto-ready, and to keep up her ultra-bad Post Office attitude. 

Felicia knew that LaShonda was pilfering bibelots from her office - little knick-knacky things given to her by Black Lives Matter people and a faux-Egyptian Nefertiti look-alike amulet engraved with her name gifted by H. Rap Brown's grandson - and knew that it was LaShonda who was responsible; yet there was no way that she would ever confront a sister and imply that her best intentions regarding the street hire were ill-conceived; and only when LaShonda was caught in flagrante delicto with a second-tier associate from the Dirksen Building did she say something. 

"I ain't suckin' no dick", LaShonda shouted; but Felicia was unconvinced, especially since the episode had been caught on three security cameras.  "You can take the girl out of the ghetto", was the expected snide, nasty remark by a white staff member who overheard the exchange from the adjoining office of a Congressman from Utah's Second District. 

The indiscretion was overlooked with a 'Please don't do that again', but what with the missing tchotchkes and the goings on in the coat room, Felicia began to wonder if she had pushed the woke limits a bit too far. 

To compensate and temporarily ignore the to-do's of LaShonda Evans, Felicia fired up her harangues about white supremacy.  If the scene at one of the bell curve's asymptotes was looking iffy, it was time to have a go at the other.  The white, privileged, male who had for centuries arrogated authority and power to himself and in so doing stepped on the black man and trampled on his rights, must be removed, expunged from the body politic, left on the curb of history.  

She was marvelously eloquent, proud of her racial heritage and now in full flower and full voice to claim its own supremacy.  "The white man", she began every speech, "this social detritus, this left over scrap from discredited predatory royal courts of corruption and villainy, must make way for the black man".

She was a virtual whirling dervish, a woman with St. Vitus' Dance, and unstoppable, inimitable geyser of animus and racial hatred.  She became addled by her obsession, The Madwoman of Chaillot.  She needed to be caged; but she was a duly-elected representative of the people of her district and could not easily be silenced, censured, or removed.  Besides, she was simply stating the truth, the obvious truth, and was being condemned only for the anger and frustration in her words.  White supremacy was indeed a systemic problem, and the black man, superior in temperament, intelligence, and moral fiber must be re-throned and honored at his place atop the human pyramid. 

LaShonda went back to Anacostia, Felicia was re-elected, and Artemis Jones, Felicia's aide, quit her boss, applied and thanks to this more respectable higher-level affirmative action got accepted at the Kennedy School, returned to Washington this time as an aide to a white senator, left the ghetto in the rear view mirror, and prospered.