People, Politics and Prejudice
Some Westchester County New York political officials are standing in a pile of doo-doo after forwarding a racially tinged email which pictured the caricature of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama saying “Eyez yo new prezident.”
According to an article published in the The Journal News, fire commissioner Bruce Bell sent the email to Assistant Fire Chief Thomas Reddy, who then forwarded it to others. Both officials used personal Yahoo! accounts with identifying info to forward the email.
Now, Bell isn’t talking, and Reddy is claiming that he didn’t mean to offend anyone; he thought the cartoon was a “political spoof”; and racist aliens hacked his email account and did the forwarding. (Okay the last one I made up, but it sounds more plausible than his real excuses.)
So while Ossining decides how to reprimand its own, Reddy gets ready to start a minority recruiting department. Reddy apparently didn’t learn anything from his forced resignation a school board president in 1996 for using a racial slur “to describe a black village police officer.”
We can’t escape people’s personal opinions. It’s idealistic to think that political officials are non-biased but realistically that’s not true. They’re just people with titles. The key is how well do they separate their views from doing their job.
Does this mean these men are bad people? For Godsakes they’re firefighters, does harboring prejudices make them ineffective from doing their job? After all they probably will rescue you from the burning building, they just wouldn’t want to live in the one next door.