* Sam Stein pulls a Sen. Mark Kirk quote from a Peoria newspaper interview…

“I want to make sure we have elected people constantly looking at helping the African-American community,” Kirk said. “With this state and all of its resources, we could sponsor a whole new class of potential innovators like George Washington Carver and eventually have a class of African-American billionaires. That would really adjust income differentials and make the diversity and outcome of the state much better so that the black community is not the one we drive faster through.” [emphasis added.]

The notion that people hit the gas when driving through black neighborhoods is a common racial stereotype about urbanization and criminal behavior among African-Americans. The fact that an elected senator from a state with a sizable black population would make such a comment was deemed unfortunate by at least one African-American leader in Illinois.

“I think what he was trying to say is, he was trying to relate that to crime. But boy, it was a poor choice of phraseology,” said George Mitchell, president of the NAACP’s Illinois State Conference. […]

Mitchell did offer a more charitable interpretation of Kirk’s comment — that people drive faster through black communities because they don’t want to see poverty (as opposed to being frightened of crime). But even that interpretation rests on dicey theories about race and wealth. As Mitchell went on to note, Chicago has a number of upper-middle class black neighborhoods, for example. He took umbrage, moreover, with the idea that simply putting a few rich people in poorer neighborhoods would solve poverty in those communities.

The quote “won” the daily somewhat tongue in cheek “America’s Worst Humans” award on the national Eschaton blog.

* We have to decide what we’re going to talk about here. Was it yet another impolitic remark by a politician known for making such statements? Was his argument at all sound, or did he say something false?

Let’s go with the latter argument first, starting with the racial element.

* When I was a kid, my mom would always make us roll up the windows and lock the doors when we drove through the black part of Kankakee. And she was about as liberal as they came back then. I can certainly see Kirk’s angle, as much as I absolutely hate to admit it.

And I was once even kicked out of a black neighborhood by the Chicago police.

Three or four summers ago, I took my brother to Lee’s Unleaded, my favorite South Side blues bar at 74th and South Chicago Ave. One of the waitresses invited us to an after-party. It was a beautiful night, so we put the top down on my convertible and headed over. We got to the address (which was near several recent shooting incidents during that long, hot summer) and saw dozens and dozens of people gleefully partying in an abandoned lot and in a building which also looked abandoned.

We were immediately pulled over by two Chicago cops. They took both of our driver’s licenses and asked what in the holy heck we were doing there. We said we were going to the party. “Oh, no you’re not,” one of the officers said. They ran our licenses, gave them back to us and ordered us out of the neighborhood.

My brother, who lives in California, was a bit taken aback by the command, but I explained that if something bad did happen to us then those cops would be held responsible. Or they thought we were drug dealers. Either way, I told my brother, when a Chicago cop says “Leave,” it’s usually a good idea to vamoose, so we split.

When I told the story to an African-American friend of mine (who first introduced me to that bar), he said I was insane to go to that party in that neighborhood.

* And before anyone freaks out here and I get lumped in with Kirk as American’s Worst Human or something, I’m most definitely not saying that all or even most black neighborhoods are bad, or that all white neighborhoods are good, or that all white people hit the gas when they drive through a black middle class area, or even a poor area, whether that be black, white, Latino, whatever.

I’m just saying that it does happen and all the liberal uproar in the world ain’t gonna change that. It’s nothing at all to be proud of, or to trumpet or to argue favorably on its behalf. But, it does sometimes happen, maybe even more than sometimes.

* Whether Kirk should’ve held his tongue is really what this is about. And the “we drive faster through” stuff is troubling to me. “We” most definitely denotes an “other.”

“We” ought to be a whole lot more positive and inclusive, especially if “we” are a United States Senator. Talking about race in this country is never easy, and it’s made a whole lot more difficult by statements like Kirk’s.

* Also, too, George Mitchell is absolutely right that creating a couple of black billionaires isn’t going to solve the very real problems in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods. It’s just another goofy pie in the sky 0.1 percenter trickle-down argument and is amazingly out of touch with reality. I ain’t against billionaires, I’m just against setting all governmental policy - jobs, crime, drugs, education - around catering to the super-wealthy. What Kirk proposed isn’t a policy agenda, it’s a Randian fantasy.