Preserving the Color Line

Whitewash: Kasich's diversity problem.

After announcing 20 Cabinet level appointments, all of whom were white, Ohio Governor John Kasich told the media in January: “I don’t look at things from the standpoint of any of these sort of metrics that people tend to focus on, race or age or any of those things.” 

Shortly afterwards Governor Kasich responded to his critics by appointing Lynn Stevens, former staffer for retired US Senator George Voinovich, as his Minority Affairs Director. The appointment of Stevens, who is black, was a clumsy attempt to overrule the objections of liberals, who claimed that Kasich’s appointments have not reflected the diversity of Ohio’s residents.  Still, even after Stevens’ hiring, the criticism of Kasich’s essentially ivory executive leadership continued unabated, and finally, on February 2, Kasich appointed Michael Colbert as Director of the Department of Jobs and Family Services. 

We might overlook the occasional stumbles of elected officials, and should do so a little more often: the landscape of government is an undetonated battlefield, and every misstep seems to have monstrous consequences. I’ll give the Governor this: perhaps because of poor advice or narrow experience, it may not have occurred to him that an all-white Cabinet would create, at the very least, problems of perspective, and at worst, problems of actual governing legitimacy. Maybe, in the final hour, he did receive or perhaps hear sound advice, and thus began, with Michael Colbert’s hiring, a process of change.

But perception is everything, and because of numerous gaffes related to culture and diversity, Kasich has been publicly taken out to the woodshed already by the media, elected officials, the public and even comedian Stephen Colbert (no relation to Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services Director Michael Colbert). He may, in fact, have learned something in all this. But what he has not yet learned, what cannot yet be absolved, is the predicable (and tiresome) mid-stumble excuse: “I don’t look at things from the standpoint of…”. This, Kasich’s defense, stands as an effacement of race equal to the failure to appoint qualified candidates of color in the first place. Our Governor might have transformed the moment had he responded, in the face of a general rebuke by saying, “You’re right - we need to pay attention to that, and are committed to fixing it.” But he did not: he simply confessed his racial myopia, without remorse, and made the conflagration worse by creating a kind of auxiliary position for a black woman, and then later adding, as one of his final leadership staffing decisions, a black man to his cabinet.

Ugh.

It’s easy for those of us who are liberals to take potshots at such obvious fumbling; there’s almost something glib about it. Mocking such missteps is emotionally satisfying, at least momentarily, but it also changes nothing. 

Far harder is a truly honest talk about race, because a transformative conversation requires risk and vulnerability, which are precisely the qualities that can - or so we believe - destroy an elected official.   

So here is a modest proposal:

Kasich might, even now, change the course of this conversation if he treats it, going forward, as an actual conversation, rather than as an unfortunate volley with the media and Democrats. He could, for example, give Ms. Stevens new marching orders, charging her with nurturing a statewide dialogue on race, with the goal of deepening every Ohioan’s knowledge and understanding. She might be tasked with inviting ideas about how to make government as representative as possible, fully responsive to the needs of all communities. She might be told that her job is not to quiet things down; but instead bring the trouble below the waters to the surface, so that we might truly face what moves there, what disturbs the calm. Kasich could insist that Stevens go and make trouble in his name, and listen to the trouble, because trouble is there, and the difficult national and local dialogues about race and community are by no means over.

Or Kasich could do nothing, and keep the color line just where it is. Which will mean that the troubles, all these “troubles” about race and identity and inclusion and democracy, will rise, with all their noisy and frustrated unwillingness to just lie and shut up - they will rise again, and again and again.