Occasionally, when we set out to voice our opinions on this page, we debate (with ourselves) whether not speaking out might achieve the purpose we intend more effectively than saying something.
But, when in doubt, we’ll usually voice our opinion, as here.
It is time for Mebane’s city council to let the city’s Racial Equity Advisory Committee (REAC, in its vernacular abbreviation) expire.
This committee was formed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020.
Many cities and other governments across the country looked for various ways to express some sort empathy/sympathy/identity with the outrage and frustrations, especially in the black community, surrounding Floyd’s death at the hands of a white Minneapolis policeman.
Unfortunately, most of those efforts were very much misguided, nowhere more so than in Mebane.
The desire for some sort of “racial inclusion committee,” as it was first described, was intended to establish a special committee devoted to “racial issues” in the city.
The problem is that, from the outset, there weren’t, aren’t, and haven’t been any “racial issues” in the city – neither obvious nor festering ones.
Mebane has not had a long, recent, or ongoing problem with race relations. There were not then, nor are there now, overtly racial disputes or other even tangentially racial issues that demand the “advice” of such a committee.
So, what does the committee spend its time doing?
Not much, except occasionally grousing, almost like the theme of an old Rodney Dangerfield routine, that it doesn’t get much respect.
But, to be quite frank, it hasn’t done anything to deserve much respect.
It’s supposed to meet every month or so, although it didn’t meet, for instance, apparently for over a year until last month. Sometimes, when scheduled to meet, it hasn’t even been able to establish a quorum.
But there’s not been much substantive to come out of its proceedings when it does meet – except to complain, several times, that its opinion wasn’t sought, or heeded adequately, by city council members on some issue, generally those that aren’t within the committee’s purview in the first place, even by the widest definition.
From the outset, it’s been beset by practical and other problems. The community activist who lobbied for its establishment, and was appointed to serve on its first board, never attended a meeting and resigned.
It’s never attracted much interest from white residents, less than a handful of whom have ever been appointed to serve on the committee, and usually not more than one at a time among the seven members.
Its most outspoken black members have resigned.
There was one time a few years back when the REAC members complained they hadn’t been consulted about: the city’s budget (join the crowd of many Mebane residents who frequently voice that feeling of being slighted); or a zoning issue that wasn’t really relevant except, in the committee’s judgment, because it involved a property on the edge of a community where a few black residents resided.
The committee’s seven members have been comprised mostly or, at times, entirely of black residents, far surpassing the city’s racial composition, which is over 60 percent white, with fewer than 25 percent black.
At a time when the attitudes and trends in the country, from the president on down, are to eliminate a misplaced focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and when the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly – in academia and otherwise – ruled that racial “objectives” and quotas are unconstitutional, the REAC committee has fast become an anachronism.
All of the committee’s members terms expire this year (or have already expired).
And the city council would save itself the (small) expense and (potentially larger) embarrassment of keeping the group around by just letting its authorization expire.
It’s run its course – which we believe never existed from the outset.
Mebane needs to return to a colorblind focus, which was, after all, one of the primary original objectives of Dr. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders.
