Decked Out

A lame duck councilman's race card doesn't trump anything

Imagine that you’re Harrisonburg City Councilman Chris Jones, perhaps without his driving record or his tax bills, but with his animosity toward the school system. You’re at the end of ten years on the council after coming in dead last in the Democratic primary. Is it time to rebuild bridges with the school system or to double down?

Maybe this offer by Jones concerning his final two months in office will help define what he chose: “If we want to bring financial comfort or pain to the school system, then bring that to me.”

Ten minutes into the latest School Board/City Council Liaison Committee meeting, Jones had already identified himself as a black male twice. He’s in a room with nine city and school officials. Five of them are people of color and one is Jewish. Only three are white males and one of them has an adopted black child. And Jones, speaking to two black people, is demanding to know whether white people are deciding who’s on the Superintendent's Task Force for Support of African American Students.

“I want to make sure we’re not being tokenized,” he says, with a straight face. “I don’t know who’s on your task force.”

The person sitting next to him when he says that is Monica Robinson, the other City Council liaison member, who also sits on the task force. She indicated she was pleased with the makeup of the task force and optimistic about its progress.

It’s not clear if Jones had spoken to Robinson about her task force membership before demanding to know why he wasn’t invited to the meetings. Later, in reference to that complaint, he says, “I didn’t necessarily mean me as in me, but I mean me as in a person.” Trying to decipher what that sentence means could blind you to the presence of five first-person pronouns.

Realizing that race is the firedamp of politics in the American South, I’m still going to suggest that Jones is not only playing the race card, but is setting the deck on fire and playing 52-Card Pickup.

My question at the outset was whether Jones would build bridges or double down in his final days on council. He’s apparently answered that. But perhaps his hostility toward those still in the public eye is understandable. At least two of the people sitting at that table explicitly supported him in his campaigns for City Council, but likely would not now. I helped him in all three campaigns, a mistake I acknowledge and apologize for. Jones lost me when he was arrested asleep behind the wheel a hundred yards from an elementary school. That’s not leadership, and it's not the example needed by those he claims to speak for.

Jones has indicated in the past that his hostility toward the school system is in part aimed at Superintendent Michael Richards, characterizing the school budget as “money that he [Richards] is taking away from us [City Council].” Perhaps that hostility was behind his statement that “Black and brown folk do not sit in the upper administration of Harrisonburg City Schools.”

Four of five secondary principals in the city are black. The system’s chief of staff was born in Mexico. The upper administration member Jones tried to bully last year (“I gave you 40 million dollars,” he said) is mixed race.

It’s possible I’m the only person who’s watched two liaison meetings. It’s deep in the nerd weeds, somewhere below Planning Commission, just above the Traffic Safety Committee. Both of the ones I’ve watched this year were dominated by Jones accusing school officials of things they refuted with facts. His attacks on the school system and Richards may be explained by a comment he made at this week’s liaison meeting.

“I don’t want to be anybody’s second fiddle.”

He got his druthers. Come January, he’s no longer part of the band.