Photo by Chris Rief

There has been a lot of talk over the past week about how the racial divide in the District led to Vincent Gray’s victory. We’ve seen vitriol spewed from both sides, the talk of the “old guard” restoring the legacy of Marion Barry, or how the influx of “myopic twits” have pushed aside hardworking blacks. The Washington Post has used a lot of ink to talk up these arguments. Thankfully Colbert King managed to bring some rational discourse to the paper this weekend with his column. King posits that the racial divide is not always a driving force in D.C. politics, and points to Phil Mendelson’s win as a key example.

Councilmember Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) gathered the most votes out of any candidate on the September 14 ballot. Even with the Michael Brown name confusion issue, Mendelson dominated in every part of the city. Many who rejected Adrian Fenty’s bid for re-election also supported Phil Mendelson. To boil everything down simply to race is foolish. As King puts it, “People pontificating about race in this city, based on parachute jumps into black neighborhoods where they conduct two or three interviews and then scoot back to file reports on what black folks are up to, don’t know what they are talking about.”