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Racist Mayor: Nikuyah Walker

Racist Mayor: Nikuyah Walker
11th in a series.
By Matthew Vadum

Editor’s note: This is the 11th part in Frontpage Mag’s series on Racist Mayors. Stay tuned for more installments.

Charlottesville, Virginia Mayor Nikuyah Walker openly disparages white people, police officers, Thomas Jefferson, her own city, and America.

An Independent who favors statue-toppling and an economy-crippling $21 an hour minimum wage, Walker ran for office using the campaign colors of red, black, and green, which are the colors of Afrocentrism and black nationalism.

Her campaign slogan was “unmasking the illusion,” she said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR). “The illusion is that everyone can thrive. So the unmasking illusion was to have this very open and direct conversation about what Charlottesville really is like.”

Walker was elected to Charlottesville City Council months after the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 left a counter-protester dead and assumed its place in leftist mythology as proof of America’s everlasting evil.

After the rally, “what changed was that people were faced with the fact that we’re not a post-racial nation,” she told the (UK) Guardian.

Walker was chosen by her fellow council members as the city’s mayor.

Charlottesville’s “council-manager” or “weak mayor” system, which University of Virginia professor Rich Schragger said is the most common form of government in towns and small cities in America, makes the mayor “for the most part a figurehead.” The council “is the board of directors, the mayor is the head of the board of directors, and the city manager is the CEO,” he said.

Walker may only be a figurehead, more or less, but she is still managing to do a lot of damage.

Her background is predictably radical.

“Nikuyah’s commitment has been to authentic inclusion, equity, and progress,” her bio on the city’s website states. “Her primary goal as a councilor is to help create a city that deserves its World Class designation.”

Walker “has spent most of her adult life serving those most oppressed and neglected in this community. She has worked in several non-profits in Charlottesville—as a Substance Abuse Clinician, an HIV Prevention Educator, and a Community Organizer, and as an employee with the City of Charlottesville in the Parks and Recreation Department.”

Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” in August 2018, if Charlottesville was representative of other cities in America, Walker said the same things any garden-variety Marxist would.

“I think if you start talking about the issues that we’re facing around the country that relate to race and class, you can put Charlottesville up there as a city to study and you’ll find all the major disparities exist,” she said.

“And we hear these stories all across the country. We heard them in … Florida with Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and with Tamir Rice in Cleveland. Like we hear these stories about people who are just shocked at where we are in our communities in regards to racism. But even once the facts are presented, people really don’t want to change their actions to help truly heal that.”

Except that once the facts were presented in all three examples of supposed racial injustices perpetrated against blacks that Walker mentioned, it became clear they were nothing of the sort.

In 2012, Trayvon Martin tried to kill George Zimmerman, a Latino sometimes identified as a “white Hispanic,” and was killed by Zimmerman in self-defense. In 2014, Michael Brown tried to kill white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and was killed by Wilson in self-defense. Also in 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who reportedly had been pointing a toy pellet gun that looked like the real thing at people, was killed by Timothy Loehmann, a white police officer who tragically mistook the toy for a real gun.

Bashing white people is not out of character for Mayor Walker: it’s who she is.

To her, so-called white supremacy is everywhere.

We look all over this nation and you have symbols of white supremacy … all over the place that you can look and it says that white — what is superior, right? It tells a story. And people look around them and all they see is symbols, portraits of white faces. So that story of just white dominance overall is something that we have struggled with as a country.

Of course, saying “white dominance” is a problem, is a racist sentiment. It is another way of saying white people are a problem.

At times, Walker sounds like Malcolm X, who believed bringing white people into black activist groups could reduce their effectiveness, and who famously told a sympathetic white woman who offered to help his cause, to drop dead. As he recounted the experience in his autobiography:

Anyway, I’d never seen anyone I ever spoke to before more affected than this little white college girl. She demanded, right up in my face, ‘Don’t you believe there are any good white people?’ I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I told her, ‘People’s deeds I believe in, Miss—not their words.’ ‘What can I do?’ she exclaimed. I told her, ‘Nothing.’ She burst out crying, and ran out and up Lenox Avenue and caught a taxi.

In an interview with Vogue, Walker pontificated:

Where we are today is not by mistake, and it’s going to take real intention—you’re going to have to be real clear and concise about who can be a part of the transformation. And that’s been part of the issue in Charlottesville—and I’m sure around the country—that the people who have built the systems and perpetuated crimes within those systems are the same people who are first to show up at the table when transformation is demanded. And because there are certain degree requirements to be at the table, that usually means that the right people—the people who are actually affected, the people who really have the heart and soul to transform these institutions, who may not have a Ph.D. or a master’s degree or even a bachelor’s degree of study, but they have the lived experience to lead to true and authentic transformation—are not at the table.

White people tend to be obstacles because they don’t understand what’s really happening, Walker said.

White people who have only a dictionary-definition understanding of what’s going on are not going to be able to resolve those issues. … I think asking black people to teach you is one thing, and moving out of their way so they can resolve the issues that you created, that’s a totally different thing. In Charlottesville, I’ve been asking that they move out of the way and allow the issues to be resolved by the people who are being affected. Reality has shown that most people who are not affected—even the ones with the best intentions—can’t fix it. And then there are the white people who are in the room only to derail the process. We have to admit to all of those things.

Walker lamented the racial composition of her city.

“This community is over 70 percent white,” she said in a Facebook Live event, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow.

It’s a very wealthy community and it is important for people to understand when their privilege is shaping their thought process and conversations … White people cannot take direct conversation. Y’all want to beat around the bush –‘it’s too hard, let’s not talk about it’— type of stuff.

Walker views herself as to the left of the Democratic Party, bemoaning the ineptitude of Democrat politicians “who don’t know how to reform systems.”

“One of the main things that I’m here to do is to call attention to the liberal progressive Democratic structure that’s in place, that believes that their best intentions are enough,” she told the Guardian.

“You need actions behind those intentions. You can’t just use words,” she said.

I’m attempting to make sure – and it’s painful – that people who work for the city, people who receive money from the city, understand that if they’re not moving the needle, making progress, changing lives, if they don’t truly understand service, they will not be in a position to receive resources, or I will criticize you publicly.

Walker told Vogue she supported a plan to take school resource officers (SROs) out of the local public schools. SROs are law enforcement officers usually employed by a police agency. The campaign to give them the boot in Charlottesville is ideology-driven, based on cop-hatred and a feeling that school disciplinary measures are too hard on black children.

Most of local blacks’ “interactions with our police department have been negative. The only time they maybe received some reprieve from that was in 2017, when officers stood by and let anything be inflicted upon them,” she said.

Drawing from the vocabulary of critical race theory, she said:

Our public school system is an institution that mimics the prison-industrial complex, so removing the SRO is just one piece of that equation, but we are not educating our students—not everyone is receiving the level of education that can really unlock their dreams. So that is the bigger fight to me than removing the officers from the school. That’s just one aspect. We don’t want a school system that feeds black and brown children to the prison system.

Local schoolchildren have also been indoctrinated.

In December 2020, the Black Student Union at Charlottesville High School spewed leftist drivel to support a push to get rid of SROs, urging the hiring of more social workers and guidance counselors. “The Black Student Union has full confidence that this approach will create an environment that will help our students and will take a step in the right direction towards breaking the school-to-prison pipeline,” the group said in a statement.

Evidence presented to a committee studying the policy suggests SROs play an important role in Charlottesville. “Since the 2017-18 school year, SROs have made 37 arrests at CHS, Buford Middle and Walker Upper Elementary,” the Daily Progress reported in January 2021.

But school resource officers are police and police are bad, so to Walker and her coreligionists they must be expelled from schools.

Walker’s morbid preoccupations surfaced in a March 24 tweet referencing an article about Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, which is headquartered in Charlottesville, and to this day he plays an outsized role in the local culture.

On Twitter she wrote:

thomas jefferson raped Sally Hemings. He ‘owned’ and raped her. How repulsed do you think she use [sic] to be as she laundered his fluids and scent out of the linens that he raped her on?

Actually, we’ll never know what emotions Hemings felt because little is known about her life and it isn’t at all certain that Jefferson had carnal relations with her.

In fact, although some say evidence suggests Hemings bore several children fathered by Jefferson, the allegation has not been proven. Although no sample of the DNA of the author of the Declaration of Independence was available, DNA testing of other people in 1998 “indicated a genetic link between the Jefferson and Hemings descendants,” according to Monticello.org.

The results of the study established that an individual carrying the male Jefferson Y chromosome fathered Eston Hemings (born 1808), the last known child born to Sally Hemings. There were approximately 25 adult male Jeffersons who carried this chromosome living in Virginia at that time, and a few of them are known to have visited Monticello.

In other words, the science says Thomas Jefferson may have sired a child by Hemings, but so may 24 other men with the surname Jefferson. One way of looking at this is to say that DNA evidence showed there is a 1-in-25 or 4 percent chance the third U.S. president was the biological father of Eston Hemings.

But the study’s authors, no doubt feeling intense pressure to cast aspersions on one of the most accomplished white males in the history of the world, hazarded a guess and lazily found “the simplest and most probable” conclusion was that Jefferson had fathered Eston Hemings. So it’s “case closed,” only if you belong to the let’s-get-this-over-with-because-I’ve-got-a-grant-check-to-cash approach to historiography.

On May 24, Walker, who must have studied at the Ta-Nehisi Coates School of Pretentiously Bad Free Verse, inflicted a two-sentence poem on her Twitter followers. She wrote:

Charlottesville: The beautiful-ugly it is. It rapes you, comforts you in its cum stained sheet and tells you to keep its secrets.

One can imagine a particularly graphic song by Riskay playing in the background as Walker recites the above words.

After a backlash she removed the reference to ejaculate and tweeted a longer version of the poem. Although she won’t become a goodwill ambassador for the city any time soon, she should make the shortlist for the next round of MacArthur Fellows “genius” grants. In her poem, she anthropomorphizes Charlottesville, which rapes and smothers and lynches its inhabitants.

Complete with grammatical errors, it reads:

Charlottesville: The beautiful-ugly it is. It lynched you, hung the noose at city hall and pressed the souvenir that was once your finger against its lips. It covers your death with its good intentions. It is a place where white women with Black kids collects [sic] signature for a white man who questions whether a black woman understands white supremacy. It is destructively world class. White people say that it is a place where gentrification started with the election of a Black women [sic] in 2017 and because of white power, a lie becomes #facts. Its daily practice is that of separating you from your soul. Charlottesville is void of a moral compass. It’s as if good ole tj [i.e. Thomas Jefferson] is still cleverly using his whip to whip the current inhabitants into submissiveness. Charlottesville rapes you of your breaths. It suffocates your hopes and dreams. It liberates you by conveniently redefining liberation. It progressively chants while it conservatively acts. Charlottesville is anchored in white supremacy and rooted in racism. Charlottesville rapes you and covers you in sullied sheets.

Why Walker wants to continue being mayor of a city she so obviously despises is unclear.

Then again, Barack Hussein Obama schemed mightily to become POTUS even though he hates America with a burning passion.

Maybe whining is the only thing Walker is good at. In modern America, it pays the bills.

Original Article

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