Mayor Milquetoast…at it again.

Mayor Milquetoast is at it again. Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer is the perfect example of a white liberal who parades himself as a champion of social causes and then when it is time to put policy to his speeches, he falls short, doing nothing and protecting no one but himself and his ability to elicit funds from wealthy Louisvillians.

His response to the recent protests over the murder of Breonna Taylor is just another example.

In 2018, when Louisville activists and citizens were begging him to help protect citizens during the height of Trump’s deportations and round up of immigrants, Fischer did his namby-pamby best to look like he was taking action. He called “sanctuary” a political term and said that he’d instructed the police not to work with ICE. This didn’t stop ICE agents from running crooked sting operations and nearly beating Mario Portales-Castro to death. The agents beat him to unconsciousness and fractured his skull. After the fact, they refused to allow him treatment. According to the Courier Journal, “ICE agents took Portales-Castro to the University of Louisville Hospital emergency room but told him he would not receive the necessary treatment and surgery for his fractured skull.”

These types of incidents could have been prevented if Fischer had the stones to make a choice for what is right and for the people who overwhelmingly helped him get elected.

He doesn’t and no candidate like him does either.

Let’s not forget he co-chaired the campaign for Mike Bloomberg, a candidate who famously said this about Black citizens at the Aspen Institute, ““Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops: They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York. It’s true in virtually every city.”

So waiting for Fischer to act on the Breonna Taylor case, or any other case, when he tied his reputation to another mayor with a shitty reputation for protecting Black and brown citizens isn’t surprising. Fischer isn’t going to do shit because Fischer doesn’t give a shit.

So how can citizens get him to act? By keeping the streets full (sadly during a pandemic) and putting the spotlight firmly on his inaction and lackadaisical performance as a public official. It’s nice that he shows up to respectable events, smiles and takes photos but he needs to protect his citizens with the ferocity that he uses to seem engaged.

Oh, I’m sure he’s waiting to announce a “task force” of the same tired names and black faces we’ve heard associated with every other “task force” he’s created to put a sheen on his record.

I don’t know but the air smells different and I don’t think that tactic is going to work out well for him.

This evening during his COVID-19 address, the governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear said that he wanted protesters to have a voice, then sent hundreds of state police to aid Fischer, apparently at Fischer’s request.

Read this as Fischer is concerned but not because he cares about the violence.

Power is concerned with one thing, protecting and maintaining power. These state troops showed up in full riot gear and immediately went to war. They didn’t allow protesters to have a voice, they shot first.

White supremacy has an end date and that date is fast approaching.

So Fischer needs to get ready to truly act or figure out how long he can hide behind this face?

Oops, I mean this one:

Fischer is a Janus. We never know which face we’re going to meet and neither one of them ever tells the whole truth or takes the difficult path. Both of them do their best to smile when Black folks are being good and then do nothing or the worst when those Black folks get squirrelly with him.

White supremacy loves the idea of a good negro but certainly never is concerned with protecting them. For Fischer or several other politicians in the nation to survive this, they need to decide where they stand. I hope they choose wisely because the consequences could be dire. There is a taste for blood in the air and I’m afraid the folks in ivory towers never peek out the window. They’d better, because, metaphorically, blades only get so sharp before someone uses them.