Stupid, Dirty Girl

One of the stranger [and funnier!--ed] political stories I've heard is the incident several weeks ago in which the California Secretary of Education, Richard Riordan, told a 6-year old girl that her name, Isis, meant "stupid, dirty girl." Riordan, a former mayor of Los Angeles, had previously been famous for losing a gubernatorial primary to a hard-right wing candidate, Bob Simon, who was ultimately crushed by Gray Davis in 2002.

The situation was complicated when the Democratic Assemblyman from Compton, who has the imperishable name Mervyn Dymally, seized a (fool's-)golden opportunity to construe the gaffe as an egregious racial slur and proceed from there:

At the time, Dymally told the Mercury News that Riordan "needs to do more than just apologize. And I have to inject: This was a little African-American girl. Would he have done that to a white girl?''

Trouble is, the girl's full name is Isis D'Luciano, and she is white and blond. So apparently Riordan "would have done that to a white girl." Lots of things could have motivated Riordan to make that remark. For one thing, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to learn that the girl is either stupid or dirty. Lots of kids are, maybe most of them. For another, Riordan is obviously so socially inept that he couldn't think of anything better to say to a 6 year old than that, and he is so politically inept as to say such a thing while he was being recorded, that one feels a sort of sympathy or at least pity for him.

But imagine if the girl had been black? Riordan would have been branded a racist and forced out of politics. So history, in this case, skipped right over tragedy to farce.