Kentucky’s marble-floored frat house needs some mirrors. For self-reflection.
Republished from Kentucky Lantern
Earlier this year I wrote about the shameless sexism and rampant racism I witnessed in Frankfort, about how it often seems that leadership — whether through encouragement or choosing to ignore shenanigans — runs our taxpayer-funded statehouse like a marble-floored frat house of older, white men.
To prove me wrong — insert laughing emoji here — the Kentucky Senate filled all of its leadership positions for 2025 with older, white men, including replacing Majority Caucus Chair Julie Raque Adams with Sen. Robby Mills and outgoing floor leader Damon Thayer with Sen. Max Wise.
When asked who he might recommend as his replacement, Thayer repeatedly gave Raque Adams’ name. And yet, she also lost her seat as majority caucus chair. Did she not want either job, did her fellow male senators not want her, or both?
And aren’t these the same legislators and leaders vigorously leading the fight to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) on Kentucky’s college campuses?
Somebody quick, hand our frat house of good ol’ boys a mirror.
I was in the room for the September hearing on DEI in the Capitol Annex, and the only thing more despicable than watching powerful university presidents grovel to the systemic racism was watching helplessly in the audience as not a single lawmaker had the courage to voice the obvious. When I stepped out into the hall for a break, I overheard a Black man who had also stepped out say loudly, “This is bull***! Is it always like this?!”
“Yes it is,” I said. “Yes it is.”
And stuff rolls downhill, does it not? In national Republican politics, the man who built his political capital by demanding that our first Black president show his birth certificate — racism and white supremacy on national display — has nabbed the presidency for the second time, easily winning Kentucky with 64.5% of the vote. Shocking no one, it appears he’s filling his cabinet with mostly unqualified, camera-ready, white men.
While Democrats nationally and here in Kentucky do the required post-election-loss autopsy to point fingers and determine what could have been done differently, I will posit that there is nothing that could have been done. Harris never had a chance running against a happily hateful old white man who made his political bones being a proud white supremacist.
Here in Kentucky last week, 14 white GOP legislators and incoming lawmakers signed a public statement calling for the resignation or ouster of Jefferson County Public Schools Chief Equity Officer John Marshall for posts he made on X about conversations with Black students and young professionals. The Republicans’ denunciation of Marshall read, in part, “In the current heated political climate of America, it is absolutely unacceptable for a senior JCPS leader to stoke the fires of hatred and division rather than set an example of bringing students together in peace.”
Wait a minute, who’s stoking the fires?
When our Senate and House leaders are finished with the mirror I offered above, maybe they could loan it to those 14 colleagues.
By “the current heated political climate of America,” they are pointing to the presidential reelection of their party’s leader who was so accurately described by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic as follows: “His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against ‘lazy” black employees’ and insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.”
Remember that the same lawmakers who signed their big, chest-thumping statement about John Marshall, in conjunction with long-serving Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne (both white men), serve in a legislature where not even the Crown Act — a fundamental bill allowing Black people to wear their own hair at work — can make it to the floor for a vote.
But don’t call them racists. Or white supremacists.
Come January, Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated for the second time, and the Kentucky General Assembly will convene again in the marble-floored frat house dominated by older white men in the GOP supermajority.
Here’s a thought. If you don’t want activists, voters, professors, community leaders and newspaper columnists to call you racists and/or white supremacists, take a minute for some self-reflection.
Stop putting out cowardly, written statements denigrating revered Black leaders. Expand your caucus to include women and people of color. Distance yourself from the proud racist entering the White House. Think about what diversity, equity and inclusion mean to real people instead of flailing absurdly at an acronym.
Consider the anti-discriminatory bills, like the Crown Act, that you have continually and proudly ignored through your actions or lack thereof.
Do better.
Be better.
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter. Kentucky Lantern stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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