After overseeing the 1,600 volunteers in Anthony Williams's victorious mayoral campaign, David Howard was appointed to be the District of Columbia's public advocate. On January 15, about two weeks into his new job, Howard, who happens to be white, told two members of his staff that, given the lack of funds, he was going to have to be "niggardly" (which means stingy, miserly). His staff, ignorant of the word's meaning or just sensing an opportunity to make trouble, mistook it for a racial slur and spread inflammatory rumors that Howard had used the other n word. Howard, in a caricature of self-abasing liberalism, resigned after apologizing to his spiteful subordinates. And the new black mayor, striking a pose of spineless racial posturing, accepted.
By quitting, Howard missed a chance to rebut this new version of the old but effective propaganda that racism is born of ignorance: The victim of racism now apparently has no responsibility to distinguish between the ignorance of others and his own. If it feels racist, it is.
But the real lost opportunity was Williams's. Only three weeks in office, he had already been accused in an amazingly demagogic Washington Post op-ed of being insufficiently black. Faced with his first public controversy, he buckled. The "niggardly" flap was a pathetic parody of racial protest, but Williams's weakness in responding to it was the real thing. He will no doubt now be hounded throughout his term by opportunistic hectoring.
For D.C., one of the few cities in America where one comes across public property spraypainted with swastikas, the Howard story is only the most recent example of reaping what you sow. But that's not the whole story. David Howard, it was reported two days into the flap, was the highest ranking openly gay member of the new government. D.C.'s gay rights groups, black and white, have rallied to his cause, arguing correctly that his resignation was wrongly accepted. No longer just a white guy with a big vocabulary, he is a representative of another special interest group, a trump card in the game of D.C. identity politics. Mayor Williams has now said that he is looking to rehire David Howard.