Atlanta mayoral race have turned out to be no different than Birmingham's 2007 mayoral race

Well, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution spilled the "tea" on what's really been going on with their upcoming mayoral races and it has boiled down to that's right "race".  Well, last week a memo was issued by the Black Leadership Forum (BLF) calling for the black electorate of Atlanta to vote for a black mayor to so that they can have the "black agenda" fulfilled.  This interesting and inciteful editorial in the AJC calling the memo "bigoted", it seem that the race has turned into a "race" race.   The memo said that “the developers have an agenda, downtown business has an agenda, the gays have an agenda, the Hispanics have an agenda."  Well, this has turned this pretty low-key mayoral race into a campaign in which incumbent mayor Shirley Franklin to denounce this memo.  There are current 3 key candidates in the race at the moment, the current Atlanta City Council President Lisa Borders, Atlanta City Councilwoman Mary Norwood, and Georgia State Legislator Kasim Reed.  The memo specifically endorsed Borders; however, Borders and Reeds issued statements denouncing the memo and saying the race should be based on race.  Norwood just said via her spokesperson the people would judge her based on her platform.  Oh yeah, Norwood is white.

LOL, this is a H.A.M. because today 2 Clark Atlanta professors, William Boone and Keith Jennings, have come out admitting ownership of the memo and denial of it being racist. Also Aaron Turpeau, a longtime political insider and consultant, is the only member of BLF who has been identified. He has acknowledged the memo and said it's part of the group’s efforts to establish a “black agenda”.  Boone and Jennings admitted they had written the memo, but they say that it wasn't to support anything other than addressing black issues so voters would come out for the run-off.  However, this may backfire and cause a higher turnout of whites.  Atlanta might just have it first white mayor in nearly 40 years.

Borders has been endorsed by former Atlanta mayor and UN Ambassador Andrew Young and is very popular amongst the city young black professionals (who are quite active in city politics).  However, Norwood is very popular with the gay community in Atlanta proper (which is predominately white) also those in the law enforcement and fire protections officials.  However, she doesn't really have much popularity with the black electorate.  Now other large majority black cities have voted for white mayors in the past, so black folks aren't that racially-based on voting.  On the other hand, a number of times there are situations where white mayors in certain black cities where done primarily with votes from whites rather than blacks.  It's a Catch-22, but one can see that we have some serious racial polarization that is going down in the ATL.

IMO, it sounds like Birmingham in 2007 all over again, but this is the supposedly very socially progressive metropolis to our east in neighboring Georgia. Yeah, Birmingham isn't alone on this at all like some people would love to believe. I feel that yeah there should be a viable candidate who cares about all citizens in Atlanta, but should it just be a "token" white or black candidate because of their phenotype, HELL NO!  However, you know there is more foolishness to this than I care to want to uncover here because I have no  dog in this fight.  Nevertheless, it is pretty damn interesting when Atlanta, "the city too busy to hate" apparently it's not too busy to discriminate or be prejudice on either end of the racial pendulum...