(Congressional) House Negroes

In this week's issue of Time magazine, there is an article about Harold Ford Jr.'s run for Bill Frist's seat in the U.S. Senate. The article goes on to discuss the unprecedented number of African-Americans running for top political offices (Kenneth Blackwell for Ohio's governor, our boy Kweisi Mfume for U.S. Senate, Deval Patrick for Governor of Massachusetts, among others). This doesn't surprise me. Barak is lonely and could use some company and I'm sure our Brothers and Sistas could do a far better job balancing state budgets and solving some of the problems in education, given it is us most affected by these issues. But what made me put down the magazine and sit up in bed was the very last two sentences of the article: "There have been only five black Senators in U.S. history. And only one African American, Virginia Democrat Douglas Wilder in 1989, has been elected Governor ever."
5 .... and 1, y'all. In U.S. HISTORY ... we're not talking 20 years; we're talking more than 200 years. 5 and 1 ... so that leads me to my question du jour: what's REALLY going on? Why do we continue to allow white men to not only make the rules of the game, but to make the game itself? If anyone was paying attention last week -- it was the US Senate that struck down what would have been the first raise in minimum wage in about 10 years. And it wasn't just the Republicans, y'all. It was your Clinton-loving Dems, too.... so WHAT, I ask again ... is really going on?