Stark’s Idea Is Basically a Racist One : Congressman’s comment about Secretary Sullivan is stereotyping at about its worst

Even if Rep. Pete Stark winds up giving Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan the unqualified apology to which the Bush Administration’s only black Cabinet officer is entitled, there’s a lesson to be learned--and committed to memory.

Stark’s coarse and offensive characterization of the secretary’s position on various health-policy issues was not simply intemperate or lacking in civility; it was, in fact, a patronizing, objectively racist affront.

Stark, an Oakland Democrat who chairs a Ways and Means subcommittee on health, has become increasingly frustrated with Sullivan’s opposition to abortion and national health insurance. He believes the former head of Atlanta’s Morehouse School of Medicine has altered his views to accommodate those of the White House. At a press conference Thursday, the congressman said that, because of Sullivan’s positions on these issues, he “comes as close to being a disgrace to his profession and his race as anybody I have seen in the Cabinet.” Stark is white. About 6% of his constituents are black.

Sullivan took understandable exception to such remarks, as did many of Stark’s colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Friday, the congressman said on the House floor, “To the secretary, I have to say (that) I blew it. I should not have brought into the discussion his race, because it obscures the fact he is carrying on a bankrupt policy.”

No. That’s not it.

Stark should not have raised the the question of Sullivan’s race because it is irrelevant and, in this context, insulting. The notion that skin color, religion, ethnic origin or sex obliges a person to hold particular ideas is as hurtful as any other racist idea.

Implicit in Stark’s original comments is the suggestion that Sullivan “does not know his place,” which is in support of the policies the congressman thinks are good for African-Americans.

Stark is entitled to his views; he is not entitled to insist that Sullivan or anyone else share them as a consequence of some imagined racial duty.

That is the line at issue here and Stark owes Secretary Sullivan an immediate apology for crossing it.