Kwame Kilpatrick

Kwame Kilpatrick stood in the courtroom and begged for forgiveness. His lies in the text messaging and perjury scandal that rocked Detroit in 2008. Kilpatrick speaking softly portrayed himself as a bit beaten. He claimed to be a victim of a vindictive prosecutor who is fixated on the old Kwame Kilpatrick, the one who lied in a police whistleblower lawsuit when he denied being romantically involved with his then chief of staff Christine Beatty. He claimed to be a good husband, a new person, but Judge Groner’s response was simple “Your testimony in this court amounted to perjury” the end of the line had been reached for Kwame. He will now spend the next 2-5 years in prison. His law license has been taken from him, Compuware, the company paying is 120,000 dollar salary will be releasing him at the end of the month.

It is a strange and interesting result for a man to whom the mantle had been passed in 2002. He was crowned the hip-hop mayor: a new breed of politician from the streets who could understand the plight of the city while displaying an amazing aura of cool. In his 2002 inaugural address, Kilpatrick said:

“I stand before you as a son of the city of Detroit and all that it represents. I was born here in the city of Detroit, I was raised here in the city of Detroit, I went to these Detroit Public Schools. I understand this city. ... This position is personal to me. It's much more than just politics.”

All this was news to people who knew him. His mom, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick had been a state representative (a seat Kwame took over after she vacated the seat to run for congress) and is now a member of congress where she has served since 2003. His dad, Bernard Kilpatrick was a chief of staff for a Wayne County Executive and now runs his own consulting firm. Kwame had never been what he said he was, and is no more hip-hop than the suburban middle class children who drive their expensive SUVs while singing along to the latest Lil Wayne.

All of this came to a head in the courtroom on May 25, 2010. For once, someone saw right through the mayor. The man who disgraced his office by inviting strippers into the mayoral mansion. During the first 33 months of the Kwame administration, he managed to rack up $210,000 in city issued credit cards to pay for travel, meals, and entertainment. He managed to install a 131 million dollar radio system that was used by the Detroit police and fire departments. He gave out no bid contracts and wantonly squandered the resources in the most economically depressed city in the country. Yet, in 2005 he managed to win re-election. How? He won with 53% of the vote, a victory he secured by sending his staffers to nursing homes to help dying patients fill out their ballots.

So who was the real Kwame? Probably a pimp who managed to jive is way into Black people’s hearts by providing them hope that even their hypersexual, irresponsible, earring wearing entitled sons can finagle their way into positions of power. There should be no place for that in our community. We should expect our politicians to speak without using colloquial terms, treat their offices with a tremendous amount of respect and more importantly love their wives and children. While this is an ideal, it is not one that we should be willing to compromise from the start. The mayor should be about the people’s business, not auditioning for a rap video.

I do not doubt that people will say it was racism, but I want to remind them that Kwame plead guilty and agreed to pay a fine of 1 million dollars to Detroit in payments of $79,000. Instead of paying his fine, he lived in million dollar homes, sent his wife to plastic surgeons and rode around in expensive SUVs. Some may see the sentence as too harsh. Kwame’s lawyer has already said that it seems as if they are "out to get" Kwame. It is a harsh sentence but unlike most things in Kwame’s life of privilege it may teach him and others that follow suit a valuable lesson: there is no space in our lives for people who take more than they give, misuse others for personal gain and take advantage of poorer and weaker members of the community to advance their own motives.