By Dayvon Love
There is a contentious state senate race for the 41st legislative district of Maryland that should be understood beyond just two individual people running for office, but as a clash of civilizations. Serious analysis of politics is not about personality but about the political interest, worldviews and agendas that form the basis of a candidate’s political viability.
Maryland Delegate Malcolm Ruff (D-District 41) is running against the incumbent, State Senator Dalya Attar.
Ruff, a Black man from Park Heights, is a civil rights attorney. He has worked on a variety of social justice issues, including the successful litigation of police brutality cases in Maryland. His professional career has been rooted in seeking justice, particularly for Black people who have been victimized by the engrained racism of the criminal justice system.
My organization is collaborating with him on a piece of legislation that would tax institutions with endowments above $2 billion and invest the revenues into a reparations fund. This is not a piece of legislation that will pass this year, but it is an attempt to prime the Maryland legislature for the kinds of recommendations that would likely emerge from the Maryland Reparations Commission in a couple years.
The Baltimore Scoop describes itself as a platform “that captures the essence of Yiddishkeit,” which means the Jewish way of life. Recently, the publication put out a blurb for its subscribers about Malcolm Ruff’s candidacy. The literature reveals a tremendous amount about the base of support that is backing Dalya Attar’s campaign.
The article frames delegate Ruff’s sponsorship of the reparations bill as a distraction from dealing with important issues facing the residents of the district. This is typical electioneering discourse, but is an interesting frame given the fact that the majority of the district are working class Black people who would benefit greatly from substantive reparations policies. The blurb also incorrectly describes what the bill actually does.
The Baltimore Scoop blurb says “at a time when Maryland families are struggling with rising BGE rates and costs of living, Malcolm Ruff, the delegate who represents our district and who filed today to run for Senate against Senator Attar, sponsored a bill that creates a new tax to fund giving reparations to people impacted by historic inequality.”
This falsely implies that this bill creates a tax that would be an additional burden on the residents of the district. The reality is that this bill would only tax a handful of the most wealthy institutions in the state. But the implication borrows directly from the right wing playbook of framing reparations as taking money from hardworking tax payers and giving their money away.
The blurb also goes on to say that the bill would prohibit the resources from being used for law enforcement. While this is correct, this is another subtle right wing dog whistle to imply that delegate Ruff is not concerned about keeping the community safe. This is at odds with the reality that he has been supportive of the work of the networks of formerly incarcerated folks and other community based groups that have played a significant role in the historic declines in homicides in Baltimore over the last few years.
A politics that is rooted in the European settler colonial project of the state of Israel, otherwise known as Zionism, is a force within the Democratic Party that is aligned with the centrist, corporate wing of the party. Those Zionist political forces have been advocates of so-called tough on crime policies that historically has fueled mass incarceration, opposed to broad based economic redistribution policies, and supportive of Sinclair Broadcasting and its executive chairman, David Smith’s propaganda campaign to demonize Black political leadership as inherently corrupt.
The state senate race in the 41st legislative district is a political clash of civilizations between a politics of social justice and Black self determination, and Zionist political forces that are complicit with mass incarceration and White monopoly capitalist domination of this society. There couldn’t be a more clear contrast.
When we are voting to elect political leaders we are not just putting them in a seat, but we are empowering their base of support with a voice for their political agenda.
The Baltimore Scoop article provides more evidence of the right wing political forces that are a central feature of Senator Attar political viability. I hope that Black people vote in our own collective interest, otherwise we are co-signing our collective disempowerment.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.