‘Now, it’s allowed’: KC Mayor Lucas sees racist threats escalate amid protests, pandemic
When Quinton Lucas says something is “fascinating,” that means it’s really really bad. And when Kansas City’s understated mayor says “y’all...let’s do better,” that’s his version of an all-caps APB.
Back when Lucas was on the City Council and the discussion got really heated, he might push his chair away from the table and look up at the ceiling, or in extreme situations let loose with an eye roll.
He’s so accessible that he self-doxxed, essentially, by sharing his cellphone number with the world — twice, in case you didn’t write it down the first time. At the height of the protests after George Floyd was murdered, he begged anyone who felt like the only answer was destruction to call him first, at any time of the day or night.
Yet I’d guess that what he shows of what he’s really thinking is a sliver of the whole. Maybe that’s part of how you go from homeless to Cornell Law School to mayor at age 35.
So when he shared a screenshot of a text message that called him the n-word and said he “should swing from a tree” because he’d ordered that Kansas Citians wear masks during this current COVID-19 spike, I had to wonder how many threats he’s gotten that we haven’t seen.
“For every one like that that he’s shared with the public,” said his communications director, Morgan Said, “there are 20 he shares with staff and 100 he shares with nobody.”
Naturally, when I talked to him, he said no, it wasn’t really scary, though he did turn it over to the cops and thinks they’ll probably be talking to the guy. Probably?
What did his mom, Quincy Bennett, have to say to all of this? First, just that it was crazy. Then, as the night wore on, she asked if he maybe wanted some backup from his uncle who has a bunch of Army buddies. Yeah, no.
Another post Lucas shared at the same time as the death threat showed a manipulated photo of him that made it look as though he’d been wearing an “F the police” T-shirt. Have any of you who fell for that met our mayor?
“Social media and photoshop are always fascinating,” he tweeted. “To the many texting me aghast of fake photos circulating, I recommend you not believe everything a muckraker sends your way... and use some judgment.“
In our interview, he said, “I honestly in some ways don’t get it.”
“It” being the volcanic reaction to an order to wear a mask. An order that’s so simple, necessary, nonpolitical and life-saving. And that has nothing to do with race.
(Former Vice President Dick Cheney is man enough to wear a mask, after all; why hasn’t that been the man-up and mask-up message all along?)
Lucas said the racist threat “does stem from the conversation in Washington,” though, to the point that it sometimes feels like “we’re in the middle of the George Wallace campaign. It comes from the conversation at the federal level. If we’ve got a president saying masks are dumb and protests are dumb,” then “we’re in a pure unadulterated culture war. And my concern is, I don’t know where this ends.”
One thing he and his mom discussed after this happened, he said, was that during all the years they spent during his childhood in not very diverse Hutchinson, Kansas, no one ever said anything like this. “And she said, ‘Maybe they were that way, but now, it’s allowed.’ ‘’
Sure, because there are some “very fine people” among the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville, and some “bad hombres” with “kung flu” who we need to watch out for.
The other night at a rally against racism in Olathe, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Willmott said that the current president — King Tang, he calls him, “because he thinks he’s king and looks like Tang” — is kind of a “roach whisperer,” coaxing all of the racists who used to scatter when the lights came on out into the open.
And the threats, Lucas said, have “crescendoed,” during the pandemic and protests.
How all of this really affects him, I never thought he’d tell me and he didn’t: “There are some people these days that get angry about the darndest things,” he said. Mr. Mayor, you sound like Art Linkletter, and even I barely know who that is.
After he tweeted the text that he should hang from a tree, a bunch of people told him he was “wimpy” to even mention it, he said. But what’s wimpy is whining about wearing a mask that could save your grandma’s life.
“If you don’t wear a mask, what the hell, we’re not going to arrest you,” Lucas said. “You might or might not get into the grocery store. No one’s out to get you.”
Why, he asks, is no one on the other side of the political spectrum calling out racist threats like the one he just got, or trying to calm the waters in any way? “I hope there will be a point where our leaders on the right will” do that, he said. “When will it be time for someone from another side to say maybe we can condemn this?”
Not soon, of course. Under King Tang, we all know that’s not going to happen.
