Buckhead City coming to legislature and to a head
By Bill Torpy, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bill White, the slick carnival barker leading the Buckhead cityhood parade, has been stepping in it recently.
Last week, White deleted his retweet of a comment from a far-right website called VDARE, one that coupled higher crime rates to cities that have higher percentages of Black residents. The contention is not necessarily untrue, but there’s a whole host of social, economic, historic and cultural explanations on that subject that could fill a library. But the sarcastic tweet from VDARE came across as racist. Which it was.
A few days earlier, White called Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens a racist for a publicized comment he made that seemed like Dickens was ruing the fact that Atlanta was no longer a majority Black city. Dickens was actually talking about the effects of gentrification and how better policies are needed to keep working class Black residents in the city.
White, the public face of the effort for Buckhead to secede from Atlanta, quickly apologized for the snafu. “I’m not perfect; I hate to have unforced errors,” he told me Thursday. “I apologized and moved on.”
As to why he followed VDARE in the first place, White, who has 24,000 followers on his Twitter account, said he often blindly follows accounts that follow him.
I’m told there are cityhood supporters who want him to step down from the campaign, that he’s become a distraction, especially as the effort heads to the Legislature this week to gain state approval for the question to be put to the Buckhead’s voters.