Boston's Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu came under fire from commentators on the right and left over her segregated holiday party, leading the New York Post to compare her to segragationist-era Governor George Wallace.
Wu attracted controversy this week for hosting an "electeds of color" holiday party. After invitations were mistakenly sent out to all, she made it clear that White city council members were not invited.
While the mayor and her aide apologized for the accidental invite, they did not apologize for planning a party that excluded White city leaders.
Wu's defense of the segregated party exposed the left's "regressive views on race," the New York Post's editorial board wrote.
BOSTON MAYOR DEFENDS EXCLUDING WHITE PEOPLE FROM HOLIDAY PARTY
"If you’re throwing a party that Gov. George Wallace would approve of, you might want to think twice," the Post mocked.
"But hey, she’s a progressive, which these days means embracing some deeply regressive views, where being ‘anti-racist’ means obsessing about race, and to heck with all that ‘content of our character’ talk the civil-rights movement stood for," it criticized.
Mayor Wu's party was just one instance of how the far-left's push for segregated spaces has manifested in American culture, from separate housing on college campuses to minority-only graduation ceremonies, the editorial said.
"The old ‘separate but equal’ crowd claimed it served the cause of social peace; the new one argues it serves social justice — but it’s based on reducing people to their skin color, either way," the Post added.
10 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT A ‘CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS’
Boston Herald columnist and conservative radio host Howie Carr also pummeled Wu for hosting the party.
He argued this controversy would've been endless media fodder if a White mayor had done something similar.
"What if the reverse had happened – what if a White mayor had held a Whites-only party at a city-owned building, after specifically disinviting all the non-White members of the City Council?" he asked in a column for the Herald.
"We all know the answer to that question. It would have been the end of the world, a national story for days if not weeks on end…And if it had been a White Republican mayor who had hosted it, every GOP politician in the nation down to the candidate for tree warden in Athol would have been asked to denounce it," Carr wrote.
"Michelle Wu was just trying to put the ‘party’ back into apartheid," the columnist mocked.
"In the 20th century, there was an expression – Banned in Boston. It was a reference to books. Now Banned in Boston is back, but the banning isn’t about books. It’s about White people," he criticized.
"Daily Show" co-host and comedian Kal Penn was more forgiving of the Democratic mayor, but also took some jabs. He mocked the mayor for creating "a whole mess" by disinviting White people from the party.
"Y'all, come on! At that point, it’s too late! Your only option is to say the holiday party this year will center and honor the narratives of the BIPOC community and then nobody’s going to want to come," he teased on the Thursday night show.
Fox News' Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.
