NAACP blasts Cotati council 'blackface' incident

<p>Sonoma County’s NAACP on Friday slammed Cotati City Councilman George Barich for appearing in blackface on his personal blog and urged voters to recall him.</p><p>Chapter President Ben Terry also chastised Cotati’s four other council members for not publicly condemning Barich after he posted the Halloween picture of himself beside columns lambasting President Barack Obama.</p><p>The lack of a response “leads us to believe that these are the views of all of the city government of Cotati,” Terry said in a statement.</p><p>“One of the reasons for the need of a NAACP chapter was because people with a black face could not eat in restaurants in this county,” Terry said, noting the chapter was formed 56 years ago. “It appears that in 2009, people of color are still looked upon in the city of Cotati as a race of people that have not advanced and still are a joke.”</p><p>The council has been mostly silent since the controversy over Barich’s blog began about two weeks ago.</p><p>Mayor John Guardino and Councilwoman Pat Gilardi haven’t returned phone calls seeking comment. Councilman Robert Coleman-Senghor, the lone black member, has said only that he was proud of residents who stepped up to complain, but “there are larger things for us to deal with.”</p><p>On Friday, Councilwoman Janet Orchard made her first public comments on the controversy, calling Barich’s picture inappropriate and wrong.</p><p>She said the council would take steps to address Barich’s behavior and could seek to distance itself from him in some way at its meeting Wednesday.</p><p>“I believe the council needs to officially say this is not OK,” Orchard said.</p><p>Barich said Friday he had not read the NAACP statement and declined to comment on it. The statement does not mention him by name.</p><p>Late last week, he removed the blackface picture from his blog, www.gbarich.blogspot.com, saying he wanted to give the city a chance to research legal concerns about his use of a likeness of the city logo.</CW></p><p>Traffic on the Web site has ballooned over the past weeks, going from about 650 hits to nearly 5,000, according to a counter. The site still contains an apparently pirated music video showing the rapper Snoop Dogg at the controls of a purple jetliner under the headline “Air Force One takes flight with soul.”</p><p>One of Barich’s blogs in defense of himself accused a “far-left fringe group” from the Chamber of Commerce of conspiring against him.</p><p>Terry said Barich’s removal of the picture is not enough and called for Barich’s ouster from office either by the council or a voter recall. </p><p>He and other members plan to attend Wednesday’s meeting.</p><p>“We do not believe that his actions of removing the piece from the blog erased anything form his heart,” Terry said. “And for him to continue to be a city councilman is only bad for the city of Cotati.”</p>