With the mayor and the City Council gradually moving through its biennial re-appointment dance, we’ve had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Duane Reed in chambers more often than usual.

Mr. Reed, the articulate leader of the local chapter of the NAACP, typically appears whenever there is a mayoral appointment to be confirmed. He strides up to the podium and cautions council members about “transparency” in the appointment process and the need to cast a wide net so applicants of all backgrounds may be considered.

It is a noble, if futile, mission inasmuch as all mayoral appointments are, well, mayoral--meaning that there is no real process beyond the mysterious internal workings of R.T. Rybak’s cerebellum.

But at today’s gathering of the Health, Energy, and Environment Committee, Mr. Reed threw us a curve. He delivered his usual speech in advance of the committee’s enthusiastic confirmation of Gretchen Musicant as director of the Health Department.

But when the agenda shifted to confirm Jayne Khalifa as the director of the Civil Rights Department, Reed approached the podium with a bit of a smile. “I’m going to change the script a little bit,” he told committee members, before launching into a brief sermon about how Ms. Khalifa had “engaged the community” and “reached out” to Mr. Reed’s satisfaction. “I enthusiastically endorse a person of color (Ms. Khalifa happens to be black),” he enthused, and then, apparently awakened somehow by the racial cast of his endorsement, he quickly added, “a qualified person . . . the most qualified person for the job.”

Ms. Musicant, we feel compelled to report, does not share Ms. Khalifa’s--nor Mr. Reed’s--African American heritage. We note this not to diminish Mr. Reed’s earlier point about the need to look beyond ethnic background when making high-level city appointments. Anything less certainly could be construed as a racist perspective.