Somehow I Don't Think This Is What Dr. King Had In Mind

I haven't been keeping too close a watch on the news in recent weeks, but the past couple days I've been cooped up in this room in Berkeley, California sorting through papers and packing things for my upcoming moving van trip back to Brooklyn, with my only company being the none too tender ministrations of AM talk radio.

Normally that would mean being subjected to an unrelenting barrage of rabid right-wing ranting, but this being the Bay Area, we're also offered a similarly demented and hate-ridden outpouring of left-wing lunacy. Tonight I've endured three hours of the grotesquely obese race baiter Bernie Ward (a defrocked Catholic priest, who woulda thunk!) and half an hour of Ray Taliaferro, who's been spewing venom, often but not always race-tinged, at all things American for at least four decades now. It was in June of 1968 when, newly arrived in San Francisco, I first heard Taliaferro raving about how Richard Nixon was a madman, a criminal, and, if I'm not mistaken, a "son of a bitch."

Being a rather hateful little hippie myself at the time, I thought this Taliaferro character was just one more part of what made San Francisco great, but over the years I became considerably less fond of him, even on occasions when I agreed with him, because of his tendency to browbeat listeners and dishonestly distort what callers said in response to his inflammatory rhetoric. Example: Caller says, "Ray, I basically agree with you that racism is a problem in our community, but I'm not sure rounding up all white people and interning them in re-education camps is the way to go about solving it." Taliaferro responds: "Well, of course you'd say that, you rotten, good-for-nothing, Ku Klux Klan-supporting, inbred little cracker. Why, I bet you're just sitting there in your log cabin or your trailer park macraméing a rope to take to your next lynching, you low-life, worthless piece of scum. And what have you got to say for yourself? Nothing? I thought so (because Ray has turned off the guy's phone line)! See, folks, you confront these racists with the truth and they just turn tail and run like the cowards they are!"

Actually, Bernie Ward uses almost exactly the same technique, and tonight he, even more than Taliaferro, was obsessed with this Jena, Louisiana case. I'd just heard of it earlier today, and as far as I could see, the main thing it illustrated was the depths of depravity to which the so-called "civil rights" movement has sunk. We've got Mack Daddy Al Sharpton flying in to scoop up some publicity and no doubt some cash, we've got Jive-Ass Jesse Jackson accusing Barack Obama of being "white" for not having a sufficiently knee-jerk reaction to the case, and Bernie Ward doing a solid three hours of fulminating over how this proves America is a completely racist nation.

So what's the great injustice these crusaders are rushing to denounce? Well, apparently six young African-Americans are being denied their God-given right to rat-pack and savagely beat one white teenager as a means of addressing their hurt feelings over some racial tension and turf warfare that's been going on at a small-town high school in the Deep South.

Ward, Sharpton, Jackson et al. are comparing this to the freedom rides and heroic marches of civil rights activists in the 1960s, but as I recall, those protests were demanding the right to attend schools and ride at the front of the bus. I don't remember Martin Luther King declaiming about a dream in which one day gangs of young men would be allowed to attack and beat other young men based on the color of their skin.

Okay, am I being one-sided here by ignoring the initial provocation by white students, who apparently told black students they couldn't hang out under a certain tree and later decorated that tree with nooses to reinforce that point? Well, I'm not ignoring it, and of course I think it's vile to evoke, whether intentionally or not, painful memories of a time when black people were routinely lynched in the Deep South.

But what seems to be overlooked here is that however vile and hateful the white students were being, they were still engaging only in speech and symbolic actions. You know, sticks and stones and all that...? Calling people names, especially racially charged ones, or making it clear that you don't think very much of their skin color or their culture, is the mark of small-minded and ignorant people. But a gang beating someone black and blue and bloody is a whole other order of injustice.

Martin Luther King knew that, and struggled mightily and mostly successfully to persuade his followers to restrain their understandable anger and instead employ nonviolent tactics. The charlatans who claim to be carrying on his legacy are doing just the opposite: charging that the arrest and prosecution of the black teenagers for their gang assault is a violation of their civil rights.

If there was even a shred of logic to this position, you'd have to also accept that women were merely exercising their own civil rights if they attacked and beat every moronic misogynistic rapper who's making a living slagging off bitches and hos. White kids who get robbed for their lunch money or suffer gratuitous beatdowns by black kids in liberal bastions like Berkeley or Oakland should be immune from prosecution if they brought in their own posses to administer some street justice. I say if there was any logic to this position, which of course there isn't, but nonetheless the media are falling all over themselves to present the hatemongering of Sharpton, Jackson et al. as if it were a perfectly reasonable response to an obvious injustice.

Combine this with the usual suspects hopping on the "OJ's only being persecuted because he's black" bandwagon and I very nearly want to despair about the possibility of Dr. King's true dream ever being realized. He dared to speak of a day when people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; 44 years later we seem to have arrived at a point where the color of a man's skin is all we're allowed to see.

New York Then And Now

A couple times a week I walk the mile or so from my place to Greenpoint, and no matter which route I take, I seldom fail to marvel at the number and size of new buildings going up. Who do they think is going to live in all these new apartments, I wonder, knowing all the while that they'll be quickly filled, and at astronomical rents no less.

It's not just my neighborhood; a similar story is unfolding over large parts of Brooklyn, not to mention Queens, the Bronx and anywhere someone can find a sliver of buildable space in Manhattan. It's predicted that a million new people will soon be living in New York; during the 1970s, when many people believed the city to have entered an irreversible decline, the population dropped by nearly that much.

Movies like Warriors and Escape From New York painted the city as a nightmarish dystopia, a viewpoint shared by many Americans and more than a few New Yorkers. People left in droves, with some neighborhoods being more or less abandoned. In 1968 some squatter friends and I had our pick of dozens of empty buildings on the Lower East Side; on the site of one we occupied there now stands a block of new condos starting in the million dollar range.

If you want a clue to what changed, here's one: I noticed on my walk yesterday that many of the new apartments are being built without bars on the windows, not even at street level, something that would have been unheard of in the New York of old. I passed one window where a young man had left his curtains open: I could see him sitting placidly in front of about 20 grand's worth of computer and musical equipment. On warm nights people sit out on their stoops with expensive laptops on streets where once only the very brave or foolish would have risked walking.

There may be be many reasons for New York's booming population and economy, but it's hard not to believe that its having become the safest big city in America isn't one of the most vital. Which begs the question: what happens if things turn bad again, if a new mayor drops the ball, if an economic downturn takes us back to the era of ruined neighborhoods and endemic crime?

Optimists like to believe that couldn't happen; that the city's turnaround is so complete that whatever it was that went wrong before is a sheer impossibility. These days you'll find more people worrying about gentrification than its opposite, for which there isn't a universally recognized word, but which I'm prone to call - only slightly flippantly - slumification.

Many people, especially those who can no longer afford New York's skyrocketing rents, or who fear being displaced from neighborhoods where they've lived for years, view gentrification as some unholy plot hatched by the mayor in collusion with property developers and the artsy-fartsy white hipsters who act as their shock troops. But gentrification is not purely a white issue; this afternoon, Mary Pattillo, author of Black On The Block: The Politics Of Race And Class In The City, was on WNYC talking about how the black middle class has had a similar effect on formerly depressed black neighborhoods.

In a perhaps unguarded aside, she said there was a general sense that the affected neighborhoods, while going upscale, should "remain black," and I couldn't help wondering what sort of outcry would result if another community leader expressed the notion that his or her neighborhood should "remain white." It also put me in mind of what might be seen as a deliberate act of "slumification," which it could be argued helped precipitate the decline of many New York neighborhoods in the 1960s and 70s: Mayor John Lindsay's policy of plunking down huge housing projects, heavily populated by African-American welfare recipients, in what had previously been stable white working or middle class areas.

The resulting friction, exacerbated by soaring crime rates, was dismissed by Lindsay and his brain trust of elitist Manhattanites, as atavistic racism which had to be confronted and rooted out by any means necessary. But as Jim Sleeper points out in his excellent The Closest Of Strangers: Liberalism And The Politics Of Race In New York, the conflict was not so much about race as about class. Lindsay's quest for social justice (or, if you prefer, his desire to pander to minorities) led him to make the classic racist mistake: seeing people only in terms of their skin color.

In the rarefied ideological realms where he dwelt, Lindsay was unable to see the difference between the gradual integration of a neighborhood by blacks whose educational, professional and social values more or less matched those already present, and effectively dropping a bomb on it by introducing thousands of new residents who had little or nothing in common with the existing residents, and were essentially being shifted about by a program of social engineering not wholly unlike South Africa's creation of little Bantustans during the apartheid era.

Is it over-simplifying to blame Lindsay not only for New York's decline, but also for the racial and political balkanization that ensued? Certainly the mayors that followed, especially the hopeless Abe Beame and the not much better Ed Koch, have to shoulder their share of the blame. The economic and energy crises of the 1970s couldn't have helped either. Similarly, those who want to credit Rudy Giuliani for New York's recovery or Mike Bloomberg for building upon it have to admit they were greatly assisted by the booming national economy beginning in the 1990s.

But New York's decline as well as its recovery were so dramatic, and so clearly linked to certain mayoral policies like Lindsay's failed liberalism and Giuliani's take-back-the-streets initiative, that it seems foolish to argue that it makes no difference who is mayor. And if that's the case, there's always the possibility, even likelihood, that some day we'll again see a mayor who's willing to tolerate high rates of crime and disorder in the belief that there's a constituency for that sort of thing.

Freddy Ferrer or Mark Green would, in my opinion, have been just that kind of mayor: like Lindsay, they see people primarily in terms of race, and because there's a certain portion of the minority community that does have a vested interest in a New York that soft on crime, politicians like these jump to what I see as the racist conclusion that minorities in general want less law enforcement and more tolerance for the intolerable.

On a more hopeful note, New York has changed so much that people now have come to expect safe streets and an honest, well-functioning city government. The politics of divisiveness and class envy that powered Lindsay and his successors into office may have trouble gaining a toehold again. In his review of Vincent Cannato's The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay And His Struggle To Save New York, Jim Sleeper points out that the ostensibly conservative Rudy Giuliani, in many ways the "anti-Lindsay," had helped bring many of Lindsay's liberal ideals to fruition while Lindsay himself left little more than ruin, despair and destruction in his wake.