She has spent 20 years in television, a black woman reporter from a large East Coast city. Last week she was in Richmond, Va., to chronicle the first election of a black governor in American history. Sharing a cab from the train station, she was uncertain about her feelings.
”There are a lot of similarities for black people in these lines of work,” she said. ”Black politicians and black people on television, we`re all in the business of selling ourselves to white people, to the majority.
”If we can`t do it, if we`re seen as too threatening or too aggressive or too whatever, then we lose. You have to be aggressive enough to get where you want to go, but not be seen as so aggressive you can`t stay.”
Last Tuesday, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves, was poised to get where he wanted to go, and make history in the process.
A native of Virginia, a combat veteran in Korea, a career politician known for 20 years across the state, the incumbent lieutenant governor in a period of relative prosperity, the heir to the legacy of two popular Democratic governors, Wilder should have had safe passage to the Executive Mansion.
After all, the Republican he was running against, J. Marshall Coleman, had lost a gubernatorial race to Democrat Charles Robb in 1981 by more than 100,000 votes.
It was hardly that simple, of course. Wilder is black. And he beat Coleman, who is white, by 5,000 votes out of 1.8 million cast, a margin of 0.04 percent, with a recount possible.
Last week, politicians, pundits and college professors were reveling in victories by black candidates in Virginia, New York City and a host of smaller mayoralty races.
By most accounts, the results of Election Day 1989 constitute a watershed, the triumph of newly minted black political pragmatism.
Looking at Wilder and David Dinkins, the black Democrat who inched into the mayor`s office in New York by the narrowest of margins despite a 5-1 advantage in voter registration, the New York Times editorial page described the events as follows:
”Each ran as a politician who is black, not as a black politician. Their appeals were across ethnic lines. . . . For Mr. Dinkins and Mr. Wilder, that meant declining the help of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who inspires blacks but inflames many whites.”
For some, this sort of weighty post-mortem is practical politics, signaling the emergence of a post-civil rights era for blacks in public life. More to the point, if you monitor some analyses, it means the end of Jackson. For others, the orgy of self-congratulation smacks of condescension. The current celebration of racial harmony at the polling place contains a mean-spiritedness, particularly as it relates to Jackson.
None of this is straightforward; none of it is simple. You may believe that Jackson has played no role, or a negative role, in the emergence of a black political class. But no honest black politician looking at voter registration figures would make that claim.
Jackson helped Wilder by staying away from Virginia because, as the TV reporter noted, blacks can`t appear to be too aggressive, too threatening. But Jackson won the Democratic presidential primary in Virginia last year and galvanized black voters in that state as he has in many others.
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Wilder was elected governor in a state where 80 percent of the voters are white, and the historical significance of that event is undeniable.
But the fact remains that as in New York City, thousands of white voters in Virginia abandoned their party or stayed home rather than vote for a black. Pretending that race doesn`t matter is as deluded a notion in its way as believing that race is all-important.
For all their reaching out, for all the coalition-building and desire to be washed in the blood of the political mainstream, Wilder and Dinkins were in full collapse at the close of their respective campaigns.
Yes, they won. And, yes, politics is a bottom-line game, as Wilder is fond of pointing out. But if we`re keeping score, what might be said about last Tuesday is this:
If a black candidate is clearly the most qualified, if he or she works full-time at accommodating a white majority, and talks of little but conciliation and reconciliation, and keeps Jesse Jackson out of sight, and isn`t too aggressive or too threatening, he or she has a chance.