After a century of race-based, color-conscious and ethno-sensitive “balanced tickets,” a new political trend is showing itself in the offices of big-city mayors.
Call it “trans-racial politics.”
You can see it in New York City, where Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani startled everyone when he decided to dismantle the city’s offices designed to serve the interests of blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians and homosexuals.
His black Democratic predecessor, David Dinkins encouraged such offices, which critics labeled his “offices of ethnic pandering.” Dinkins also endeavored to hire a staff that reflected the city’s “gorgeous mosaic” of ethnic and gender-preference diversity.
Dinkins’ approach was in keeping with old-style urban politics. It is a style that boldly emerged on America’s urban scene a century ago with the massive influx of immigrants, most of whom came from Europe. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other non-whites typically received fewer benefits until they began to organize and gain political clout, particularly in the post-’60s era.
Such have been the ways of ethnic succession, a political etiquette that awards political power, favors, services and influence to groups who organize politically, whether along lines of race, ethnicity or other interests.
Giuliani, a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, thumbed his nose at all that. Decrying his critics as “fixated” on the notion of ethnic balance, he declared a strategy of “one city, one standard,” and promised to serve all communities–every one of them–to the best of his ability.
Now, almost four years later, he is facing voters again in the city’s Nov. 4 general election. So, he is facing a royal punishment, right?
Wrong. Major polls show the mayor to be a shoo-in for re-election. Even his least supportive constituency, black voters, give him 20 percent of their support in polls, four times the 5 percent of the black vote he received four years ago against Dinkins, an African-American.
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His charismatically challenged challenger, Ruth Messinger, barely received the 40 percent of the Democratic vote she needed to avoid a run-off against Rev. Al Sharpton, who received an impressive 32 percent of the primary vote in a very low turnout.
Sharpton, an old-style black politician, boosted his support by exploiting black anger over the nationally publicized beating and sodomization of a Haitian immigrant in a Brooklyn police station. But Giuliani has cooled black anger by initiating new police reforms and by reminding everyone of how crime, down all over town, has fallen to 30-year record lows in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods since he took office.
“New Yorkers don’t particularly like Giuliani,” one New York friend told me. “But they respect him. To him, respect is better.”
He’s not alone. Mayors across America are showing that the race issue isn’t what it used to be. Black Democrats like Dennis Archer of Detroit and Michael White of Cleveland have campaigned across racial lines and been rewarded with new investments, tourism, lower crime and reduced racial tensions in their cities.
White Democrats like Richard M. Daley of Chicago and Edward Rendell of Philadelphia have made the same outreach in reverse to blacks and Hispanics with similar rewards. Richard Riordan of Los Angeles, a progressive Republican like Giuliani, also has campaigned as a coalition builder, without the baggage of the Democratic party’s race-focused past.
Can this be end of race-based politics? No way. But, at a time of widening racial, ethnic and other divides, it is important for political leaders to know they don’t need the race card to win the game.
“You have to have ethnic realism,” Jim Sleeper, a New York editorialist and author of “Liberal Racism,” a critique of race-based politics, told me. “People do function in those groups. But it shouldn’t be the central organizing principle of the polity.”
At the same time, Jonathan Coleman, another liberal white author of a recent book on race, “Long Way to Go: Black and White in America,” defended ethnic consciousness.
“People from various ethnic backgrounds should not have to sacrifice what it is that makes them distinct,” he told me. “I think whites have asked that of blacks too often, without thinking that they, too, should change. If we respect each other’s differences, that will help us to have a more harmonious whole.”
Underlying both of these viewpoints is a fundamental struggle to balance the realities of ethnic pluralism with the dream of a nation unified under a single idea of equal opportunity–a unifying “civic identity,” as Sleeper calls it.
The trouble comes when racial politics becomes an end in itself. When reformers do no more than replace old racial power blocs with new ones, they’ve only done half the job. Inevitably they wind up where New York City’s Democrats currently appear to be stuck these days, up a dead-end street, squabbling among themselves along frayed lines of race, ethnicity and power.