Mugged (45 page)

The official position of the New York Police Department was to deny that there was a movement to kill cops. That was New York City policing before Giuliani.

Lindsay spurned working class whites, hard hats and the middle class, instead appealing to rich, Manhattan elites and angry blacks. His idea of solving the race problem was to put “much of the city’s African-American community on to the dole”—as Siegel and E. J. McMahon put it in the
Public Interest
.
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The very term “limousine liberal” was coined to describe Lindsay.

Under Lindsay, New York got its first income tax, the murder rate exceeded one thousand for the first time in history and he bequeathed a bankrupt city to his successors. The symbol of New York during the Lindsay administration should have been piles of garbage and a dead cop.

But like Obama, Lindsay was elegant, telegenic and looked good in a suit. All the people who went totally nuts over Lindsay are the same ones going nuts over Obama today. At the end of his two terms, the next man to be elected mayor, Abe Beame, ran on the slogan, “Had Enough Charisma?” The
New York Times
wrapped its editorial arm around Lindsay, brooking no criticism for their matinee idol.

Lindsay did incalculable damage not only to New York, but to the entire nation, which foolishly followed the recommendations of the Kerner report. That was when the country decided that instead of punishing black rioters, we would hear them out and lavish black neighborhoods with those oh-so-helpful government programs.

Another beneficiary of liberal race mongering was David Dinkins, who ran for mayor of New York about fifteen years after Lindsay left the city in tatters, so he could finish the job.

On August 23, 1989, in the middle of the Democratic primary pitting Dinkins against incumbent Ed Koch, a black sixteen-year-old named Yusef Hawkins was fatally shot by a group of white thugs in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. This set off massive protests led by Al Sharpton, who was looking for a new gig a year after his work on the Tawana Brawley hoax had concluded so triumphantly.

The white gang had been lying in wait to attack a romantic rival—a black or Hispanic youth allegedly dating a neighborhood girl. It was Yusef’s bad luck that he happened to be walking past the girl’s house that
night, on his way with three black friends to see a used car. Yusef was singled out by the white toughs as the putative boyfriend, with one of the whites asking, “Is this the one?”

No one—not the responding police officers, the witnesses, the black commissioner of police Benjamin Ward (of the Farrakhan mosque incident), not the girl who had inspired the attack—believed there was a racial element to the shooting.
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As Shelby Steele described the case in a PBS
Frontline
documentary, there was nothing racial about the murder—until Al Sharpton made it so.

When the people of Bensonhurst failed to act sufficiently racist in front of TV cameras as hundreds of blacks marched through their town, Sharpton appeared to taunt the onlookers.
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Bensonhurst residents so detested Sharpton that they forgot the press was there and began shouting epithets and waving fists and watermelons at him—just the sort of footage TV networks eat up with a spoon. The mostly Italian American crowds didn’t mind black people. They didn’t mind blacks marching in their town. It was Sharpton they loathed.

Yusef’s funeral became a political extravaganza with a dozen politicians in attendance, Sharpton acting as concierge and Farrakahn’s Fruit of Islam doing security. Sharpton the Peacemaker eulogized Hawkins by saying, “I don’t know who shot Yusef, but the system loaded the gun.” He said: “I want you to know, Yusef, we’re not going to let you down. They’re going to pay this time.”
⁷

In a strange moment during an event that was full of them, one black preacher demanded “freedom” not just in Bensonhurst, but “in Wappingers Falls”—the site of the Tawana Brawley hoax, long since disproved.

All the white politicians were booed by the crowd at the funeral service. Only Dinkins got a big cheer. Mayor Ed Koch was booed; mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani was booed; Governor Mario Cuomo was booed. Pursuant to the blacks-can-never-do-anything-wrong policies in force at the time, Cuomo later praised the blacks who had booed him, commending them for their restraint and saying, “they treated me better than I expected.”
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The parents and brothers of the boy who was lying in the coffin didn’t speak at the funeral—this was a political rally. Yusef’s father, Moses Stewart, had warned Dinkins, “You do not take my son’s death as a political thing to take potshots at other politicians.”
⁹
Stewart was gracious to Mayor Koch, offering to walk out of the church with him
¹⁰
and later told the
New York Times
that if he were going to endorse anyone, it would have been Koch. Dinkins, he said, “came to me to campaign.”
¹¹

Despite Stewart’s desires, his son’s death was a huge political spectacle —and it worked.

While Sharpton was out causing a ruckus, Dinkins could utter sweet nothings and be hailed as a racial healer. In a world of Sharptons, Masons and Maddoxes, Dinkins came across as the kinder, gentler black man. Just like Obama.

Suddenly, newspapers were full of references to “the historic nature” of Dinkins’s candidacy and bubbling with enthusiasm at the prospect of Dinkins becoming “New York City’s first black mayor.”

Is this sounding familiar?

Even as Dinkins refused to disassociate himself from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, both of whom had made remarks causing consternation in Jewish communities, he was publicly endorsed by Gilbert Klaperman, former president of the New York Board of Rabbis. Klaperman held a press conference to announce that he had “committed a major sin,” by looking at the color of Dinkins’s skin.
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It should have been a premonition of things to come that the general election pitting Dinkins against Giuliani turned into an ethnic slugfest, but, alas, was not. Voters were desperate to believe that having a black mayor would calm racial tensions. As Ken Auletta wrote in the New York
Daily News
at the time, even if Giuliani would make a better mayor, you had to vote for Dinkins or blacks would say it was racist
¹³
—just what Jacob Weisberg said about Obama twenty years later.

Dinkins won the election and, in no time managed to turn a city that was already dysfunctional into Dante’s inner circle of hell.

The hope that his election would bring an end to raging racial wars turned out to be unfounded. Dinkins’s reign was marked by constant racial tumult—marches, riots, protests and a string of alleged racist incidents, with the mayor invariably taking the side of criminals against the police. No accusation of racism was too implausible to prevent a Dinkins press conference denouncing racism.

Although he is usually remembered for his weak indecisiveness, it should also be remembered that Dinkins was a whirlwind of activity whenever there were fake victims of racism to be comforted.

Dinkins not only fueled racial strife by pandering to race agitators, but he raised the ugly specter of racism on his own behalf over petty political disputes. (Again: Sound familiar?) In 1993, Dinkins responded to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s speech on social disorder by implying that the speech was racist.

Moynihan had compared the murder, welfare and illegitimacy rates in the city in 1943 to 1993, asking: “What in the last fifty years in New York City is now better than it was?”

Dinkins responded by saying that in Moynihan’s “good old days, I wore the uniform of a U.S. Marine and I had to sit in the back of the bus.”
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So there you have it. Blacks were discriminated against once, so don’t worry about skyrocketing murder, welfare and illegitimacy rates.

When another Democrat, Governor Mario Cuomo, threatened to have the Financial Control Board take over New York City’s budget if Dinkins couldn’t win any concessions from government unions, Dinkins threatened race riots, saying he would “bring in Jesse Jackson and make this a real black-white thing.”
¹⁵

Yet and still, Dinkins almost won reelection on white guilt. As Michael Tomasky wrote in
New York
magazine, “Bad as the previous four years were—about 1,700 private-sector jobs lost every week on average, homicides surpassing 2,000 per year, more than 1 million residents on welfare—just about half the city was reluctant to give up on its first black mayor.”
¹⁶

In case there wasn’t enough racial intimidation in the Dinkins campaign, President Bill Clinton came to town to accuse New Yorkers of racism if they didn’t reelect Dinkins. Beginning with a phony disclaimer— “this is not as simple as overt racism”—Clinton then accused New Yorkers of supporting Giuliani just because he was white. In the standard liberal use of the word “we” to mean “you,” he said: “It’s this deep-seated reluctance we have, against all our better judgment, to reach out across these lines.”
¹⁷

This was the
re
-election campaign for the city’s first black mayor. New Yorkers had already voted for him once. Had they not realized Dinkins was black in 1989? But unless voters stuck with a disastrous black mayor, they were racists.

If Dinkins had not been defeated by Giuliani in 1993, the same liberal policies of the previous thirty years would have continued unabated and about 28,000 more people would have been murdered between then and now, most of them black.

Noticeably, successful black public servants are never helped by white guilt. The clearest cases are black Republicans. No white guilt aided their rise.

And yet look at what that has produced! To name a few, there’s Representative Allen West, Representative Tim Scott, Lieutenant Governor and Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, presidential candidate Herman Cain, Judge Janice Rogers
Brown, and, saving the best for last, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—whom Shelby Steele calls “the freest black man in America.”
¹⁸

With neither blacks nor self-righteous liberals to vote for her, Mia Love became the first black mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, in 2009. In the middle of a national economic meltdown, she cut the city’s deficit from $3.5 million to $779,000 and won the highest possible bond rating for her city.

If your tastes run toward Democrats, there is Cory Booker, mayor of Newark and the most impressive elected Democrat in the nation. It wasn’t white guilt that got Booker his job: In his first two mayoral runs, Booker ran against black Democrats and was attacked for not being black enough.
¹⁹
The second time, in 2006, Booker won, becoming the nation’s only postracial Democrat.

Since becoming mayor, Booker has produced an almost Giuliani-like transformation of one of the most crime-ridden cities in the nation. Within two years, Booker had reduced murders in Newark by 36 percent, shootings by 41 percent, rapes by 30 percent, and auto thefts by 26 percent.
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By 2009, Newark was back to 1959 murder rates.

On his way to a Fourth of July barbecue one year, Booker spotted a woman buying drugs on the street in front of children. He had his security detail pull over, so he could arrest her.
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And that’s to say nothing of Booker’s advocacy of charter schools and his help getting downtown Newark its first grocery store in more than twenty years—a crucial quality of life matter in the inner city.
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It’s not just in the political world that white guilt kills. The minority doctor who took Allan Bakke’s place at medical school was so incompetent that his medical license was eventually revoked for “gross negligence, incompetence and repeated negligent acts.”

Patrick Chavis had been touted by Senator Teddy Kennedy, the
New York Times
and the
Nation
as the doctor admitted in Bakke’s place. As Kennedy put it, he was the “perfect example” of affirmative action because he was “serving a disadvantaged community and making a difference in the lives of scores of poor families.”

Dr. Chavis made a difference to the community by sending half a dozen of his patients, bleeding and vomiting, to the emergency room and killing one of them.
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There’s your affirmative action success story.

White guilt has never produced anything but catastrophe.

White guilt fueled the liberal crime policies that resulted in tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of murders, to say nothing of
maimings, burnings and rapes. White guilt got us huge tower blocks of public housing that are fortresses of social pathology. It produced the entire entitlement-dominated politics we have now.

It’s led the nation to turn a blind eye to the ticking time bomb of exploding illegitimacy rates.

It got us the
George Lopez Show
and we don’t even owe the Hispanics anything.

It got an acquittal for OJ as a result of the trial being moved to a venue that would produce more black jurors than the courthouse in the jurisdiction where the crime occurred.

It produced a destructive welfare state that was untouchable for decades. It got us anxiety, anger, fear and a major political party incapable of making an argument more sophisticated than: “You racist!”

And it got us the most left-wing president America has ever seen.

When there were so few cases of white-on-black hate crimes that liberals had to start making them up, wasn’t that a clue that the Klan wasn’t preventing black progress anymore? If white people could be shorn of all racism overnight, it’s not clear how that would improve the black condition.

On the other hand, if all black people woke up tomorrow morning with the cultural predilections of Korean Americans, all sociological disparities—income, crime rates, out of wedlock births—would vanish within ten years. Both thought experiments are unfair, but one at least has a practical resonance to it.