HIS WORLD IS AS white as Seinfeld’s, a slice of the city so comfortably one-dimensional that even the popular star of the ongoing Giuliani serial cannot see his own, peculiarly un–New York, isolation. Not since the days of Vincent Impellitteri nearly half a century ago—through the tenures of Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, Abe Beame, Ed Koch, and David Dinkins—have there been so few black faces in high places in a city administration. Never before has 80 percent of any ethnic group rejected the reelection campaign of an incumbent mayor, as exit polls said blacks did in 1997, preferring a white woman they barely knew who had no chance to win.
And never before have more of a mayor’s targets—squeegees, cabbies, street vendors, public-hospital workers, welfare recipients, police-brutality victims, CUNY students, and the dispersed elderly ill {the} from Neponsit nursing home—been so consistently of one hue while his beneficiaries—cops, firefighters, hotel operators, express-bus riders, tax-break developers, Staten Islanders, and Yankees and Jets owners—been so consistently another.
All his life Rudy Giuliani has occupied a milky universe—raised in a blanched Nassau suburb, educated at insular Bishop Loughlin High School and Manhattan College, shuttling twice between the colorless cubicles of the Justice Department in Washington and the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, practicing law at three mainline firms where not just the shoes were white.
As a kid born in Brooklyn, he rooted for the all-white Yankees while Jackie Robinson crossed the color line at Ebbets Field, just a couple of miles away from his home. He so craves the familiar he married his own cousin. He quarantined Haitians in Florida camps for the Justice Department. The first home he ever bought was an apartment in the East 80s, and he has never lived, like so many white New Yorkers, on a block alive with human diversity. The only two blacks he regularly talks to at City Hall today are both named Rudy, but neither Crew nor Washington has been able to help him past his racial wall.
Now focused on a Senate race just a year or so away, he knows every button to push to reach white voters but did not, even with a bottomless campaign treasury in 1997, buy a millisecond of advertising in any black medium. One of four mayors who replaced black incumbents in recent years—including those in L.A., Chicago, and Philadelphia—he is a national emblem of urban reassurance, a tamer of the tribe. He always has his defeat of the city’s first black mayor as a ready excuse for black hostility to him five years later, an alibi that saps any obligation to bridge what has become a gulf of fearful proportions.
Blacks are a grand abstraction to him. He rarely hosts town meetings in their neighborhoods. He frequently lectures them about everything from their child-rearing habits—attacking a mother for allowing her teenage son to be out bicycling at 2:30 a.m. when a cop gunned him down—to their work ethic. He’s spent the year riding the sky from one Republican capital to the next, engulfed by a party so fair it cannot be fair, telling Arizonans in April that Phoenix feels “like home” and that “the issues” in that 5 percent–black town “are very much the same” as in 25 percent–black New York. He is never heard discussing racism or poverty as if they are real facts that a mayor could actually combat.
He is too busy crediting himself for crime reductions to ever mention that the communities ravaged a decade ago by crack and guns might have had something to do with the decline, helping to deliver themselves from a culture of death. He is certain that work resurrects the dependent even when it takes good mothers away from their children to push brooms on city streets without any promise of a genuine job. Not only is he ready with a knee-jerk benefit of the doubt virtually anytime a cop goes head to head with an African American; he does not appear to have a doubt.
In his first weeks in office in 1994, Giuliani refused to meet with Al Sharpton and others over a police raid at a Harlem mosque. It worked so well he’s been rejecting black guests or invitations ever since. He said no when David Dinkins asked him to his home for dinner after a war of words over Crown Heights. The new borough president of Manhattan, Virginia Fields, who ran on the Liberal line with him last year and is known for her warmth and equanimity, begged for a meeting during the recent Million Youth March controversy and was instead denounced as a “coward,” along with the rest of the African American leadership.
Carl McCall, the highest-ranking black official in state history, takes trips to Israel with a Republican governor, but was stood up when he tried to arrange a sit-down with the mayor. Neither did Rudy have time for the cabbies, who are now mostly African and South Asian, even when they believed by the thousands that his new taxi rules threatened their livelihoods. A Voice survey of 35 black leaders, 30 of them elected, identified many who’d reached out to the mayor on issues ranging from AIDS funding to the Harlem march, usually without so much as a callback.
The city’s Equal Employment Practices Commission, a quasi-independent body that is supposed to monitor minority hiring, said in its annual report in 1996 that it “looked forward to a meeting with Rudy Giuliani” to discuss the draft of a new equal opportunity plan. Even though the city charter requires both a plan and a mayoral consultation with the EEPC, according to Abe May, the commission’s executive director, “none ever occurred.” Jointly appointed by the mayor and the council, the mildly critical commission Rudy would not meet with is, to this day, chaired by Charlie Hughes, the scandal-scarred D.C. 37 union president who appeared in Giuliani television ads in 1997.
Yet Priscilla Wooten, the city councilwoman who endorsed Giuliani last year and was the only leader surveyed by the Voice to praise him without caveat, tells the story of how her husband was recently awakened from a daytime nap on the porch of their East New York home by a tap on the shoulder. Wooten’s husband “thought he was dreaming when he saw Rudy smiling in his face,” the councilwoman said. All it takes is a lot of amens, and Rudy is, after all, willing to minister to a select black flock.
As painfully apparent as this chasm is, the Times’s endorsement of Giuliani last year did not make a single cautionary mention of race. When Reverend Calvin Butts, a prominent Harlem minister, branded the mayor a racist this May, a Times editorial characterized Giuliani’s relationship with minorities merely as one “marked by clumsiness and needless tension.”
While the Times has acknowledged that blacks “feel bruised and excluded” by the administration, the paper of record has yet to examine Giuliani’s antiblack underside in any comprehensive or ongoing fashion. Remarkably, black management drew far more attention in the less-polarized Koch era, and David Dinkins absorbed three nonstop years of media body blows as a supposed anti-Semite. Yet the whiteout of the Giuliani story—in the Times and elsewhere—has marginalized blacks, misinformed whites, and allowed Rudy to continue to portray himself like he did in his now laughable 1993 campaign slogan, as the mayor of “one standard, one city.”
The Times has brilliantly dissected Giuliani’s welfare agenda, for example, but it hasn’t connected these policies to his overall impact on blacks, thereby contributing to the color-blind camouflage concealing the administration’s seemingly irresistible targets. The paper’s excellent coverage of Giuliani’s overnight evacuation of the Neponsit nursing home in Queens last year, resulting in daily $3,050 fines by federal health authorities for violations of commonsense safety regulations, did not mention that most of the evicted residents who appeared at a city council hearing were elderly blacks living with every kind of affliction.
When the Council of Black Elected Officials convened in Harlem shortly after the Million Youth March to assail Giuliani as “unconscionable” and to claim he’d given their request for a meeting “the back of his hand,” no city daily wrote a word. The council includes officials representing 2.5 million people.
Black voices of outrage are seldom aired. Distilled facts are presented again and again in story after story. All that’s missing is the context of continuous attack that most black New Yorkers now understand instinctively.
Indeed, Rudy has managed to so bury the race question—converting anyone who raises it into a proverbial arsonist—that even his liberal opponent last year, Ruth Messinger, seldom dared. Only the brutality issue is regularly presented in unavoidably racial terms.
But even there, Giuliani’s incident-by-incident indifference, the sacking of his own post–Abner Louima task force, his resistance to a twice-passed council bill for an independent commission, and his police commissioner’s rejection of abuse cases substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board have hardly become a media censure of him. White editorial boards forget black agony over this five-year mountain of CCRB complaints, which increased again in the data that was released last week, when they write their periodic paeans to the mayor.
Rudy kept at his side a deputy mayor whose “watermelon” reference to a black-owned financial company and “two-white-men-have-run-New-York-for-200-years” comments were called “racist” by the Times. He said nothing during an on-air appearance with his then friend Bob Grant when Grant called Congressman Charlie Rangel a “pygmy.” Asked by the Washington Post to defend his record on minorities, he said: “They’re alive, how about we start with that,” which he later explained as a reference to plunging homicide rates. He was once quoted as saying that it would be “a good thing” if poor people “left the city,” conceding that driving them out of town through welfare cuts was “not an unspoken part of our strategy; it is our strategy.”
In his first months in office, he eliminated the special assistants who acted as liaisons to particular ethnic groups, including blacks, but the worst-kept secret at City Hall was that one of his top aides continued to perform that function with the Jewish community for years. He also wiped out Dinkins’s set-aside program for women and minority contractors, promising to increase minority contracting without any formal preference program. He has never offered a scintilla of evidence since then that he’s done that.
Giuliani has hired 1,500 investigators to scrutinize the desperate claims of the welfare poor even while he’s cut the inspectors and attorneys who insure housing-code compliance to a mere 243. He’s created a test for homelessness that requires shelter seekers to prove they aren’t warehousing castles.
These are the barely noticed racial anomalies of life in Rudyland. They flit on and off our pages and our screens. But they are, in a city where blacks have long since transcended Ralph Ellison’s telling title, a constant challenge and concern.
We are a better city than Rudy will let us be. Municipal governments are not corporations judged only by bottom-line stats of tax and welfare cuts. There is a love here he can’t feel, one that is not just tough.
Research assistance by David Kihara, Will Johnson, Coco McPherson, Soo-Min Oh, and David Shaftel