A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes
Author:Chris Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-03-20T16:00:00+00:00
AT THE MICRO LEVEL, the Nation’s anxiety over racial equality and coexistence manifested as concerns about “the neighborhood,” as in “there it goes.” In the years when black people were moving into neighborhoods in, say, the formerly white ethnic enclaves of the Bronx, crime was also going up. These events were unrelated, but they were easily and at times eagerly conflated by white residents, politicians, and predatory realtors. A semantic shift occurred. Now one could talk about race without ever mentioning the word black. The legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater once described the way this worked at the national level.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
In the context of urban politics, it worked somewhat differently. The key sites of battle weren’t tax cuts and budgets. Instead, residents and politicians could speak of property values or crime, and then even further removed, they could say the concern was litter or graffiti or abandoned buildings. They weren’t lying: they were, at some level, actually concerned with the creeping seediness of the city. But American racial history—the nation’s most enduring and violently loaded conflict—lurked even in the municipal disputes of my youth, as the virus of racism infected neighborhood politics and bloomed in tabloid headlines.
Of course, a lot of the time racial conflict wasn’t subtext. In 1986 four black men walked into the white Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach after their car broke down. They were chased and beaten by a white mob. As twenty-three-year-old Michael Griffith, one of the four, attempted to evade the mob, he was struck by a car and died. Just three years later four black teenagers went to the white ethnic Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst to inquire about a used Pontiac for sale. They were met by a mob of white men wielding baseball bats, and one, a man named Joseph Fama, was carrying a gun. The mob beat the young black men, and then Fama fired two shots into the chest of sixteen-year-old Yusef Hawkins, killing him.
The mob had apparently been lying in wait for another group of black and Latino men who they believed were coming to the neighborhood. It was a lynching, plain and simple, more than six decades after the Dyer anti-lynching bill was introduced (and never passed), and over two hundred miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.
This level of virulent white racism wasn’t limited to a few isolated neighborhoods—it could be found throughout the city. In fact, I spent much of my childhood in one of those places. The Italian American neighborhood Morris Park in the Bronx, where I went to elementary school, featured delicious pizza, single-family homes, and tidy yards with fig trees wrapped in blankets and trash bags to keep them warm in the winter.
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General | Discrimination & Racism |
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