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. It was also, in the mid-1980s, the kind of place where certain adults would drop the word nigger causally.
Not by accident, one of the chief architects of Nixon’s highly effective racialized Southern Strategy, which led white southerners away from the Democratic Party and into the arms of Nixon, Reagan, and the Republicans, was the definitively nonsouthern Kevin Phillips, a white Bronx native of the Parkchester neighborhood, adjacent to Morris Park. His first political job was staffing a Republican congressman from the Bronx who ran the borough’s Republican party and represented Morris Park among other ethnic enclaves.
In 1970 Phillips was contemptuous of attempts by liberal Republicans to persuade black voters to join the party, telling a Times reporter:
From now on the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 per cent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.
This wasn’t a Mississippian but a New Yorker talking about the benefits of backlash politics and the advantages of bringing “negrophobes” into the Republican Party. As the Times profile noted, Phillips
had grown up in the Bronx. His observations of life in this polyglot borough had convinced him that all the talk about melting pot America was buncombe. Most voters, he had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic or cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited.
The kind of raw and bitter New York racial battles that formed Phillips’s worldview, and that swirled everywhere around me in the city of my youth, now largely take place through the lens of gentrification, an inversion of the old “there goes the neighborhood” politics of white flight.
But today in inner-ring suburbs around the country, worry that the neighborhood is going to seed is a constant preoccupation. In many metropolitan regions, urban real estate price spikes have pushed the poor out into the periphery. Areas that were once squarely in the Nation now see the Colony flooding over the border. In these places, the freighted municipal battles of the Bronx of my youth are reinscribing themselves. North Charleston, South Carolina, a once-white suburb, is now majority black—and a black man fleeing a traffic stop was shot in the back by a white police officer. Ferguson, Missouri—like many parts of the Bronx—went from majority white to majority black in a relatively short period of time. “A lot of people have left here,” Ferguson’s white mayor, James Knowles, told me. By which he meant, I think, A lot of white people have left here. He continued, “There is also a lot of people that have stayed here and enjoyed that diversity.”
After a few days of talking to Ferguson residents, I recognized a familiar dynamic: the cheek-by-jowl racial politics of a large metropolis was now churning through a town of 20,000 residents. As in New York in the 1980s, Ferguson’s racial composition had changed, but its governing class hadn’t kept up. Ferguson’s white residents spoke a lot about the parts of the town that were unruly, unkempt—seedy—notably the Section 8 rental apartments on Canfield Drive where Mike Brown was shot and killed, a one-block stretch of the Colony.
“You know, Canfield Apartments [are] one of the things we have struggled with for the past few years,” the mayor told me. “There is a lot of subsidized housing over there, a lot of people do not stay very long. A lot of people they come and go.” Disorderly, in other words.
I asked him what he thought was the big takeaway from the death of Michael Brown and the protests for racial justice that had brought hundreds of reporters from around the world to his city.
The mayor didn’t hesitate: “We have to find a way to stabilize housing. There is, all across north St. Louis County, a problem with housing where people only live for a few years. They switch school districts, you know, every year. They move houses every year, every six months. They never really set down roots. We have to find a way to do that.”
I was a bit incredulous: “So you think that is sort of the—that is your takeaway from this?