Sure, It's Never About Black And White Until It Is

Stolen from Steve Gilliard's great blog, stevegilliard.blogspot.com


Lower Manahattanite wrote this in comments



I had some time to think about this walking home last night, so here goes:

Well…I screwed up last night. I made the grievous mistake of making day three of the transit strike the day I panicked and shopped a bit too heavily for the kids’ gifts. A little Daffy’s, a touch of Old Navy and Modell’s, capped off with a whisper of Steve Madden for the daughter (poor baby’s a bit of a Bigfoot at 11) and before I knew it, I’d loaded myself down with three shopping bags of ersatz Santa leavings in addition to the slim valise I’d been carrying during the strike in lieu of my heavy computer bag.

The delicate balance had been lost. The not too bad walk to Brooklyn became a f*cking ordeal. The top of my right foot began throbbing as I neared the Manhattan Bridge. Midway, it was a hot icepick stabbing through the foot. By bridge’s end, I envied Kunta Kinté, who’d had his foot chopped off by an angry massa.

I rested just after the walkway in front of some high school or other, marshaling strength for the trudge ahead. The traffic was scream-worthy. A call to the wife to drive down to downtown Brooklyn to get me was out of the question—it was inaccessible.

So I walked some more.

Slowly though, as the pain returned. I found myself at Grand Army Plaza. I stopped to gather myself and let out a huge exhale when a car pulled up next to me, honking. It wasn’t a cab, or livery car—just a small black Honda with a mid late 20’s/early 30’s Black woman in the front seat and one in back. Did I know them?

“Goin’ to Rochester Avenue…you headin’ that way?, the squat woman in front asked.

“F*ck yes!”, I screamed in my head—which came out of my mouth as “Yup! Utica and Eastern, thanks so much!” I loaded my bags in the back next to the other woman and fell into the front seat as we pulled off for the final 2 miles or so home.

After a long, pregnant pause (and making sure I wasn’t gonna be mugged by the cast of “Set It Off II—The Reckoning”) I piped up, “I really appreciate this—you heading home from work?”

“Nah.”, she replied. “Just tryin’ to make a little extra paper goin’ between here and the bridge. You’re my last one.” After a pause, she continued, “I know I confused you with this little car an’ all, but I got m’ girl ridin’ with me—one woman in a car is kind of a target, soooo…I’m rollin’ like this. Made about two-hundred dollars tonight.” The butchy friend in the back seat gave a half-nod as if to say “We cleaned up…big time.”

“How much for my ride?”, I asked, figuring I could maybe live without the pint of blood I’d be charged along with fifty bucks.

“Eight dollars.”, she said.

Which was a f*cking steal as on non-strike days, the livery guys’d charge me ten for the same ride.
“No problem.” , I said. “I’ll give you ten.”

The ride was hurtling by now as my foot croaked out a ‘thank you”. The driver continued. “Glad it’s over, right?”

“Yes-I-am.”

“Yeah…”, she went on. “I hope the union gets some of that surplus.”

When I agreed, it was officially “on”—(she felt comfortable with me as a passenger—and my guess is she talked like this to several of her passengers to “feel ‘em out” before speaking her mind) and proceeded to lay down a rather detailed pro-union stance.

Things like, “It was nice to see them stand up to the mayor, regardless of how it turns out.”, and how “Bloomberg never expected Toussaint to defy him—that’s why he went off, calling them ‘Thugs’.” “And what the f*ck is up with “Thugs” anyway? Why go there?—You know why he went there!” “Sittin’ on a billion dollars an’ gonna lie about it—then when time comes to pay some people, it’s ‘I’m broke! I’m broke! I ain’t got nothin’!” The kicker was when she talked about her co-workers at the hospital (at this point, I noticed she was wearing nurse’s scrubs as was her silent buddy in back) on Long Island and how she’d had arguments with them about the strike. She took great pains to point out the background of these co-workers, and let me just say that…well, according to her, they were quite eh…”different” from her own.

Okay. They were suburban White folks who basically wanted Toussaint and the TWU thrown under the jail. There.

As we pulled up to Utica, she also noted how her Black co-workers came down very much on her side of the fence. Imagine that.

At any rate, it was time to get out and walk the remaining few blocks home. (Rule of thumb from daddy—“never have a stranger drop you off right in front of your house---you never know…) And after I handed the woman a ten-spot, closed the door and walked about fifty feet—it hit me.

I had, what Samuel L. Jackson called in ‘Pulp Fiction’, “a moment of clarity”.

I was looking at a poster for some Reggae jam and the club throwing it was in Brownsville. Then three words came to me.

“Ocean Hill-Brownsville”.

Ocean Hill-Brownsville—the infamous battle in ’68 where the experimental (in that it was locally controlled) Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board wound up in the hands of an elected group of Black parents who wanted a more culturally sensitive group of teachers in the district—so they ditched nine White teachers they’d had a problem with and the White-run UFT went berserk, shutting down the entire public school system three times in protest of the dismissals—bringing about a coalescence of then disparate White groups, namely the predominantly Jewish UFT and the suburban Jewish population and the White Catholics they up until that time, distrusted. The two groups came together and forced Ocean Hill-Brownsville to re-instate the teachers and forged the now-larger White right-tilting alliance that would depose the liberal Lindsay and bring in Beame and Koch to bring the dusky masses to heel.

Black folks finally get a chance to be something in this town and got smacked down for it.

As I walked, my mind flashed ahead to 1975, when due to mismanagement, the city’s finances had gone into the sh*tter and the D.C. GOP said “Drop Dead”. One of the casualties of the city’s budget crisis was the end of free admissions to the City University system. Free since the 1850’s and right through the Great Depression, the system changed all that in 1976—which affected me drastically because as one of seven kids, I knew my folks could not afford to send us all to college. So I was counting on my grades getting me into CUNY. But alas, that was not to be. Took out a huge loan for college that f*cked me financially for years. Oh yes…did I mention that the year CUNY went to a paid system, 1976--was also the year that minorities became a majority of the students? Rudy Giuliani, who loved to throw venom about not granting special rights to special interest groups got a free education via CUNY years before. Funny, that.

Black folks finally get a chance to be something in this town and got smacked down for it.



My mind was whirling now as I trudged down the hill—I thought about the Knicks team of the late 70’s—coached by Willis Reed and boasting a first for the team--an all-Black twelve man squad. I remembered how ownership complained about how attendance was down and then…the derisive nickname the team got during this time began to repeat in my head, as if chanted by a 14,00-strong Garden faithful crowd.

The New York “N*ggerbockers”. N*ggerbockers. N*ggerbockers.

Black folks finally get a chance to be something in this town and got smacked down for it.

A pattern was, shall we say…”developing”. Or rather, had developed and I was just really noticing it.

Remember when in a fit of upheaval, the New York Post wound up being run by Abe Hirschfeld in the early 80s? Remember when he appointed Wilbert Tatum as Editor? Wilbert Tatum of the Amsterdam News? Black, liberal, friend of Percy Sutton and every major Black politico in NYC, Wilbert Tatum? Remember what the staffers at the Post did the day after Tatum took charge? They went berserk, mutinied and put out a vicious, racist (for them), crazed edition of the paper full of fat gorilla caricatures of Tatum and scandalous, scurrilous headlines showing their disgust at the man who was going to be their new day-to-day boss. I remembered that as I crossed Crown Street. They forced him out after three weeks.

Black folks finally get a chance to be something in this town and got smacked down for it.

David Dinkins is elected mayor and BEFORE he can even screw up, Staten Island, the 90% White one of the five boroughs with a population of 450,000 declares it wants to secede from the city. F*cking secede. The NYPD stages a riot against Dinkins near City Hall, led by the curse-spewing loser of that mayoral election, the free CUNY educated Rudy Giuliani. The battle lines are drawn early in the disastrous Dinkins term. He would not be given a fair chance to govern unencumbered.

Black folks finally had a chance to be something in this town and got smacked down for it.

The Apollo Theater comes into focus. Let’s just say…I did some work up there for a few years and got to know the folks there pretty well. The folks at Inner City Broadcasting in particular. They ran the theater as a performance venue AND as a television and music production facility, producing two TV shows from there as well as broadcasting live, community radio from the theatre itself (inviting audiences in free). All this after the Schiffmann family who owned the place in its salad days had run the place into the ground and let it sit vacant and decaying for years. Former Boro Prez Percy Sutton got enough money to buy the Apollo and got it back to its glory, cross-pollinating it with his Inner City Broadcasting holdings. Soon, there were rumblings, rumors and leaks that the city wanted him out of the picture, and wanted that considerable media entity in the hands of someone more “responsible”—a.k.a., not challenging the city’s power structure. The rumor, and it was laughed at out of hand when Mayor Dinkins worried about it publicly, was that Time-Warner wanted the Apollo as an anchor holding for the gentrification of 125th Street. People howled at that idea—it was “tin-foil hat” stuff. But Zuckerman’s Daily News got in on it, and for years, crawled up the butt of Sutton and ICBC and the Harlem politicos who held on fast. He and his attack dog, editor Michael Goodwin, and Black hatchet people Jonathan Capehart (who would later go on to work for Bloomberg News and as an advisor to Bloomberg’s campaign—fancy that!) and Karen Hunter went after the theatre management, hounding them and blowing small differences out of all proportion until eventually, thanks to their mighty Wurlitzer of white noise, the years-long campaign (coupled with an investigation by GOP Attorney General Dennis Vacco) ended with the Suttons losing the theatre, the Daily News with a Pulitzer for muckraking and a new board taking control. Who runs that board? You guessed it..Time-Warner…of-f*cking-course. And the theatre did become the anchor in the gentrification of 125th Street. Never mind that the place was turned over to actual crooks (who tried to break the theatres unions and stiffed them to this day on payroll—as well as stiffing outside vendors) and mismanagers who after five years in charge…just fixed the f*cking marquee.

Black folks finally get a chance to be something in this town and got smacked down for it.


I’m passing the White Castle on Empire Boulevard when Roger Toussaint’s face pops into my head. The leader of a key city union—the mover of it’s people, the beneath-the-skin “bloodstream” of NYC TWU, decided to stand up to a known crooked management and its equally duplicitous political muscle-men in the Mayor and Governor. The moment he does that, the moment Toussaint and his 70% minority (sounds so stupid to say 70% “minority”, but hey…) stands its ground (after cutting the city a break a few days before), the tabloids—Zuckerman’s Daily News and Murdoch’s Klan-screed of a rag Post try to lead a virtual lynch mob against Toussaint and the union. The News fantasizes in its pages about Toussaint’s being tossed into the river by Brooklyn Bridge walkers, while the Post—God bless it, runs a photoshopped pic of Toussaint behind bars on its front page (White collar crime like accounting fraud, two sets of books and disappearing hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t warrant jailbird photoshops on major metropolitan daily’s front pages I guess.) and mocks his Caribbean background with a page two headline “Here’s Your New Island Getaway—Rikers Island!”, replete with a spread of pics of the interior of a jail cell and Rikers amenities. “Mad As Hell!”, “You Rats!” “Jail ‘Em!” blared the headlines. You’d think he was the one ranting like Bloomberg and Pataki, or screeching like a crazy, old ninny like Koch the other day, but no…their venom was turned on a 70% minority union and it’s leader in a futile attempt to sway the populace towards practically killing this guy and his workers. But it didn’t f*cking work. The most reliable polls, the targeted ABC and now the NY1 poll out today show the heated anti-union rhetoric didn’t take and in fact, the Mayor, Governor and MTA caught a sh*tload of hell for what went down.

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/NY1ToGo/S...tid=1&aid=55816

Take a read of the breakdown of the poll racially insofar as opinions.

Yup. It wasn’t a factor in this, my *ss.

As I neared my door, I thought about an episode of “Eyes on The Prize II” about Martin Luther King’s final battles against racism in the north. Having won huge battles in Birmingham and Montgomery and all over the south, he tried his hand at fighting entrenched northern racism and found himself running into a brick wall of resistance. The venomous, over-the-top reactions he got in daring to challenging bigotry in Chicago and the suburb of Cicero, Illinois depressed him and he basically went back to the south to fight, having tasted defeat in the allegedly more “sophisticated” north.

Up here, racism has never really been discussed frankly. It’s always easier to simply make fun of Southerners for their alleged “backwardness” in their clunky practice of racism instead of ever focusing on our own up-north silky, subtle, but just as destructive meting out of race-hatred. It has…never been confronted honestly. And thus, it festers…from Cicero, Illinois, to Boston Massachusetts, and yes...to so-called “liberal”, “blue” New York f*cking City. What we saw this past week in the handling, coverage and opining about this strike had a lot to do with class and economics…but the easiest, at the tip-of-the-tongue, quick-reaction venom that got spewed about this strike had an undeniable racial edge to it…and you have to live here awhile to understand it in a continium—from Ocean Hill-Brownsville, to CUNY, to the N*ggerbockers, to the Post, to Dinkins, to the Apollo, to the transit strike just ended. Yahoos who freep a CNN poll sitting in a cubicle in Sandusky have no clue. The post-strike polling done here in NYC bears the truth, and a bitter truth at that. A truth that doesn’t sadden me at all, but rather is just a given—something you just learn to deal with in this town and somehow work the hell around.

Black folks finally get a chance to be something in this town and got smacked down for it.

I got to my door and realized I’d forgotten about my foot pain entirely as I’d walked and thought.

Walked and thought.

Ain’t that a b*tch?
LowerManhattanite