The president was expressing an attitude that is a commonplace among the New York liberal elite, and has a certain amount of truth to it. Race was the central issue the last time David Dinkins ran against Rudy Giuliani for mayor. Giuliani, a former tough-guy federal prosecutor, was an awful candidate, offering the public little more than pigment and an attitude -and yet he nearly beat Dinkins, who seemed, at the time, a healing presence in a city tired of conflict. More than a few New Yorkers were so embarrassed by their votes that they lied about their preference: Dinkins won the exit polls by 10 percent, and the election by 2 percent. But he did win. And he was supported by about 25 percent of the white population, a figure he will be hard pressed to replicate in November. So what’s happened? Have New Yorkers become more racist? Or is it something to do with David Dinkins?
I think it’s three things to do with Dinkins, only one of which is about race. The first, and least important, is that he hasn’t managed the city very well. The mayor has done a few good things: he has put more cops on the street, more health-care centers in the neighborhoods. But the city’s trajectory as an economically waning, uncivil, unsafe, bureaucratic mess remains unchanged. The real power is in the hands of the city’s more than 350,000 public employees, whom Dinkins has refused to challenge. Too much of New York’s $31 billion budget goes to its employees; too little to its citizens.
The mayor’s second problem flows from the first. He seems out of touch-a consequence of his fierce civility, friends say. (His predecessor, Ed Koch, was a more familiar Noo Yawk type, fast, funny and obnoxious.) But Dinkins’s apparent remoteness has its roots in ideology as well as personal style. He may be the last of the big-time urban liberals, a straggler from the ’60s. He has been slow to acknowledge the city’s most profound problem-the changing nature of poverty, the growth of an underclass whose privation has behavioral as well as economic roots, He came to office, for example, believing that “homelessness” was a housing problem. Most New Yorkers agree with liberal columnist Pete Hamill, writing in New York Magazine, that the presence of thousands of deranged, sometimes violent, beggars has more to do with drug abuse and mental illness than with a housing shortage. Giuliani, running a more thoughtful campaign this time, has seized on this issue and uses Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s recent essay on the tendency of societies to numb themselves to outrageous behavior, “Defining Deviancy Down,” as a sacred text. He hasn’t proposed any plausible solutions, but he has connected with the public fur-Y. “In English common law, assault is merely the act of threatening someone,” he pointed out to a Greenwich Village crowd last week. “Most of you are assaulted every day on your way home from work.”
Dinkins’s third problem, the most subtle and serious he faces, has to do with a metaphor-and with the race issue. For most of this century, the operative metaphor describing New York’s lumpy ethnic stew was the “melting pot.” It was insufficient, as Moynihan and Nathan Glazer pointed out 30 years ago in “Beyond the Melting Pot.” Ethnicity didn’t melt well; indeed, it was urban America’s central organizing principle, even if most urban Americans didn’t want to admit it. In 1989, David Dinkins took a step toward admitting it. He changed the metaphor to a “Gorgeous Mosaic.” This seemed harmless at the time, but it wasn’t. A mosaic is composed of pieces, and Dinkins seemed to be placing more emphasis on the bits -not only ethnic groups, but gender. religious and sexual-preference groups-than any of his predecessors had. As an anachronistic liberal, Dinkins believed in group rights -he favored quotas (“set-asides”) for minority contractors; his Human Resources Administration, a scrofulous bog of reverse racism and incompetence, discouraged nonblack charitable groups from caring for needy minority kids. Fairly or not, in Dinkins’s New York, the pieces began to seem more important than the mosaic itself And the suspicion grew that he favored his piece more than others.
Well, of course he did. New York mayors always have. But Dinkins had legitimized group aggrievement in the process, and so Hispanics now had a moral as well as political beef when the mayor appeared to stiff them on appointments. And Jews could claim-unfairly-the mayor was anti-Semitic because he was reluctant to use force (against black hoodlums) during the Crown Heights riot. It was no longer just a dumb police-policy decision; it was action taken against them as an ethnic group. As a result, racial enmity has indeed intensified in New York during the Dinkins era. It couldn’t not. This is what happens when diversity is celebrated too enthusiastically, when individual rights are subsumed by group identity-in fact, when groups are reckoned to have any “rights” at all. It is a lesson President Clinton should ponder as well, before he tosses aside another text and decides to lecture Americans on a subject as nuanced and emotional as this.
