The Civil Rights Era/The Closest of Strangers

...It lays bare the consequences of a racialized politics which insists on equating race with culture...

...In The Closest of Strangers, Jim Sleeper, an editorial writer for New York Newsday, has written a compelling account of how racialism has helped shatter the common culture of New York, a culture which, despite the stain of a residual racism, was once heavily infused with social democratic ideals...

...Two powerful though very different new books help explain how it was that integration was never given a chance to work...

...Dozens were killed and President Lyndon Johnson was forced to send in federal troops to restore order...

...The surrounding suburban counties now bill themselves as Southeastern Michigan rather than Greater Detroit...

...Since the late 1960s, racial redress has slid down the slippery slope which began with affirmative action designed to bring minorities into the mainstream, moved on to separate criteria for jobs or college admissions quotas, and has now arrived at a cultural and political separatism that threatens the viability of our colleges and cities...

...The legal staffs of the federal agencies moved steadily away from the color-blind ideals of the early civil rights movement, in which as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, a man was to be judged "by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin," toward the race-conscious policies of quotas and proportional representation...

...Graham, a scholar at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, carefully traces the development of the mechanisms for enforcing civil rights law from their origins in the New Deal's toothless Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC) on to the legally well-armed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) of the Nixon years...

...There is no feeling of pity for Detroit in the suburbs...

...In a particularly devastating1 section, he describes how the trio and their white apologists like lawyer William Kunstler asserted that in the name of a race-based morality the mere facts of the matter were irrelevant in the Brawley case...

...Sleeper's primary target, however, is neither the landlords nor newly minted upscale Archie Bunkers, but racial racketeers like the infamous trio of Mason, Maddox, and Sharpton who perpetrated the Tawana Brawley hoax...

...Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh had initiated a "war on poverty" even before LBJ had launched his...

...Mayor of what was then a predominantly white city with a sizable minority of both black poor and well-to-do black auto workers, Cavanaugh brought African-Americans into prominent positions in government, and increased funding for the schools and public housing...

...The facts, argued Kunstler and writers for the Nation, had to give way before the racial resentments which gave the Brawley story a tribal if not an objective realty...

...But instead, as Graham painstakingly traces it through the back halls of the bureaucracy and into the courts and back, the victories over old-fashioned racism have been accompanied by a new racialism which insists on defining individuals by their ascribed characteristic...

...But with the landmark 1964 Omnibus Civil Rights Bill a variety of federal agencies including the EEOC were armed with sweeping new powers modeled on the New Deal's National Labor Relations Board...

...Graham's story of bureaucratic intrigue and judicial overreaching lays bare the process whereby the 1964 civil rights act, a monument to the integrationist ideal, which explicitly barred racial quotas, was turned into an instrument, not for the kind of affirmative action which reaches out to be inclusive but for racial classifications...

...For their part, self-satisfied suburbanites, confirmed in their sense of total separation, feel no need to help...

...The consequences are all around us as the working poor, who watched as virtue went unrewarded by the Republicans and vice unpunished by the Democrats, were increasingly pulled into the downward spiral...

...But at the same time as it incorporated the diversity of different identities, it called in the public sphere for the shared standards essential for citizenship...

...These powers enabled civil rights agencies to investigate, hold hearings, and, most important, issue sweeping orders covering not just individual instances, but whole categories of cases, all of which was enforceable in court...

...THE CLOSEST OF STRANGERS Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York Jim Sleeper Norton, $21.95, 345 pp...

...Sections of the city have returned to prairie...

...But Sleeper, who has a passionate attachment not only to New York but to the old left's ideals of both racial justice and transna-tionalism, has written a tour de force...

...We view the values of the people of Detroit," says Richard Sabaugh, a county commissioner from neighboring Warren, "as completely foreign...

...Detroit has never recovered from its riot, the worst in the nation's history...

...That equation sometimes makes it difficult for New Yorkers of different races to converse, let alone partake of shared ideals...

...This should have been an unadulterated triumph...

...Up until the 1960s civil rights enforcement efforts were hampered by the case-by-case approach...

...Sleeper, and here before I go further I should note that I am among those thanked in the preface, has a sharp eye for the complexities of New York...

...In 1973, Detroit's newly elected black mayor Coleman Young declared war on the suburbs...

...Too many diverse people have lived together for too long for our cultures not to have rubbed off on each other...

...Whites fled...

...American culture today is, if not universal, transnational...

...In anticipation of what full-fledged "multiculturalism" promises to bring for the future, the black city and its white suburbs now view each other as armed and hostile camps...

...What the social breakdowns of our cities suggest is that the call for both tolerance and integration is as essential now as it was twenty-five years ago at the height of the civil rights movement...

...Jim Sleeper's The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York is a searing, sweeping account of the rise of racial separatism in New York...

...In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the cop, the social worker, and the teacher, each of whom patrolled his or her own beat in the name of middle- and working-class morality essential for success in a technological society, were withdrawn from the lives of the very poor...

...Within six years, and before the sharp decline of the auto industry, Detroit was transformed from a prosperous and potentially integrated city into an economically depressed and almost all-black city...

...As such Graham's book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the current conflict over the Kennedy-Hawkins bill, a piece of legislation that would serve to institutionalize racial quotas and the divi-siveness that accompanies them, for all forms of hiring and promotion...

...If as the demagogic Chicago Congressman Gus Savage suggests, "white is never right," black and white have no choice but to confront each other over a chasm of racial/cultural incomprehension...

...Detroit's plight illustrates the point...

...Denounced as though they were agents of an external colonial power, their departure left the working poor exposed to the tender mercies of the criminal classes...

...Detroit had been in the forefront during the racial reform of the 1960s...

...Fred Siegel The great forgotten fact of America's recent racial history is that the ideal of integration was eclipsed almost as soon as it was established...

...Detroit, said the New York Times as the 1967 riots began, "probably had more going for it than any other major city in the North...

...Hugh Davis Graham's The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy-1960-1972 is a heavily documented, blow-by-blow account of how integration was slowly subverted by subtle shifts in bureaucratic policy making...

...It's turned out, at least for Detroit, to be a war of attrition as the city has lost nearly half its population...

...The pluralism preached by the proponents of racial integration made room for the complexities of the hyphenated identities most of us bear as descendants of different ethnic and religious heritages...

...Withering in his criticism of racist practices by landlords who have made fortunes by fomenting racial fear, he also explores the way in which the threat of crime committed by blacks has curdled the commitments of even racially tolerant New Yorkers...

...Overwrought at times, Sleeper's book will no doubt infuriate many...

...Taking on racist practices one victim at a time meant slow progress in achieving voting and other civil rights...

...The polemical fireworks aside, The Closest of Strangers can be read as an explanation of how America's quarter-century experiment with full-scale moral deregulation has been every bit as much a disaster as the financial deregulation which has left us with the S & L collapse...