ON POLITICAL BOOKS: Manhattan on the Rocks
Alter, Jonathan
ON POLITICAL BOOKS MANHATTAN ON THE ROCKS Moderate black leaders could save Nm York from the Sharptons and the Brawhys by Jonathan Alter A New York story: Our building superintendent...
...The theme is survival and hanging onto a few shreds of dignity in a Hobbesian world-plus a little revenge on the punks who make life so fearful...
...They represent the only pocket of hope in the tides of despair now engulfing of names of groups almost never heard on the local the city...
...It’s not about skating in Central Park or finding the perfect new restaurant...
...Like millions of other New Yorkers, my wife throws up her hands...
...Then, as if we were previewing some warped new civic ad campaign, the other New York springs to life...
...thousands simply fled...
...Yet the analysis is so discerning that only an A1 Sharpton would accuse him of racism...
...Many blacks and the handful of liberals still left in New York will no doubt react badly to this book...
...They may identify with some of the demagogues’ messages, but they know, at bottom, that they must work with whites...
...Loud...
...This is what constitutes a “good” story in New York, 1990...
...ON POLITICAL BOOKS MANHATTAN ON THE ROCKS Moderate black leaders could save Nm York from the Sharptons and the Brawhys by Jonathan Alter A New York story: Our building superintendent tells us there was another murder in the neighborhood...
...But because he represents a rational black response at a time when even many middle-class blacks are tempted to think irrationally, his fate is of tremendous consequence...
...But one of Sleeper’s larger points is relevant to any big city...
...Mario Cuomo first became well known in New York for skillfully mediating a dispute in Queens in the early seventies over a plan to put a large housing project in the white middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills...
...They concentrate on housing, education, and drug prevention programs that work and that need our help...
...For the governor, too, is viewed by Sleeper as falling prey to a portion of this double standard, implying that Reaganism excuses some of what’s wrong on the other side...
...That is liberal in the best sense of the word...
...But Sleeper is not only a former liberal activist (now an editorial writer for Newsduy) he is still u liberal...
...In his engrossing and important book,* Jim Sleeper argues that the classic New York resentment featured in popular culture has evaporated in a pool of weary cynicism: “From Ralph Kramden, the garrulous but decent ‘big mouth,’ and Archie Bunker, a quiver of barbed retorts against shrinking horizons, we have come down to a word of resignation spoken anonymously in the street: ‘Fuggedaboutit...
...But before racial calm comes honesty, and this book is a good place to start...
...The real racism, Sleeper argues, isn’t against black defendants but against black victims, who make up the vast majority of those robbed and murdered...
...In fact, the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who normally keep the neighbors up are shaking their fists and muttering oaths...
...It’s wrong to say that politicians like Dinkins can’t do much to save New York...
...He echoes the neoliberals’ favorite black thinker, Shelby Steele, who writes that “we [blacks] hold up race to shield us from what we do not want to see in ourselves...
...Like something from heaven or a movie set, glorious Vivaldi is pouring forth from a sixth floor window...
...he seems to show more interest in tennis than in the problems outlined in this book...
...But this time it’s not the usual salsa beat...
...White racism does not excuse black crime or black racism or black lying...
...But Sleeper is white, and he gives the argument a moral edge that blacks don’t usually appreciate hearing from whites: “Some [blacks] have stopped following Martin Luther King’s admonition to ‘bum the midnight oil’ in order to compete with their white counterparts, demanding instead a formulaic inclusion,” Sleeper notes as part of his attack on affirmative action...
...The courts, far removed from the community, were a horrible venue for liberal reform...
...These whites didn’t have to put up with it...
...Right now, David Dinkins is looking like a loser...
...The next day brings the murder of a Utah tourist trying to help his mother in the subway...
...In his wordy but passionate editorial-writer prose, he puts Jonathan Alter is a senior writer at Newsweek and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Sleeper establishes that the William Kuntslers of the world were more than just annoying...
...Like the whites, they, too, have been ignored and patronized by the Kuntslers...
...he embraces it...
...Jim Sleeper...
...What Lindsay’s limousine liberals didn’t realize was that their alienation of white ethnics in the outer boroughs would damage New York into the 21st century...
...They shouldn’t...
...But another part is a result of who Sleeper is and what he has done...
...Yes, Ed Koch played the race game with white ethnics...
...Norton, $21.95...
...Liberals and black militants (“professional blacks,” he calls them) are the principal villains in Sleeper’s book...
...These are largely black organizations that have rejected the racial politics of New York City...
...Great serve, poor service Even if one views blaming liberals as tiresome, Sleeper goes on to do something almost no one dares: he blames blacks, This is still the third rail of American politics, and he does more than touch it...
...That’s it...
...it is that very charge that now afflicts us: “Nothing further can be gained by blaming racism as such for the mayhem engulfing poor neighborhoods...
...Yet no one can accuse him of becoming a Reaganite, for Sleeper refuses to Forget About It...
...Sleeper proves through an analysis of recent election returns that most blacks prefer black candidates whose appeal transcends race...
...He also finds hope in a place where people least expect it: electoral politics...
...And it wasn’t just the whites who were alienated by the response to crime...
...We’re outta here...
...Cuomo notes that when public housing for the poor was proposed for a black middle-class neighborhood called Baisley Park, the residents were “even more ferocious” in their opposition than the white residents of Forest Hills...
...But the larger picture is vivid, too: “The confluence of radical spite, absurd legal extrapolation, and liberal disdain for white ethnics that led to forced busing, the bloating of welfare rolls, and the mau-mauing of white teachers broke the spine of New York’s civic culture,” he writes...
...Sleeper is unequivocal...
...For non-New Yorkers, the descriptions of the divisions between Harlem blacks and Brooklyn blacks may be too detailed...
...It was almost as if he were saying that tax deductions on luxury vacation homes for the rich somehow justify promotions of minority police officers who failed a test or toleration of Glenda Brawley’s [Tawana’s dissembling mother] refusal to answer a subpoena,” Sleeper writes...
...The tendency nowadays is to say that anyone who attacks affirmative action and vigorously points out where blacks have hurt themselves must, by definition, be a conservative or neoconservative...
...What’s extraordinary about Sleeper’s book, though, is that I put it down feeling more optimistic about the city...
...Having edited a community newspaper in Brooklyn and covered city politics for The Village Voice, Sleeper comes by his observations first-hand...
...Their reaction was not only to crime itself, but to how it was being addressed...
...The argument is more convincing when it comes from blacks, but that doesn’t mean Sleeper shouldn’t have made it...
...Sleeper recalls a grimmer legacy...
...Over on 108th St., a 23-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic was rubbed out in a drug deal...
...This book is as much about class as race...
...They laugh in his face...
...When the PBS-Lincoln Center-Vivaldi crowd starts thinking like the Queens working class it once snubbed, something fundamental has changed...
...The New York Times story focused on how well they had done in the pri-vate sector in the years since...
...But two wrongs don’t make a right...
...It’s a valid point...
...he “gave them the theater of their bitterness...
...For all of that, liberals were determined “to blame white ethnics for black deprivations really caused by social arrangements that benefitted primarily the liberals themselves,” Sleeper writes...
...It came from up there by that air conditioner, the youth plaintively tells the police...
...We return from a Saturday evening out to find our tree-lined street bathed in the loudest music imaginable...
...In this, Sleeper gives voice to what practically every white person in New York already believes...
...The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York...
...us right up against the wall of race and class, where we can’t ignore it any more...
...Earlier this fall, veterans of the Lindsay administration gathered for a reunion...
...Some critics of the book have focused on this sentence and other like it as evidence that Sleeper is roiling the rhetorical waters at a time when they’ve been roiled quite enough...
...Part of the reason is that he identifies inspiring examples of virtue amid the rubble...
...Courting disaster Much of the book is a thumbnail history of how New York’s neighborhoods went down the tubes...
...Except, perhaps, Mario Cuomo...
...More specifically, many of these same liberals turned up as the real estate sharks of the eighties...
...For instead of just criticizing, Sleeper offers some alternatives, which come in the form news: East Brooklyn Congregations, Industrial Areas Foundation, the Science Skills Center...
...But even the satisfactions of outrage are waning...
...A barechested teenager previously seen in possession of a boom box summons the cops, who arrive after the music has stopped...
...they actually helped destroy a delicate urban organism that had taken shape over generations...
Vol. 22 • November 1990 • No. 10
