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 eing named
Time magazine's "Person of the Year" was the cap
on New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's last days in office, but the true
"Kodak Moment" came a week earlier, with Giuliani warbling
"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" on Saturday Night
Live, flanked by a couple of hipper-than-thou young performers.
To appreciate the incongruity of such adoration, you need to remember
just how much September 11th altered people's perspectives on reality
generally and on the mayor specifically. Consider, for example,
this snapshot from two summers ago: Walking through Central Park
on my way to a softball game, I crossed paths with a ragtag line
of inner-city campers. As I waited for them to pass, I overheard
one black kid, maybe ten years old, brag to his friend, "If
I see Giuliani, I mess him up. I cut him."
It's more than slightly disconcerting to realize that if the terrible
events of September 11th had never transpired, Rudy Giuliani would
almost certainly have left office overwhelmingly despised by his
black constituents. An April 2000 poll found that 91 percent of
black New Yorkers disapproved of Giuliani's performance — a
statistic that dragged down his overall approval rating to 37 percent.
It's worth dwelling on these numbers with respect to Giuliani's
SNL appearance because the measure of white hip-ness —
an especially precious commodity in New York City, and the sine
qua non of SNL — has always been to affect solidarity
with black feelings. Recall, in this light, Susan Sarandon marching
beneath posters of Giuliani made up to look like Hitler, or Bebe
Neuwirth refusing to share a charity benefit stage with the mayor,
or Rosie O'Donnell joking that Giuliani was working on a book titled
It Takes a Village Idiot.
After September 11th, of course, celebrities were suddenly falling
over themselves to fawn over Rudy the Rock. Such hypocrisy
was nauseous — though if you caught Sarandon's half-minute
homage to the NYPD at the Concert for New York City, can you ever
be nauseated again? — but Giuliani seemed to like being fawned
over, and he earned it. By any rational measure, he was the most
effective mayor in the city's history — and, not incidentally,
the greatest ally black New Yorkers ever had.
The numbers alone are jaw dropping. For the four years of the David
Dinkins mayoralty, homicides in the city averaged 2085. Then Giuliani
was elected and immediately beefed up the police's elite Street
Crimes Unit, granting cops greater latitude to crack down on crime.
The tide turned. During Giuliani's first year in office, 1994, murders
dropped to 1,561 — and kept dropping. To 1,177 in 1995. To
984 in 1996. To 767 in 1997. To a low of 629 in 1998. Even with
a slight upturn in 1999 and 2000 — a rise that coincided, predictably,
with the reining in of the cops after the gruesome Amadou Diallo
killing — the number of homicides still hovered below 700.
For 2001, the number dipped again to 641. Despite the national recession.
Despite stretched resources after September 11th.
If you're keeping count, that's something like 8,000 human beings
still walking the planet because of Giuliani's policies . . . or
almost three times as many as perished at the World Trade Center.
Half of them, it should be noted, are black — since, even though
blacks comprise only a quarter of the population, they perennially
comprise half the city's homicide victims.
How incomprehensible, in retrospect, seem the words of New York
Times columnist Bob Herbert, who last year declared that black
New Yorkers detest Giuliani because "they feel that his policies
have been disproportionately disrespectful to their interests."
Funny how a morning like September 11th causes you to rethink your
"interests." Giuliani may have lacked the rhetorical guile
to make blacks feel warm and cozy, but he kept them breathing in
breathtakingly large numbers.
Contrary to perception, furthermore, the reduction in crime did
not come at the cost of escalating police violence. In 1993,
the last year of the Dinkins administration, 41 civilians were killed
by the police. The average for Dinkins's four years was 28
civilians deaths. Under Giuliani, that number was halved; city cops
are now killing fewer civilians per year than at any time in the
last quarter century. In fact, the police are firing fewer bullets
at fewer people in fewer incidents than at any time for which data
are available.
Now factor in the rest of Giuliani's resume: that he brought corporate
businesses to inner-city neighborhoods, that he balanced the city's
pre-9/11 books, that he slashed welfare rolls without putting people
out on the streets, that he cleaned up Times Square, Herald Square,
and Penn Station, that he refurbished Central Park and Bryant Park,
and that he fought the teachers' union and the education bureaucracy
to hold public schools accountable for the underperformance of their
mostly minority students . . . well, you get the picture.
As Giuliani's mayoralty recedes in our collective rearview mirrors,
two key lessons come to mind. The first lesson is that the mere
fact of a racial divide does not entail two equally valid sets of
opinions. Reason is not a democracy. And it was absurd — I
repeat, absurd — for black New Yorkers to scorn Giuliani.
The buck-stops-there logic by they blamed the mayor personally for
the death of Diallo, or even for the statistically justifiable criminal
profiling of young black men, should have been the very logic by
which they credited him personally with thousands of black lives
spared. The blame accrued; the credit, absurdly, did not. Writing
on the subject of the black-white divide in the wake of the O. J.
Simpson case, William Buckley remarked, "Either we [all human
beings] share a common rational apparatus, or we do not." Black
contempt for the evidentiary record of Giuliani's achievement mirrored
black contempt for the evidentiary record of O. J.'s guilt —
both are of a piece with the Flat Earth Society's contempt for evidentiary
record of the earth's roundness. The fact that self-appointed black
leaders were provided credulous, even sympathetic, venues in the
mainstream media from which to air their anti-Giuliani rants suggest
that the expectation of rationality for blacks among the elites
may not be the same, even at the dawn of the 21st century, as it
is for whites.
The good news, in this regard, is that September 11th seemed to
inaugurate a black reassessment of the Giuliani record. Giuliani's
overall approval rating hit 85 percent during his last days in office;
more significantly, among black New Yorkers, it rose to 69 percent.
Part of this, of course, may be a natural softening of hearts. Part
of it may be the specter of Osama bin Laden as a less ambiguous
Public Enemy Number One. But with surveys reporting blacks nationwide
favoring heightened scrutiny of young Arab men at airports, black
New Yorkers may also have begun following the if-then logic that
calls for heightened scrutiny of young black men late at night in
inner-city neighborhoods.
This is a telling development — indeed, it is the second key
lesson to be drawn from the Giuliani mayoralty. Before the terrorist
attacks, the very word "profiling" conjured up, in the
minds of many blacks, vast governmental conspiracies against them.
After 9/11, however, even the killing of Diallo looks less insidious
— since, at the time four jittery cops fired 41 shots in five
seconds at the unarmed African immigrant, 16 of the previous 19
cop killers had been black or Hispanic males. The mental light bulb
is switching on: Inferential reasoning is unavoidable. Or,
in other words, when people who resemble you commit particular crimes
in disproportionate numbers, you are liable, through no fault of
your own, to suffer as a result.
Giuliani's policies didn't kill Diallo; human nature did.
If it's okay for Time magazine to honor Rudy Giuliani, and
SNL to serenade him, then maybe it's finally okay for all
Americans, black and white, to acknowledge that truth.
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