Nothing has worked for them. Integrate your schools, they were told, integrate your housing, and an age of brotherhood will set in. Reluctantly at first, but eventually with that low-keyed goodwill characteristic of decent Americans of all types, they accepted the concept of integration. It moved slowly, of course, but it moved. And so most Americans accepted the panacea of integration, only to discover that everyone still wasn’t nice. And now there’s a whole new flipflop, and they find themselves expected to atone for the sins of the slave traders and embrace something suspiciously like neo-segregation and minority neo-racism. Keep quiet, they’re urged, when militants pursue their children across college campuses they pay to keep running. The old abstraction was integration. The new one is white racism. And we’d better believe it, by God, or we’re the worst sort of bigots.
The New York mayoral campaign is about such things, ideas rather than hard issues, although, ironically, New York never stood in such need of hard concrete remedies to hard specific problems. The problems are legion, summed up nicely by Alistair Cooke, who brings an objective British perspective to an overview of the condition of the City.
Comments