Theodore Hamm, a Metropolitan College professor, has a revealing piece on Truthdig about Giuliani’s tenure as mayor. Focused around the screening of the new documentary, Giuliani Time, Hamm addresses Giuliani’s horrendous record on race.
Why is there such contempt for the man who never tires of reminding audiences of how he “saved” the city after 9/11? As “Giuliani Time” makes abundantly clear, it’s because in the eight years he reigned as New York City mayor leading up to 9/11, Giuliani ruled as a petty tyrant. And the most frequent target of his animosities was the city’s black population.
After defeating the city’s only black mayor, David Dinkins, in 1993, Giuliani made it crystal clear that he was not interested in a dialogue about race relations. During his first month in office, Giuliani ended the city’s affirmative action program established under Dinkins. For most of the next eight years, he conspicuously refused to meet with any of the city’s black political leadership.
In the documentary, Giuliani’s one high-ranking black political appointee during his two terms, schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, voices his displeasure with his former boss. Crew recalls his surprise when Giuliani announced that he would pursue a school vouchers program, a policy that promised to further deprive the city’s many poor students of color of educational resources. It was during the Amadou Diallo controversy, Crew says, when he realized that there “is something very deeply pathological” about Giuliani’s views of race.
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In terms of crime, Giuliani’s overzealous “quality-of-life” policing effectively amounted to a full-fledged crackdown on young men of color, as documented by the NYPD’s record number of wrongful “stop-and-frisk” encounters. Prior to his post-9/11 “heroics,” Giuliani was best known for having “cleaned up New York.” But as Columbia University’s Jeffrey Fagan and others make clear in “Giuliani Time,” crime dropped even more dramatically in other major cities during the 1990s—and many of those cities did not employ the racially biased quality-of-life approach of Giuliani’s NYPD.
New Yorkers know that there is more to Rudy Giuliani than the man who appeared in lower Manhattan in shirtsleeves on September 11th, 2001. New Yorkers like Hamm are going to continue to remind the rest of the country about Giuliani’s authoritarian and racist tendencies simply because he was such a terrible mayor.
If we judge him based on his actions during his two terms in office, rather than by the two weeks after 9/11, the thought of Rudolph Giuliani becoming president should alarm most progressives. And for people of color in New York City and elsewhere, the prospect is terrifying.
Unfortunately for progressives, the Republican primary is not going to be decided on which candidate appeals to them or minority voters. The Democratic base and people of color are two constituencies that are not taken into account when discussing the electability of Republican presidential candidates — even though Democratic hopefuls are judged by their ability to win conservative Christian voters in red states. That said, the prospect of Giuliani winning the nomination and his candidacy being painted based on his mayoral administration’s destructive, racist policies should be enough to scare Republicans who want to see one of their own in the White House in 2009.
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5 Responses to “Giuliani’s Race Problem”
well if you feel that giuliani is so bad then i think it would be appropriate if you wrote in david dinkons’ name for president, since the “eeevil” giuliani and his “eeevil” policies did such a poor job in nyc.
once again, more nonsense about how laws were broken, only in the minds of liberal hacks who for years said the city couldnt be cleaned up and who were enraged when giuliani proved them wrong. awwww
Something to say?
destructive? racist? giuliani left that city imeasurably better then the one he inheritied. despite what cause de celeb al sharpton and his ilk want to take up, police brutality was cut by nearly 2/3rds during his tenure, poverty, homelessness, drug dealers, prostitution all curbed and virtually eliminated by giuliani. the mob, the heads of the 5 crime families, broken by giuliani. what he did was turn a broken down disgrace of a city and made it into the unofficial center of the country, a symbol of our strength and prosperity.
but maybe we should undo that, because he wanted to cut funds for an “artist” to smear feces on a picture of mary, or because a man who reached for his back pocket after cops said put your hands up got shot. giuliani proved that no city is unmanagable, and did what was needed to turn a disaster into a utopia.
try as they might, dems will continue to hit rudy the hardest, because he is who they fear the most. poll the public, who will protect you best, hillary, barrack hussein, or america’s mayor. nuff said
Left by matt
March 1, 2007 at 3:12pm