The Crisis of the Negro New York Pol

Ta-Nehisi Coates states:

There really is almost no black base for David Paterson, and Thompson is winning black voters by a mere 18 percent. For a black Democrat running for mayor in the biggest city in the country, against a white Democrat turned Republican turned Independent, that is incredible.

But not suprising.  There is a forty-year trend of auto-corruption in black politics.  For convenience sake, I date the incubation period from the 1967 New Politics Convention to the 1972  Black Political Convention.  From booing Martin Luther King off the podium to putting themselves up for bid, all within five years.  

In New York, the issue was complicated by inter-borough and inter-ethnic fights, further compounded by the defection of Latino voters from David Dinkins to Rudy Giuliani in the 1993 Mayoral election.   Giuliani was (and is) interesting  as a case-study in racial opportunism when, as was the case with his feud with the Police Commissioner, race baiting took precedence over public safety.

New York racial politics tend to be purely symbolic, as when Al Sharpton (for example) will mount a purely symbolic action as a means of community catharsis.  This makes Sharpton useful, because the catharsis comes at the expense of addressing tangible issues.  This dynamic goes far beyond racial politics in the City, because, organizationally speaking, there is no political culture beyond the neighborhood level.

The opportunity exists to fill the vacuum in City politics, but no black leaders or organizations deign to put in the sweat equity to accomplish it.

Politically, New York is a Gertrude Stein metaphor: there is no there, there.