racial politics, New York-style

Occasionally my local paper, the New York Times, lets down its PC guard and tells it like it is, as in this story in the Sunday paper about the aftermath of the terrible, misbegotten shooting of Sean Bell, gunned down in error by five New York City policemen.

Diane Cardwell frames her piece around the good all-around relationship between bazillionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Queens neighborhood’s black community:

Since the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in southeast Queens last weekend, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been able to cool tempers by tapping into an abundant reservoir of black political supporters, many from the area where the chaotic event occurred.

That support is a product of Mr. Bloomberg’s careful cultivation of voters and politicians in the middle-class black neighborhoods of southeast Queens, which swung to the Republican mayor in the 2005 election, helping grant him a huge margin of victory.

This lovefest is in pointed contrast to Rudy Giuliani’s famously tense relationship with every interest group in the city, Cardwell underscores, but she isn’t shy about listing other reasons for the bonhomie:

Mr. Bloomberg has shown a willingness to repay that support, for instance by breaking with his party to raise money for the State Senate campaign of Malcolm A. Smith, who has emerged as one of the important leaders working with City Hall in dealing with the Bell shooting. …

In addition, it does not hurt matters that Mr. Bloomberg spreads some of his wealth around the community. Last year, three Jamaica-based organizations — one that helps small businesses, an arts and education center and a social service group for the elderly received donations from him.

So far so good. But you knew that it’s not all champagne and roses, right? So—predictably, there are those hotheads who want Bloomberg to fire the police commissioner, who threaten street protests and congressional hearings. Then there’s Al “Jack-in-the-Box” Sharpton, a one-man PC Probe Attack (TM) machine:

The Rev. Al Sharpton, for example, is organizing a meeting of black and Latino elected officials, clergy members and labor leaders on Tuesday to discuss their next moves, hinting at some sort of mass civil action just as the city gears up for the holidays. He already called in national leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and corralled a group of lawyers to represent witnesses to the shooting, which occurred on the day Mr. Bell was to be married. …
Mr. Sharpton, a veteran of other police-conduct controversies, has again acted as a point person, taking the lead in putting a focus on the case’s potential civil rights aspects.

That’s the end of the honest reporting in the piece—the part where she says Sharpton is a bloodhound for “potential” civil rights cases. Cardwell undermines her own argument at the end:

Once labeled a race-baiting firebrand, Mr. Sharpton is now considered to be closer to the center of the broader leadership group.

At the private meeting with Mr. Bloomberg, for example, Mr. Sharpton did not second Mr. Barron’s call for Police Commissioner Kelly’s resignation, telling Mr. Kelly that he supported him.

This is the mainstream position of the “broader leadership group” representing New York City’s black community?

Call me crazy, but trolling for potential civil rights violations is still race-baiting. It may be dressed up in a (to some) more respectable package, but it still fuels the fires of racial disharmony.