How Much of This is About Race?
I grew up around Philadelphia, and went to high school and college there in the 1970s. It was a racially-fraught time. The Civil Rights movement had changed a great many things, and its effects were amplified by the Great Migration of southern Blacks to northern cities after World War II. A considerable number of urban Whites moved to the suburbs, in what came to be called White Flight. By the 1970s, demographics had changed the political balance of power in many cities, including Philly. What had once been a city ruled by WASPs, and then by the Irish, and then by the Italians, was, in the 1970s, on the verge of being ruled by Blacks.
The reaction, a severe one, was personified by a man named Frank Rizzo.
Rizzo was a policeman who became Police Commissioner from 1967-1971. Under him, Philadelphia gained a reputation for having perhaps the most racist and brutal police force in the nation. Rizzo did not run away from that record; in fact, he used it to get elected mayor in 1972, and then re-elected in 1976.
Rizzo had a personality which may remind you of someone. He was big, and loud, and larger than life. He was often seen as a buffoon, and was certainly a great deal blunter than the average politician. He once said about anti-police demonstrators, “When I'm finished with them, I'll make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” I remember seeing a book of such quotes. Rizzo was extremely quotable.
He had some other peccadilloes as well. A stripper named Blaze Starr made headlines by saying he’d slept with her after arresting her. There were questions about how, on a policeman’s salary, he’d managed to acquire his extremely expensive house. (His answer, which became locally famous: “Carmella [his wife] is a good manager.”) Perhaps most notoriously, when he was accused of a corrupt use of patronage, he insisted that he and his accuser both take a lie detector test, saying, “If this machine says a man lied, he lied.” The accuser passed the test. Rizzo did not.
In spite of all the controversy, he was elected mayor twice, and tried to use a referendum to change the City Charter to allow himself to run a third time. The voters said no. And then, somehow, he was a spent force. Though he tried to return to power in the 1980s, he didn’t get anywhere. The ‘70s was his decade.
Why do I bring up Frank Rizzo? Mark Twain said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I’ve been hearing some rhyming lately.
My father taught in the Philadelphia public schools, and he said that in a school, racial violence tended not to flare up when the proportions were 90-10, or 80-20, but that the situation became more and more volatile as the ratio approached 50-50. That was when both groups felt vulnerable, and when a school might become a powder keg. I think the same thing happens in communities at large. In particular, when a group which has held power is threatened with a loss of power, it’s liable to rally behind a warlord, someone ruthless and unscrupulous and intimidating. Qualities in a leader that might ordinarily be disqualifying – meanness, ignorance, bigotry, corruption – suddenly seem not to matter. As Bill Clinton once said, “When people are afraid, they’ll choose someone who’s strong and wrong over someone who’s weak and right.” If you’re afraid of certain people, or hate certain people, you might turn to a leader who can be used against them like a baseball bat. Frank Rizzo was a baseball bat which White Philadelphians could use against Black Philadelphians.
Something analogous to Philadelphia’s demographic changes in the 1970s is now happening in the nation as a whole. In 1970, non-Hispanic Whites made up 83% of the U.S. population; in 2020, that number was down to 58%. The proportion of Blacks has gone up modestly; the proportion of Asians has gone up significantly; but by far the largest growth has been among Hispanics. You may remember that when Donald Trump made the 2015 speech announcing his campaign, his direct attacks were not upon Blacks, but upon Mexicans – “They bring drugs. They bring crime. They’re rapists” – and his most famous pledge was to build a wall along the Mexican border.
I think every person of color – and, for that matter, everyone who isn’t a straight White male conservative Christian – has reason to be wary of the Trump Administration, but its core attacks are upon Hispanics, because in tribal terms, they are the big new threat. Hence the attempt to deport large numbers of them. I also think Trump believes that what his supporters really want, deep down, is for him to make America whiter. They can handle America being 25% non-White; what freaks them out is the ratio approaching 50-50. And if current demographic trends continue, sometime in the next few decades – the Census Bureau estimates between 2040 and 2050 – the United States is going to become less than 50% non-Hispanic White.
Does this mean I think all Trump supporters are racists? I’m not a fan of name-calling, especially of people I don’t know, and in any case I don’t see racism as a binary state: I see it as an emotion-based continuum, like anxiety or anger. At one end of the spectrum are people who have a firmly-entrenched worldview in which certain groups are disgusting or dangerous or inferior. At the other end are people who think we’re all just human. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. But when there’s bad history between two groups – regardless of who’s to blame: it’s as easy to resent someone you’ve wronged as to resent someone who has wronged you – there are lingering grudges, lingering prejudices. There are scars which bring out the worst in people.
How do these things end? Well, in Philadelphia, Rizzo turned out to be the last gasp of the old order. The demographic changes were as relentless as the tides, and in 1984 the city elected its first Black mayor. Now the political power-structure in Philadelphia is mixed: since 1984, it has had four Black mayors and two White ones. How’s the city doing? I was there just last week, and it seems to be doing fine. It’s fun; there’s money around; it’s a nice place to be. It has its problems, like most American big cities – crime, drugs, a troubled public school system – but it is not down and out. Furthermore, from what I can tell, the city is neither better nor worse-governed than before. Philadelphia has always had plenty of political hacks. Now it has hacks of a different color.
If we can preserve democracy and the rule of law, history will look back on the Trump Era the way it looks back on the Rizzo Era, as something embarrassing but transitional. Because of deep demographic forces, the United States is going become a minority-majority country, and once people have gotten used to the idea, I think that’ll work out fine. Whites will still be the single largest group, after all; they’re not exactly going to be forced to hide in the catacombs. But we do seem to be at a fork in the road. Because of demographics, we can either be a multi-racial, multi-cultural democracy, or we can be a white supremacist dictatorship. We pays our money and we takes our choice.
~ STUDEBAKER (Studebaker@studebakerguy.bsky.com)
