After New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton chose a black man to replace another black man as his deputy, a reporter asked New York Mayor Bill de Blasio if the replacement “had to be a person of color.”
“No,” the mayor claimed.
That’s not a little white lie. This is a case where whites need not apply.
Across the land, racially charged disputes are grabbing headlines. Broad swaths of life, including school admissions, crime statistics, income and poverty levels, hiring and firing, are seen increasingly through the prism of skin color and ethnicity.
Race riots, that urban staple of the ’60s and ’70s, are making a comeback. They rattled the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer shot a black teenager. More violence is expected if, as seems likely, the officer is not indicted.
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Desperate to hold on to power, some Democratic candidates spent election season trying to scare black voters to the polls. They claimed shootings like the one in Ferguson and the 2012 Trayvon Martin case in Florida would become common if Republicans prevailed. At the bottom of the barrel was the scurrilous comment by Harlem’s Rep. Charlie Rangel, D, N.Y., that some in the GOP “believe that slavery isn’t over.”
So it goes six years after America elected the first black president. That history-making moment was supposed to usher in an era of peace in the melting pot.
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