The New Republic, which likes to show off its extensive back list (and why not?) has made available (to subscribers only) two long book reviews that Wilson did for them back in the nineties, which show off his good and his bad sides. I’ll be looking at the (pretty) good Wilson today, and the not so good Wilson tomorrow. (Or if not tomorrow, then the day after.)
“The Closing of the American City,” which appeared in the May 11, 1998 issue of TNR, shows off Wilson on his own turf, urban America in flames, a hell born of liberal good intentions. Wilson takes as his texts two books, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, by Lou Cannon, and Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration, by Tamar Jacoby.
In his review of Official Negligence, Wilson accepts Cannon’s account almost entirely: that it was a massive failure of political leadership at the top that allowed outrage over an unfair jury decision exonerating the police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King to escalate into a massive riot, mostly involving Latinos rather than blacks, which led to the destruction of more than 2,000 Korean-owned businesses.
Rather too politely, to my mind, Wilson accepts Cannon’s claim that Proposition 13 deprived the LA Police Department with the funds needed for modern communications equipment. One can wonder if LA was short on funds, or short on the will to spend its money on anything other than patronage.
The 1992 riots, which destroyed the reputation of LA Mayor Tom Bradley, who at one time aspired to become a national leader (whom many liberals dreamed off as the man who would “bring us together”), were a painful reminder to Americans that the turmoil of the Sixties was not far away. Tamar Jacoby’s book, Someone Else’s House, chronicled the manifold failures of the responses to the Sixties riots in cities like New York, Detroit, and Atlanta.
I’ll quote extensively from Wilson’s conclusion, which shows how deeply the frustrations and failures of the struggle for racial integration weighed on him at that time.
THESE FINE BOOKS raise a fundamental question: Can the political will be summoned to pursue a strategy of making skin color less relevant in public life? The answer, so far, is no. Race may have become less important in private affairs; race may dominate fewer private judgments about human conduct; and a growing economy may now be contributing to the increased material well-being of members of all races. For many middle-class blacks, however, race remains a constant reminder of their difficulty, in being judged solely as individuals, and for many low-income (and young) blacks, race is an explanation for the gains that they have not made. And since they confront angry or frightened people at the moment of their deepest anger or their greatest fear, the police are the most likely public agency to be caught up in the whirlwind of racial passion. For Los Angeles to have a black police chief, even one as competent as Bernard Parks, is no guarantee that rage and rioting will not occur again.
* * *
We are at mid-stream in our efforts to produce a society in which whites and blacks can live together decently well. Such a transformation is still decades away, and in this time there will be more riots, more suspicion, and more political manipulation. The vast gains that many African Americans have made—the gains portrayed at length in the Thernstroms’ book*—coexist with a deep layer of anger, distrust, and confusion, and this deeper discontent claims as its chief victims young people who lack fathers, schooling, and a belief that the future will be shaped by their own efforts and not by a shadowy and threatening Them.
These books are reports from the nation’s halfway house, perilously balanced between extraordinary accomplishments and thinly controlled rage. My grandchildren, I believe, will inherit a different world, a world in which more Americans will have learned to live peaceably. The increasing rate of interracial marriages is a sign of what may happen: more individual acceptances of difference that presage wider group tolerance. Perhaps there will then fade the historically flawed view that whatever afflicts blacks, whites are the cause of it. That view simply cannot be true, for if whites are so powerful as to have caused all black problems, they must also be so strong as to cause all black successes; and as Orlando Patterson has pointed out, that is absurd.
When I revisited Chicago twenty years later the Loop was a ghost town after dark. Most of the first-run movie houses, which used to line State Street, were shut down. The few that remained were showing kung-fu flicks. Times Square in the early Seventies was a farrago of porn, whores, and three-card monte dealers, which I’ve described online in “One Night on the Sleazoid Express.”†
For neocons like Wilson, this was the legacy of liberalism. They did not forget, and they did not forgive. When Wilson walked through the burnt-out sections of LA after the Rodney King riots, it must have seemed as if America had not gained one inch over the past. But by the time he wrote his review, things were changing. By 1998, crime rates had fallen markedly in many big cities, something that he didn’t bother to note in his review. Most—but not all—of the bad boy black nationalist mayors were gone. Clinton peace and prosperity, which the neo-cons accepted grudgingly, was making a difference. American cities were opening rather than closing.
Now we have a black President, who has disappointed me as much as anyone. Could riots come again? As London recently demonstrated, a big city will almost always have a capacity for riot. But it’s been 20 years since the LA riots, and 20 years is a long time. The hatred of Obama on the right—and he’s won over few of the neo-cons indeed—continues to baffle me. On foreign policy, he’s given them 90 percent of what they demand, and yet for the lack of that 10 percent they prophecy the end of Western Civilization. Some people are never satisfied.
*Presumably, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom (1997), though I don’t find it referenced anywhere in the text.
†The “Disneyfication” of Times Square? Girlfriend, bring it on!
