Mixed Race Studies

Identity Politics, in a Brand-New Form

The New York Times
2013-09-14

Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

ARGUABLY, New York’s identity politics peaked in 1945. That year, William O’Dwyer, the Democratic Party machine’s mayoral favorite, was Irish and from Brooklyn. Lazarus Joseph, the candidate for comptroller, was Jewish and from the Bronx. Party leaders balanced their citywide ticket with a candidate for City Council president by plucking the name of Vincent R. Impellitteri, an obscure legal secretary to a Manhattan judge, from the index to the official city directory.

“We flipped through the Green Book for the longest Italian name we could find,” Bert Stand, the secretary of Tammany Hall, the venerable Democratic organization, explained at the time.

Last week, after Bill de Blasio finished first in the Democratic mayoral primary, students of New York politics were already pronouncing identity politics dead. After all, half the black voters abandoned the black candidate, William C. Thompson Jr., to back Mr. de Blasio (he and Mr. Thompson each got 42 percent among blacks, according to an Edison Research survey of voters leaving the polls). Ideology trumped race as even the Rev. Al Sharpton, more impressed with Mr. de Blasio’s policy agenda, remained publicly neutral instead of reflexively endorsing the black candidate. Mr. Thompson carried Italian and Irish Catholic districts in Staten Island and Breezy Point, Queens, which, in the past, have not routinely embraced black candidates, as well as several Orthodox Jewish and Russian enclaves…

…This year, said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a neighbor of Mr. de Blasio, “the really big story is that black central Brooklyn, the single largest contiguous settlement of black people anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, did not back an African-American who climbed up the rungs of regular Democratic politics in the borough, but chose instead a younger white leader in a biracial family who is a former organizer and much more Obamaesque.”…

Read the entire news analysis here.

De Blasio First in Mayoral Primary; Unclear if He Avoids a Runoff

The New York Times
2013-09-10

David M. Halbfinger, Reporter

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio, whose campaign for mayor of New York tapped into a city’s deepening unease with income inequality and aggressive police practices, captured far more votes than any of his rivals in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

But as Mr. de Blasio, an activist-turned-operative and now the city’s public advocate, celebrated a remarkable come-from-behind surge, it was not clear if he had won the 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff election on Oct. 1 with William C. Thompson Jr., who finished second. At night’s end, he had won just over 40 percent of the ballots counted; thousands of paper ballots had yet to be tallied, which could take days.

…Mr. de Blasio, a white Brooklynite who frequently showcased his biracial family, built a broad coalition of support among nearly every category of Democratic primary voters on Tuesday, according to the exit poll by Edison Research. His critique of a city divided between rich and poor — tried in the past by other candidates in New York and nationally with little success — resonated…

“I love his message about the tale of two cities, the big inequality gap,” said Jelani Wheeler, 19, a politics student at St. John’s University in Queens…

Read the entire article here.