It was lame having to listen to professional political pontificators go on and on as to whether Hillary was a closet bigo
t or Barack was trying to play the part of a professional victim.I was as glad as anybody when I heard the two candidates use a “black and brown issues” debate this week in Las Vegas to say they would work together to quit trying to make race an issue in this primary campaign.
Now it is true that this campaign has created a mental quandary for those Democrats of a liberal persuasion. They have to literally choose which “first” is more important (a woman or an African-American in the White House) when they go to cast their ballots in upcoming weeks.
People like long-time feminist activist Gloria Steinem used a New York Times commentary to argue that women are the more oppressed, whereas I have known many African-American people who will argue equally vehemently that white women have experienced the biggest gains from measures intended to benefit black people.
But Clinton and Obama both have records that show they are supportive of measures meant to benefit minorities and women. Hillary and her husband have been sympathetic to African-Americans and their concerns throughout the years, while Obama is of a younger generation that finds it absurd that women were ever in a politically subservient position.
Regardless of whether Clinton or Obama wins the presidential nomination, women and black people (minorities in general) are going to have a sympathetic ear at the top of the Democratic ticket come Nov. 4.
For a real political race war, there has to be actual disgust bordering on hatred on both sides of the equation.
That is the situation that existed in 1980s-era Chicago, when the Second City’s politics were elevated to a racial tension that may be more embarrassing to Chicago’s image than the St. Valentine’s Day massacre or police conduct during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
I’d like to think it impossible to believe that anybody ever wore the buttons depicting a red slash through a slice of watermelon as their way of expressing opposition to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as mayor.
But the ignorance level was very real. I still remember the day after the ’83 primary election in Chicago. I was in my last year of high school when I saw a group of teenage white boys in the cafeteria get upset at a group of teenage black girls who were giggling.
I never did find out what the girls were giggling about. It was probably nothing significant. But I will always remember the white boys response. “They’re celebrating the election of their f---ing mayor,” one quipped aloud, to grunts of approval from his buddies.
For the next three years, a majority coalition of white aldermen (most of whom had strong ethnic ties) used their political power to stymie Washington on everything from appointments to budgets, being willing to suffer short-term losses in government perks out of a belief that they were preventing an undeserving mayor from inflicting long-term damage to Chicago.
Of course, much of that “long-term damage” was nothing more than a redistribution of city services so that people living in the city’s majority African-American neighborhoods were merely getting fair share, rather than suffering from the decades of neglect that City Hall had inflicted on them in the past.
The racially partisan spats came to be known as “Council Wars,” a play on the Star Wars film franchise that was still new and fresh back then. Comedian Aaron Freeman did his “Council Wars” sketches depicting Harold Skytalker doing battle with, and vanquishing, evil leader Darth Vrdolyak.
Vrdolyak, of course, was Edward R. Vrdolyak, the alderman of the city’s 10th ward that bordered Indiana. His leadership put together the majority coalition of 29 aldermen who opposed Washington so vehemently.
Now I have no doubt that Vrdolyak was doing his job, in a sense. He WAS representing the interests of his constituents, many of whom were Eastern European and Mexican immigrants who had lost jobs in the steel mills and saw black people as some alien force.
I still recall one resident of the Hegewisch neighborhood who told me that Vrdolyak was a “hero” to the people of the 10th ward because he “kept the n----rs out of our neighborhood.” This particular person was of Mexican descent and was actually darker than some of the African-American people who lived in surrounding neighborhoods.
Personally, I find it interesting that Alton Miller, in his memoir of working as Washington’s press secretary, quotes his former boss as saying that Vrdolyak was not a racist, but was, “a bully. He’ll use race. Hell, he’ll use anything. He’ll use his own grandmother to get what he wants.”
The battles between the Harold Washington forces and the Vrdolyak 29 grew to be so ugly that the Wall Street Journal, in one of its trademark lengthy stories of interpretive reporting, gave Chicago its lasting label of “Beirut by the Lake.”
It ultimately took the courts intervening on Washington’s behalf to break the majority opposition in the City Council, and the election in 1989 of Richard M. Daley as mayor before the city’s racial tensions quit impacting its politics so much.
Leo Melamed, former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, wrote in a commentary in the Chicago Sun-Times that Daley’s election, “signaled a rejection of the age of foolishness and a return to the age of wisdom.”
Regardless of who one blames, it is encouraging to see that Chicago has evolved in the past three decades. Chicago Democrats gave significant support to the successful political campaigns of Carol Moseley-Braun and Obama himself for U.S. Senate seats representing Illinois.
The other leader of the white ethnic movement, Chicago alderman Edward Burke, has offered public apologies for much of the racist rhetoric used by white politicos back then. In the City Council these days, black aldermen are just as likely as white ethnic ones to side with Daley so as to get their share of the government pie.
Now it is likely that an Obama candidacy in the general election this year will stir up racial feelings in parts of the country that are less urbane than Chicago. I have no doubt that some people seriously are more comfortable with the idea of a white man serving in the role of Leader of the Free World, and will feel some level of disgust with a woman or black man at the top of the Democratic ticket.
It is possible that the 2008 presidential campaign will go down in the books as one that challenged this country’s very real tensions that remain in our society with regard to racial or gender equality. But trying to take the rhetoric between Clinton and Obama and turn it into a race fight equal to serious race wars is a cheap attempt to trivialize those tensions.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: For those in need of a quickie history lesson on “Council Wars,” check here. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/342.html
Aaron Freeman’s performing career has advanced far beyond “Council Wars.”
http://www.aaronfreeman.com/
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