Flipping the Race Card
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AS in many aspects of Staten Island politics, they play the race card backward here. One sure way of putting your opponents on the defensive is to accuse them of accusing you of racism. That was Dennis Sarlo’s gambit when he used his position as chairman of Community Board 3 (covering, roughly, the borough’s southern third) to isolate and excoriate two sentences in the draft of an AIDS organization’s 52-page service delivery plan. In a section analyzing the difficulties faced by black and Hispanic people living with AIDS on Staten Island, the report states: ”Very few African-Americans live in or south of New Dorp or Willowbrook. Racism, and racially based housing discrimination are prevalent in the less densely populated southern townships.” ”Bigotry and bias,” Mr. Sarlo cried at a meeting of his board, turning the tables on the author of the report, the HIV CARE Network, a boroughwide coalition of AIDS service providers. Among them is the Staten Island AIDS Task Force, where I am a social worker. The next day, Mr. Sarlo’s outburst was front-page news in The Staten Island Advance. A follow-up article on reactions to the report called it, ”The slap heard ’round the Island.” Thomas Cocola, Staten Island borough coordinator of Mayor Giuliani’s Community Assistance Unit, was quoted as being ‘’stunned and horrified,” and Assemblyman Robert Straniere, who represents the South Shore, called the report’s assertion ‘’shameful and inexcusable.” Though the language in the passage was probably too broad, it attracted such fierce rejoinders for deeper reasons. Housing discrimination and all it entails — property values, the racial composition of public schools, black anger and white flight — is potentially the most explosive issue in this largely conservative, middle-class, home-owning borough. Therefore it is prudent, you might calculate, to position your overwhelmingly white community as the victim of racial stereotyping. But Richard Mudgett, corresponding secretary of the Staten Island chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said after the meeting, ”Almost any black person who has lived for at least a while on Staten Island will be familiar” with the custom of calling the Staten Island Expressway, which separates the North Shore from the other two-thirds of the borough, the ”Mason-Dixon Line.” Mr. Mudgett is supported by the 1992 Davis consent decree, which mandated minority set-asides in six Staten Island housing projects that had practiced racial steering, and current Federal census data that reveals that Community Boards 2 and 3 contain black populations of 1.9 percent and 0.9 percent — significantly less than the 18 percent of the North Shore’s Community Board 1. Still, Borough President Guy Molinari seconded Mr. Sarlo by slapping the report as ”baseless and irresponsible.” And an editorial in The Advance spoke for many when it said that though the South Shore is ”predominantly white,” so are ”10,000 other communities around the United States.” Phyllis Spiro has heard it before. She is deputy director of the Open Housing Center, a private, nonprofit agency that investigates housing discrimination in New York City. It foolishly blurs distinctions, Ms. Spiro says, to compare the South Shore with other parts of the country. She points out that the area ”is still part of New York City, where there are seven and a half million people, and 54 percent of them are people of color. The South Shore has the lowest population of black people in the five boroughs, and it’s not by accident.” Ms. Spiro says if you’re nonwhite, especially black, ”Brokers never have what you want, or they steer you someplace else.” She adds that Staten Island is one of the hardest places for her agency to bring discrimination lawsuits because of the intimidation of nonwhites who would move into white communities: ”People fear that if they pursue it, they will be met by real hostility or possibly danger.” Nevertheless, the Open Housing Center’s lawsuit against an apartment complex just south of the Staten Island Expressway is to go to trial on April 28 in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. At issue is the center’s claim that whites and blacks with identical credentials received distinctly different treatment when they applied for similar apartments in the same development. One group was offered the chance to see apartments; the other was told to wait for a call. More : query.nytimes.com |