White men can jump

When Baltimore, which is 65 percent black, chose a white as its next mayor, it marked a watershed event in the evolution of America's racial politics.

By Debra Dickerson

Oct 13, 1999 | It was the headline -- "White man gets mayoral nomination in Baltimore" -- that got the Washington Post into so much hot water last month that its ombudsman, R. Shipp, felt obliged to issue this odd mea culpa:

[The headline] reveals a heightened sensitivity to race and ethnicity but an ineptness in dealing with race and ethnicity. By most accounts, his race was no more the deciding factor in his victory than was Serena Williams's in hers in the U.S. Open this month. Thankfully, The Post did not declare then that "Black Girl Wins."

What an ingeniously seductive analogy! Too bad, however, that the situations aren't analogous. The outcome of the U.S. Open is news regardless of who the winner is, but if Martin O'Malley (the new Democratic nominee and shoo-in for mayor) were black rather than white, few outside of Baltimore would have noticed. His whiteness was, in fact, the news.

Yet, most of us would agree with Shipp that something seems wrong about communicating this news so nakedly with that headline. The reasons we feel this way are revealing about the state of public dialogue about race these days.

Baltimore is 65 percent black; 60 percent of its registered voters are black. The incumbent mayor, Kurt Schmoke, was the first African-American ever elected to that post, and O'Malley bested two black candidates for his victory. Furthermore, to win the Democratic primary in this 90 percent Democratic city is to win the general election. The real question may be why a white man wants to be mayor of Baltimore.

This is a city stuck in a long-term downward spiral. Baltimore is hemorrhaging middle-class residents to the suburbs at the rate of 1,000 a month. The white population has dropped by a third in this decade alone. Of the remaining city residents, one in 10 is a drug addict. And the city has the highest incidence of syphilis in the country.

There are signs that the city's crime rate may finally be lessening, but it's still on course to log 300 homicides this year. Open-air drug markets are blatant and ubiquitous. The renaissance of other problem-ridden East Coast cities like New York and Boston has so far eluded Baltimore.

This, then, is the context in which, after 12 years of ineffectual black leadership, Baltimore is reverting to white leadership. But this time, it is a white man widely supported by blacks as part of a broad-based interracial coalition. Now thatmay be news. Race was everywhere, and yet -- as we're given to believe by the Post and by the New York Times, with its "Baltimore Democrats Pick White Councilman in Mayoral Primary" coverage -- nowhere in this election.

Less inept headlines around the nation expressed the primary outcome in the racial semaphore we're more comfortable with: "Race no matter in O'Malley win; Best backers in poor neighborhoods," chirped the Washington Times, happily conflating race and socioeconomics.

"O'Malley support strong in poorer neighborhoods, analyst says," offers the Associated Press, apparently trusting its readers to make the connection themselves. The AP story goes on to explain that O'Malley swept both black and white poor neighborhoods -- but we all know it was the poor black neighborhoods that made his win so newsworthy; it's those we were meant to envision when we read that headline.

What's really going on here is that "race," as it is used in public discourse, actually refers to the behavior of minorities -- O.J. Simpson's trial was about race, but Claus von Bulow's wasn't. It's a way to discuss minorities, whether benignly or maliciously, without appearing to do so.

The reality, of course, is that blacks have always voted for whites; they've had very little opportunity to do otherwise. It's whites who've only recently begun to vote for minorities; blacks remain substantially more likely to vote cross-racially than are whites.

Still, given the radical redistribution of power that has taken place in Baltimore and elsewhere -- and thanks to the civil rights movement and changing demographics -- we are looking at a watershed event here.

Next Page: After that "first," what then?

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