Playing politics with death

Yet charges of racism often succeed politically. Soon after the Brawley hoax and jogger trial, Sharpton's marches to protest the clearly racist murder of young Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst (a section of Brookyln, N.Y.) helped promote the idea that David Dinkins should defeat Ed Koch as mayor, even though Dinkins had no fire in his belly for the run and was so ineffectual against both violent crime and racism that, four years later, Rudolph Giuliani defeated him.

Those who used the Bensonhurst murder against Koch want to use Diallo against Giuliani, of course. Never mind that police shootings are down so much that as many blacks were killed by cops in Dinkins' four years as in Giuliani's seven. Since New York's overall homicide rate has been halved, as many as 2,000 African-Americans who'd have been murdered are instead living.

It's just not true that this was accomplished only at unbearable cost to the rights and dignity of poor New Yorkers. In 1994, before Giuliani had been mayor even three weeks, Sharpton denounced the mayor's "war on black New York" after a Harlem mosque fracas, in which cops answering a robbery call were injured as worshipers shoved them down a flight of stairs. Giuliani then refused to meet with Sharpton and others -- and they've tried ever since to make police abuses bring him down.

With Diallo, they thought their chance had come. But after Brawley and O.J. Simpson, fewer people think racism can be captured, or combated, through show trials. Playing politics with death forces a sullen scramble to find pure martyrs on each side of the color line -- a Yusuf Hawkins or a Yankel Rosenbaum, a Rodney King or a Nicole Brown Simpson -- and reinforces the very stereotypes the racial ringmasters claim to oppose.

The early Diallo demonstrations were an ephemeral mix of legitimate anger, naive moralism and political opportunism. Continued agitation -- which is virtually certain now that the officers have been acquitted -- is a political dead end. By calling the Diallo killing a "tragic murder" and courting Sharpton, even Hillary Rodham Clinton makes herself seem the unreconstructed bearer of a politics that has failed. Some liberals' obsessions with cases such as Mumia Abu-Jamal's and Hurricane Carter's mirror conservatives' preoccupations with Waco and Ruby Ridge -- justified, perhaps, but not to the point where ideology displaces effective action on key issues, for both the left and the right.

I'd rather see such dead-end politics upset by the hardier faith of East Brooklyn congregations, South Bronx churches, the Queens Citizens Organization and other mostly nonwhite but doggedly integrated organizations trained by the Industrial Areas Foundation. They build housing (with hard-won help from Giuliani), sustain new schools and fight (against Giuliani) for "living wage" jobs. Their dynamism makes racial psychodramas pale. Not incidentally, they've changed police officers' perceptions of their corners of tough neighborhoods.

Why don't we keep faith with them? Haste to create a "movement" around the Diallo case is a sop to the consciences of white elites, who have no serious intention of redressing the inequities that divide not only whites from blacks but also whites from whites and, these days, blacks from blacks. Doing that requires more than the much-touted but eerily anticlimactic "movement" for racial justice sparked by the deadly bungling that killed Amadou Diallo.

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