Paterson, at N.A.A.C.P., Warns of Racism’s Power
CINCINNATI — David A. Paterson, in his first major speech to a national audience since becoming governor of New York, said on Thursday that even as black Americans rejoice about the possibility that Senator Barack Obama could become president, they cannot lose sight of the serious social and economic ills that plague their community and should remain mindful of the racism that still exists.
“The gap between the haves and have-nots right in our own community is wider than it has ever been before,” Mr. Paterson told a crowd of thousands at the N.A.A.C.P. ' s annual convention here.
“No matter how prosperous we are, no matter how well heeled we may be, no matter how ambitious and successful we have been, we still can be cast under the same net regardless of our circumstances.”
Mr. Paterson, who is New York’s first black governor and only the third black man since Reconstruction to lead a state, addressed the convention as the intersection between race and politics in the United States appears especially fraught. Recent polls have shown that whites and blacks hold very different views of Mr. Obama, and that despite the senator’s candidacy, blacks do not believe that race relations have significantly improved.
Addressing those fissures in his speech, the governor said that he was not sure whether Americans would be able to put their differences aside in this election and support Mr. Obama.
“Can America reject the crucible of race that has dictated and pervaded all of our history to embrace an African-American man who has the right policies?” he said. “We will find out.”
The speech demonstrated how Mr. Paterson, a 54-year-old Harlem Democrat who never experienced the days of segregated lunch counters but still felt the sting of discrimination during his Long Island boyhood, has taken lessons from the civil rights struggle of his parents’ generation and melded them with the experiences of his and younger generations of blacks, who he said too often play down racism’s lingering taint.
“This is why the Jewish community has the motto, ‘Never again,’ ” Mr. Paterson said in an interview after his speech, as he rode in a car through downtown Cincinnati. “There are those who, if they had their way, would return us to an era of separate but equal.”
Mr. Paterson’s speech was interrupted repeatedly by applause and enthusiastic cries of “Yes we can!” the common refrain of Mr. Obama’s supporters. His trip to Cincinnati was part of an effort by his advisers to raise his profile, and after he spoke at the convention he gave interviews to National Public Radio and MSNBC, among other media.
Mr. Paterson said he often felt pulled between two generations of black Americans: those who grew up fighting for civil rights and those who grew up benefiting from their parents’ victories. He said that he understood where the complacency that some younger blacks feel about civil rights comes from, but that he thinks it borders on ignorance.
“The struggle was clear in that generation,” he said. “If you sit in the back of the bus, you know you’re in the back of the bus. If there’s a ‘whites only’ sign, you know you can’t go in.” But coming of age in the 1970s, as he did, when racism was less pervasive than in the first half of the 20th century, some of his peers lost perspective, Mr. Paterson said.
“What you had were a number of people who thought this struggle didn’t affect them,” he said. “They were the beneficiaries of it. And the fact that they could be comfortable saying such ignorant things is a testament to how far we’ve actually come.”
As easy as he had it compared with his parents, Mr. Paterson said he still encountered some painful instances of discrimination as a boy, which serve as a reminder to him that bias will never truly fade away. He attended grade school on Long Island because the New York City schools did not teach blind students outside of special education. He was one of the first black students to enroll at his elementary school in Hempstead.
One afternoon when a white friend invited him over to play, a neighbor unaccustomed to seeing black children in the neighborhood accused him of destroying her flower pots, he said. Mr. Paterson said his friend’s mother rose to his defense, saying that he had been in the house the entire time. The neighbor responded, according to Mr. Paterson, “You bring them in this neighborhood, and then you don’t want to take responsibility for them.”
Mr. Paterson’s views on discrimination have been shaped by the fact that he is both black and legally blind. He said one of the most painful experiences he had with discrimination came from a black businessman who refused to hire him because of his blindness.
“That’s when I realized this is kind of a universal problem that exists, this fear of the unknown, fear of others displaying difference,” he said.
That experience persuaded him to start imploring fellow blacks to examine their own attitudes about prejudice, he said. “What I could try to be was a symbol of the resistance,” he said, “but also one who would point this out internally in our own community.”
And on Thursday, he seemed to draw on that lesson as he asked black Americans to remember the gulf between prosperous and poor: “How are some of us, who have many times been luckier than we have been good, going to help those who unfortunately haven’t been able to receive prosperity as we have?”
Comments