It was similar to the outdated days: As New York wrestles with a race-tinged tragedy, Al Sharpton sends a nastygram.
The one-time portly pastor, now whippet-thin however as filled with it as ever, stepped right into a borrowed pulpit at Harlem’s Mount Neboh Baptist Church on Friday — and promptly stirred the identical outdated pot.
Sharpton had been invited to eulogize Jordan Neely, a severely troubled, usually violent vagrant who died Might 1 whereas restrained in a chokehold utilized by fellow subway passenger Daniel Penny.
It was, as they are saying, a teachable second.
Definitely the Neely tragedy touches on a lot of what makes life in New York Metropolis so tough now: publicly expressed psychological sickness; random violence; the rising incapability of present establishments to guard the susceptible — and the risks such instabilities pose to public assist for the rule of regulation itself.
However Neely was black and Penny is white — and that’s all Al wanted.
Out tumbled the same old blizzard of phrases, and a few even made sense. Definitely he wasn’t improper to name out New York’s enduring failure to deal with mental-health points.
However his time-tested, totally predictable and impossible-to-miss core message resided in these two sentences:
“After they choked Jordan, they put their arms round all of us.
“All of us have the precise to dwell.”
“They” being white New York; “us” being black New York — and by no means thoughts nuance, context or widespread sense.
Identical to that, Gotham’s race-baiter emeritus was again.
The identical man who pushed the notorious Tawana Brawley hustle, who helped three days of rioting in Crown Heights in 1991, who by no means missed a chance for anti-Semitism, didn’t preach unity or love. He stoked division.
Life has sanded down a little bit of the Rev’s tough edges. In any case, he’s residing off donations to his Nationwide Motion Community, TV gigs and private appearances — and too much-naked demagoguery could put these in jeopardy.
However you realize what they are saying about stripes and zebras: Some issues won’t ever change.
But Friday’s race-baiting, nevertheless deplorable, can also be ironic. It might have benefited Sharpton’s pursuits — and definitely his ego — nevertheless it additionally undercut a black mayor struggling to manipulate an more and more unstable metropolis.
Certainly, authorities in New York — even in Albany — is now overwhelmingly run by black, brown or in any other case minority incumbents. How does racializing a disaster assist them?
Or, extra correctly, New York itself?
It doesn’t — however Al Sharpton doesn’t care. He by no means did.
bob@bobmcmanus.nyc
