'Identity politics' increasingly shaping NY policy
ALBANY, N.Y. - ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — It was an odd gathering of lawmakers in the hidebound conventions of New York's Senate chamber that early June day. An ex-cop facing an assault indictment, a conservative minister, and an entrepreneur investigated over government grants to his health care clinics, flanked by some of the most senior members of the Assembly.
All were Democrats. All were Latinos. And all were from New York City's outer boroughs.
And on this day, two of them — Pedro Espada of the Bronx and the ex-cop Hiram Monserrate of Queens — with little in common but their ethnicity brazenly ignited a historic coup in the Senate to overthrow their Democratic majority for a Republican-dominated coalition. As they did, Latino Democratic assemblymen and senators smiled at their side.
Little discussed — in fact, studiously avoided — but part of the fabric of New York's government for two centuries, "identity politics" is when race, ethnicity, gender, a neighborhood or another single issue such as same-sex marriage trumps policy, ideology, qualifications, even a criminal record. For voters, it can be a knee-jerk act or it can be what Professor Stanley Fish of Florida International University has termed "interest identity politics." That's when voters assume a candidate who looks or lives like them will see and act on a world view they share.
In the New York Senate power play, the self-described amigos wielded it to seize more power and, they said, finally provide Latinos the leadership roles that were denied them first by white and, this year, black leaders. Coalition-building hadn't worked; it was time to leverage their power as a bloc to achieve their goal.
Espada, the force behind this summer's coup, thinks identify politics in too narrow a term to define the action.
"There's no question that was an element," Espada told The Associated Press. "For us, it's not so much along the lines of race, but of culture, of language, of core values ... we do share a generational frustration of not having a real seat at the table, a real voice."
Latinos have grown fast to 860,000 registered voters among New York City's 4.2 million, with no top leadership in government before the Senate coup.
"I think people have a natural tendency to want their own, whether it is racial or ethnic, to do well," Espada said. "I think it is the way we are brought up and there is nothing wrong with that.
"The bad side of that is you can overplay that, where you deny other people their legitimacy by having a myopic lens to your life," Espada said. "You have to be a good human being and being a good human being is obviously recognizing what we all have in common."
Identity politics has always steered votes and the politicians who depend on them. And it's flourished in New York, a state rich in ethnic, racial and geographic divides as well in advocacy of social causes such as same-sex marriage.
In January, advisers pushed Gov. David Paterson to fill Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate with an upstate woman. The governor pledged to reform the selection process after a list of possible chief judges contained no women (a highly qualified white man was appointed). The quest to legalize same-sex marriage turned into a personal mission of singular focus by sponsors. Most recently, identity politics roiled New Yorker Sonia Sotomayor's journey toward a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, because of a 2001 speech in which she hoped "a wise Latina ... would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male."
At its most extreme, identity politics can expand America's racial divide. President Barack Obama's landmark campaign speech on race in 2008 put it this way: "We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism ... But if we do," he warned, "nothing will change."
Through it all, identity politics evolved from being dismissed as a nod to political correctness to a way to implement public policy. So does the practice give voice to the isolated and suppressed, or is it the bigotry of those able to seize power at any cost?
That's rarely a public discussion. Many Democrats, Republicans and political analysts refused to comment, fearing that such an airing of the racially charged issue would result in a career-ending branding as a racist.
A byproduct of identity politics is that blocs devoted to their identity contribute to Albany's notorious horse trading late in legislative sessions, where, again, the merits of bills can become secondary to getting votes.
"I think it's always been around," said Robert B. Ward, deputy director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. "For much of the 20th century, people of Irish and Jewish backgrounds dominated New York politics and in each of those cases there was a gradual ascension to power."
In decades past, Italian-American lawmakers required the City University of New York to offer classes in Italian, Irish-Americans scored funding for an Irish heritage museum and to require schools to teach about the Irish Potato famine, and Jewish lawmakers helped fund libraries and research about the Holocaust. Minority leaders also long argued that the Senate and governor's office — always held by whites — engaged in its own brand of identity politics through corporate welfare, harsh criminal laws that most often result in prison for young, minority men and underfunding of inner city schools.
Identity politics spawned political machines for the Irish in the 19th and 20th centuries that ruled New York's cities with legendary names including Tammany Hall.
In an example of identity politics built around geography, white Republican senators from Long Island took power in 1988 over a white, upstate-based power base, then shifted upstate again in a 1994 coup by Sen. Joseph Bruno of Rensselaer County.
In Albany, some say identity politics has already exacted a cost.
Republican Sen. Stephen Saland of Poughkeepsie, in office 20 years, said it fuels a vision of the state as "a giant trough" of funding for pet projects and causes.
"These factions are at each others' throats and saying, 'Can you top this?' at the virtual exclusion of the rest of the state," Saland said.
There is the opportunity to turn identity politics into a coalition around shared needs and ideas. Gov. Al Smith reached across religious lines in the 1920s and Franklin D. Roosevelt united the poor for Democrats the decade after that. Republican Ronald Reagan connected with the middle class for Republicans in the 1980s, while Republican New York Gov. George Pataki had his Amigos de Pataki re-election effort in 2002 and New York City's mayor won with help from Latinos for Mike Bloomberg.
Today, both major parties try hard to appeal to myriad groups and without offending their bases, said Bruce Gyory, a political consultant to Democrats and Republicans including Democratic governors back to Hugh Carey. He said voters now often see themselves in far more categories such as Caribbean black; and not just Hispanic, but Ecuadorean; and not just immigrant, but subcontinental Indian.
"We could be in for an era of real ferment," Gyory said. "It's much more complicated and it's going to offer an opportunity," he said. "Let's hope our political leaders are up to it."
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