[Alyssa Rosenberg]
Today, Adam and Ta-Nehisi have things to say about Ricci, and I'm happy to let them talk about the decision. But because we'll get a pile of legal analysis today, I want to step back a little bit and talk about New Haven as a town, and what it meant to me. New Haven is to me what fatherhood is to Ta-Nehisi, I think, and because it's in the news today, even in a tangential way, I'd like to talk about the town a little.
Why am I qualified to talk about New Haven? I spent four years going to school there, including the time that Frank Ricci filed his lawsuit. Attending college in New Haven is not, admittedly, a guarantee of deep-seated involvement in the Elm City. But I was lucky enough to get swept into the roiling waters of New Haven politics, an experience that was critical in shaping my understanding of race, politics, and ultimately, myself. And I want to write a little bit about that process today. (Quick disclaimer: I work as a non-partisan reporter now, and as a result, don't participate in party politics, make political contributions, lend my support to candidates, or causes,etc. The events I'm going to describe here happened in the past.)
I liked to believe I was not a naive little white girl before I moved to New Haven: I'd helped lead a troop of Girl Scouts whose mothers were in prison in high school and spent a lot of weekends going through security at MCI Framingham for jailhouse visitors' room meetings. But when I got to New Haven, I was naive enough to believe that a town with an overwhelming Democratic majority on its Board of Aldermen would have no problem passing a law creating a local domestic partner registry for gay couples. I was wrong. A coalition of black and Latino pastors and their congregations, plus some Orthodox Jews, convinced the board to vote against the registry by a one-vote margin. But even though that loss was tough, it was the thing that got me into conversations with New Haven's political figures, union leaders, and pastors, and for that, I'll be grateful for it for the rest of my life.
In the aftermath of the bill's defeat, the domestic partnership registry became a big issue in the fall aldermanic elections in 2003. The election also took place against the backdrop of a three-week strike of Yale's clerical and technical unions during which Yale brought in Latino strike-breakers to cross the mostly-black picket lines at Yale. (In that election cycle, Rev. Boise Kimber, who Justice Alito singles out for a drubbing in his concurring opinion in Ricci, told black voters that a Latina alderwoman represented the threat posed to African-Americans by Latinos in New Haven. It's a small world.)
In the elections, I did some poll watching at the Goffe Street Firehouse,
where Frank Ricci works, and worked on another campaign in my own Ward 22. A couple of months later, my new alderman, Drew King, tapped me and a Dixwell resident to run to co-chair political operations in the ward.
Before I talk about that campaign, let me say I was a decent politician and a not very good office-holder. My running mate and I won the election in the spring of 2004 with a large majority of the vote, aided by record-breaking turnout by the Yale students in the ward, many of whom had never been to Dixwell's streets before, much less to the senior center at the Edith Johnson Towers to vote. But no 19-year-old kid should be representing any neighborhood, much less one she has a dubious claim to, and especially not while going to school full time.
The campaign, and my two-year term, changed me. I spent some long, wonderful Sundays at Dixwell's churches, particularly at Varick A.M.E. Zion, which left me with a taste for gospel music (The only detail I envision for my wedding is that "I Need You To Survive" will be played and sung sometime during the service. I don't care that it's Christian in content. That song is a must.) and my first real sense of the role religion can play in defining and demanding justice. I took community organizing classes at Varick, too. I spent one very long, dark, cold night tramping up and down streets in Dixwell, knocking on doors where people mostly weren't home, with Rev. Scott Marks, talking some about the campaign, but a lot about how he and his fellow pastors were figuring out how to discuss homophobia and gay rights with their congregations. That conversation, in its difficulty and honesty, will stick with me for the rest of my life. I sat in on community meetings where pre-teen kids talked about getting pepper-sprayed by the cops, and about the cars that kept crashing through the fence at a dead end street. I hung out with Drew at Blessed Detailing, the car wash he ran to give ex-cons jobs and to help them reestablish themselves in the community (a journey Drew had made himself), and scrubbed down some cars myself. I hung out with the janitors at the local elementary school, who told me, unsolicited, that the reason I never got hassled when I was in the neighborhood was because folks who didn't know me assumed I was working under cover for the New Haven police department, which sometimes used the school's big glass front windows to monitor drug traffic in the neighborhood.
The people who opened up their churches, their homes, their lives to me were incredibly generous. I don't know that I was able to get them much of what they deserved in return, but they made me a more thoughtful observer and reporter, and ultimately, were fairly gentle in teaching me my own limitations.
The lesson I take away from Ricci, and the lesson I take away from my years in New Haven are essentially the same: we ought to try to do right by everybody all the time, but we should be aware of the chance we'll fail. As a well-intentioned white girl, I wasn't going to be able to bind up the wounds of a fractious relationship between Yale and one of its adjacent neighborhoods on my own. I wasn't going to be able to succeed where other people, far more qualified than me, had failed to re-open a key community center. I couldn't get a city's black and Latino communities ready to talk about gay rights by myself. And the city of New Haven wasn't going to fix historical problems of racism in hiring with the rules governing a written test. But it's important to have conversations about all of those issues, about the successes and the failure, and about where to go next.
New Haven has always been a focus
of political science speculation and experimentation, whether it's
Robert Dahl's examination of urban political power in Who Governs?, William Domhoff's follow-up in Who Really Rules?, as a test case for urban renewal under President Kennedy and Mayor Richard Lee and of resistance to that urban renewal, as a center of student and radical protest in the 60's and 70's, as a city deeply blighted by the crack epidemic. It's not surprising to me that a case like Ricci would emerge from New Haven. But Ricci, to me, is
also a reminder that New Haven is a city worth paying attention to as a
whole if you care about black-Latino relations, if you care about how
cities are going to deal with gay rights issues, if you care about how
cities are going to do right by all of their residents. It's a shame if New Haven's brief moment back on the national radar is as just another test case.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
" we ought to try to do right by everybody all the time, but we should be aware of the chance we'll fail."
With all due respect, who needs that point to be made? And how, in the particular case of Ricci, do you find it to apply? No disrespect to your experiences, I'm just not getting where you're going by recounting them.
A lot more folks than you might think. I certainly dove into politics in New Haven thinking I was going to solve something, as do a LOT of young people working in policy, no matter the context. I think it's very easy to see the people who might benefit when you make a particular policy--in the context of Ricci, folks who have been systematically denied jobs in fire departments and discriminated against once they--without thinking about the tradeoffs, again in the case of Ricci, folks who will bust their asses, and because of a well-meaning policy, find themselves denied. There are no policies that don't come with cost. I went into New Haven thinking that things could just be right or wrong, and left thinking a lot more about price in funds, opportunity, relationships, etc. If I was naive to have to learn that lesson, well, I accept that judgement on myself.
The only real point I wanted to make is that New Haven has a lot more going on than the Ricci case, and that being absorbed in that dynamic was really good for and important for me. New Haven's been a guinea pig for so long, that I'm sorry to see a fascinating city where tough discussions happen get reduced to a lawsuit.
Miss Rosenberg
Thank you for your interesting post.Like yourself i am no expert on legal matters.
But I would like to say that one thing that I have noticed from reading about this case is that unlike in the movies there is no evil bad guys in this case. Some people here might disagree with me . But of the white and black firefighters that have been qouted in the newspapers , all have seemed to be good people
.I think that is the problem with these cases nowdays.It's a lot simpler when theres a Bull Conner in the situation.No one has accussed MR Ricci or the other firefighters of being racist .I myself do not think that a perfect ending for this story ever existed.
Miss Rosenberg
While i appreciate the insight you attempt to share, your post does nothing but frustrate me. I'm from New Haven. Its more to me than an earthy and interesting place to attend college. Indeed my family has been involved in New Haven politics and have been fighting to improve the Black community and repair relations between the Blacks and Whites there longer than you've been alive. My uncle was an alderman in the 60s and 70s and has run the Dixwell Neighborhood Corporation for more than 30 years. My father worked for the New Haven public housing authority at the height of the crack era in the 1980s, trying to clean up the same Elm City Homes on Dixwell that my family grew up in 40 years before.
Since you evince a familiarity with the churches in the Elm City I'll share that I grew up attending St. Luke's and then Bethel AME off of Goffe street. I learned to play ball at Goffe street park with Super John Williamson's son Maurice, where the firefighters who worked at the nearby fire station would walk by us an make ape noises on their way to work. The history of discrimination in New Haven is something I'm well versed in as a matter of both personal, family and local history.
There is much more to this case than meets the eye, starting with the fact that the white firefighters in the Ricci case received notice about the upcoming exam months before the minority firefighters. That's why the dyslexic firefighter Ricci had the time to have things transferred to tape. This is the reason, unspoken of course, why the City felt the need to throw out the test results. Ginsberg makes an oblique reference to this in her dissent. Certifying those results would have resulted in a lawsuit by the Blacks denied promotion by a test that bears little relation to the real-world responsibilities of fire-fighters, one of which is community relations.
But that's neither here nor there, and was not the point of your post. But I would ask that you refrain from representing yourself as an expert on New Haven. That would be like a student from Johns Hopkins calling herself and expert on Baltimore. While that never seems to happen, countless Yalies feel empowered to declaim about a city they have at best only a tangential relationship with.
Wow, Jonathan, that was kind of rude...and I think you kind of missed Alyssa's point which is that New Haven is indeed a very complex place that's difficult for an 'outsider' like her to understand. She obviously felt humbled by the experience. You shouldn't dismiss her experience(regardless of how limited) out of hand without debating the merits of what she actually wrote.
Xica
What Alyssa wrote was tangential to the Ricci case, which she admitted and that i acknowledged in my post. I was actually responding to her initial rhetorical question "Why am i qualified to talk about New Haven?" I always tell my students to beware posing a rhetorical question because you never know if there is someone in the audience that might decide to answer it.
But i will admit that perhaps I was unfair to Alyssa. I guess growing up in a Black community that was viewed chiefly as an abstract problem to be solved so that Yale could go about the business of being Yale and not an actual collection of human beings with real world concerns leaves me touchy on the topic. Tone is also notoriously difficult to ascertain on-line, but mine was meant to be world weary resignation that yet another Yale alum was going to speak for the Black and Brown community that produced me and thousands like me. That's why I referenced Johns Hopkins and B-more at the end of my post. I think TNC would rightly mock someone who professed to know his city from four years of college there. But, as this blog constantly reminds us all, race and history mark us in unfortunate ways.
Jonathan,
Please don't worry. I'm not offended. I've heard this criticism before, and I fully accept it. All I mean to say is that New Haven influenced me in profound ways that I'm grateful for and still struggling to figure out. The folks who took me into their lives for a couple of years did me a tremendous favor in treating me like someone who was genuinely interested and invested in their city, rather than automatically discounting me because of where I went to school. I'm very well aware that I don't own New Haven--they do, and you do. I appreciate you sharing it with me for a while, and giving me a chance to learn things that still affect me as a person and a journalist.
Alyssa