Rudy Giuliani's White World (January 26, 1999)
HIS WORLD IS AS White as Seinfeld’s, a slice of the city so comfortably one-dimensional that even the popular star of the ongoing Giuliani serial cannot see his own, peculiarly un-New York, isolation.
Not since the days of Vincent Impelliteri nearly half a century ago — through the tenures of Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, Abe Beame, Ed Koch, and David Dinkins — have there been so few black faces in high places in a city administration. Never before has 80 percent of any ethnic group rejected the reelection campaign of an incumbent mayor, as exit polls said blacks did in 1997, preferring a white woman they barely knew who had no chance to win.
And never before have more of a mayor’s targets — squeegees, cabbies, street vendors, public hospital workers, welfare recipients, police-brutality victims, CUNY students, and the dispersed elderly ill from Neponsit nursing home — been so consistently of one hue while his beneficiaries — cops, firefighters, hotel operators, express-bus riders, tax-break developers, Staten Islanders, and Yankees and Jets owners — been so consistently another.
All his life Rudy Giuliani has occupied a milky universe — raised in a blanched Nassau suburb, educated at insular Bishop Loughlin High School and Manhattan College, shuttling twice between the colorless cubicles of the Justice Department in Washington and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, practicing law at three mainline firms where not just the shoes were white.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/05/06/rudy-giulianis-white-world/
