To New Haven and Back Again

[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.