New Racism

African-Americans always occupied the city's bottom social rung, and upper-class Anglos the top. Much of the racial "action," however, has rested with numerous groups who find themselves between the white and black extremes. Jews, Italians and other groups immigrating to Dallas found their whiteness challenged, and they therefore struggled for a share of the city's immense riches. Leaders of the Mexican-American civil rights movement raced to avoid the lowest rung of the social ladder and feared that a too-close identification with the black freedom struggle would result in racial demotion.

... To be classified as "nonwhite" in Dallas meant assignment to low-wage, low-prestige jobs with little opportunity for advancement. ...

Mexican-Americans faced an even greater burden to prove their whiteness. ... Most Mexican-Americans lived in poverty and, in some cases, faced discrimination as harsh as that suffered by the African-American community.

Many members of the Mexican-American and Jewish communities, such as labor leader Pancho Medrano and Rabbi Levi Olan, Rabbi Lefkowitz's successor at Temple Emanu-El, fought a broad struggle against racism and for the civil rights of blacks, browns, Jews and all of Dallas' marginalized communities. Many, however, insecure in their position, became soldiers in service of Jim Crow. ...

Blacks vs. Latinos

Middle-class Latino organizations such as LULAC and the American G.I. Forum worked to get Mexican-Americans acknowledged as white. ...

In Dallas, this Mexican-American desire for white identity at times degenerated into outright negrophobia. ...

In recent years, there has been no uglier front in Dallas' race wars than the battles between blacks and Latinos. In January 1996, Dallas' first black county commissioner, John Wiley Price, staged protests at Parkland Memorial Hospital contending that Parkland discriminated against black and brown job applicants. Mr. Price's outrage focused on one hospital board member, Jaime Ramon, calling him a "coconut" ? brown on the outside but white inside. Mr. Price accused his Mexican-American nemesis of collaborating with whites against blacks and Latinos.

Mr. Price himself faced accusations of racism when he held aloft a sign telling Mr. Ramon to go "back to old Mexico." ... Latino civil rights organizations then led protests calling for Mr. Price's resignation.

... In December 1997, Dallas hosted the first of a series of community forums on American race relations called for by President Clinton. Municipal Judge Vonceil Hill drew up the guest list, which excluded members of the white, Hispanic and Asian-American communities. ...

"There has been only one racial agenda in this town ? a black agenda," said lawyer and longtime activist Adelfa Callejo, "but that's about to change."

Mainstream Mexican-American politicians such as Jesse Diaz viewed black gains in administrative appointments at the Dallas Independent School District as coming at the expense of Mexican-Americans, claiming that "the oppressed have become the oppressor." Meanwhile, many African-Americans saw Hispanics as riding on the coattails of previous hard-fought civil rights battles won by blacks.

... The dialogue between the two communities often degenerated into name-calling. "I call them vultures," Dallas NAACP president Lee Alcorn said of the city's Hispanic leaders in a Washington Post interview.

The meaning of "whiteness"

Dallas' power structure always depended on divisiveness. Skin color split the city, and winning acceptance as part of the white ruling caste always represented the surest means of social advancement.

... "Becoming white meant gaining access to a whole set of public and private privileges that materially and permanently guaranteed basic subsistence needs and, therefore, survival," wrote Cheryl I. Harris in a 1993 essay in Harvard Law Review. "Becoming white increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one's life rather than being the object of others' domination."

... Millions of Mexican-Americans, for instance, magically ceased to be white in 1930 by virtue of the U.S. Census Bureau, which, in its population statistics, separated those of Hispanic descent from the white population and placed them in a separate "Mexican" category. Such legal definitions had little to do with the reality of racial categories and more to do with preventing the transfer of wealth from a white master class to a population of color through inheritance by mixed-race children.

Face the past

... If Dallas is to grow up as a city, it must, to paraphrase historian David Roediger, abolish whiteness. This doesn't mean to abolish white people, but to acknowledge that racial categories like "white" and "black" are fiction and to dismantle the automatic privileges that come with white status.

... A reconciliation commission should explore that past and place historical markers throughout the city noting, for instance, where a white mob killed three slaves blamed for a fire that destroyed the village of Dallas in 1860; where members of the United Auto Workers battled company guards, who blinded one worker, at the old Ford Motor plant; where thriving black-dominated neighborhoods like State-Thomas were consciously destroyed by city planning; and where a Dallas police officer in the back of a squad car shot a Mexican-American teenager named Santos Rodriguez in the head while terrifying him with a pretend game of Russian roulette.

... No one should serve in elective or appointive office in Dallas city or county government unless he or she is thoroughly briefed on the city's history. ... Laura Miller, with her arrogance and insensitivity to the black need for a voice at City Hall and the police department, needs to know that Dallas had the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in the United States in the early 1920s; ....

Knowledge liberates. City leaders must understand that the current chaos at City Hall and on the DISD school board results from 160-plus years of racial dictatorship. Conflict should not be dreaded as a sign of Western civilization's collapse, but as a sign of an emerging democracy purging itself of a collective mental illness.

Needed: real democracy

Finally, the city will not emerge from the shadow of racial hate and paranoia until Dallas becomes genuinely democratic.

Dallas needs more than the occasional African-American and Mexican-American politician. The same money that moves white politicians to rule by the tactic of divide-and-conquer provokes too many Mexican-American and African-American officeholders toward parallel dead ends.

Mexican-American politicians may garner populist support in their community by condemning the black racial agenda, and so-called black leaders like Maxine Thornton-Reese might get re-elected by exploiting past instances of racial injustice and rolling in the gutter of anti-Semitism, but in the end, they serve the same real estate developers, bankers and similar corrupt paymasters who have always ruled the city.

Only the wealthy benefit from racism, but the social divisions that malady creates allow the rich unchallenged command of power. When the public becomes more interested in the role private money plays in who wins public office ? and the influence campaign money plays on whether public money is spent to pave roads and repair schools or to build stadiums and signature bridges for millionaires ? Dallas will have more than a hollow imitation of democracy.

Until Dallas, and the rest of the country, bans private money in political campaigns, the color of power in the city ultimately will not be white, but green.

Michael Phillips is a researcher at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001" (University of Texas Press). His e-mail address is mphillips3925@ earthlink.net.