"My Heart Is as Black as Yours"

[Sibboleth]

Stumbled across an interesting article on the 1969 Mayoral election in New York here.

Edit: full title is...

"My Heart Is as Black as Yours": White Backlash, Racial Identity, and Italian American Stereotypes in New York City's 1969 Mayoral Campaign"

To give a flavour, the last paragraph;

"While the 1969 New York City mayoral election raises several interesting questions about common understandings of whiteness and the white backlash, it also reveals one of the fundamental tragedies of the politics of the late 1960s: the inability of groups, white, black, or "in-between," to recognize or accept their own lack of understanding of the plight of others. It was not the surfacing of "respectable bigotry" that was the tragedy, but the inability of each of the groups to recognize and accept that they were all practicing some level of bigotry. When Mario Procaccino announced that "[his] heart was as black" as others, he may have been sincere in his belief that the ethnic bigotry he felt victimized by was tantamount to racism. Yet he was unable to understand or accept that he and his supporters had benefited from the "privilege" accorded to them by the whiteness of their skin. By the same token, John Lindsay and his supporters may have been unable to recognize that bigotry is often more than skin deep."