“Now we more fucked up with a Mayor named Giuliani” - Hip-Hop and Rudy Giuliani

Between 1993-2001 Rudy Giuliani served under two terms as a Republican Mayor of New York City. Giuliani, the first Republican Mayor of NYC since 1965, would win the 1993 election by a little over 50,000 votes, campaigning on a platform centred on an oppressive crackdown on crime. Manhattan, The Bronx and Brooklyn voted in favour of the Democratic candidate David Dinkins, but Giuliani’s crushing victories in Queens and Staten Island, ultimately secured him the victory. Staten Island - the borough of New York City with the largest demographic of non-Hispanic whites - was,unsurprisingly, most influential in securing Giuliani's victory. The same demographic that would suffer least at the hands of Giuliani and Clinton's sweeping policy reform to welfare, housing and crime. 

The pointed opening bars to AZ’s Rather Unique touch upon this racial disparity precisely:

               “We was already moulded into people's minds as mulignanes

     Now we more fucked up with a mayor named Giuliani”

“Mulignane” is a racist epithet for black people, prominent in Italian-American Communities, and a deliberate rhyme pairing alongside Giuliani, an Italian-American himself. It is the corrupted form of the word “melanzane”, Italian for eggplant/aubergine, and is used to dehumanise black people. Within just two years of his premiership AZ is able to bring attention to the negative impact Giuliani's policy decisions were having on black and minority ethnic communities - a swift turnaround to say little else.

Giuliani’s 1993 campaign focused on a crackdown on “petty” crimes, the sort of on-going language that continues to see people of colour, such as Eric Garner, cruelly choked to death for allegedly selling cigarettes without a tax stamp. Giuliani wanted a crackdown on offenses such as graffitiing, turnstile jumping, cannabis possession and the notorious “squeegee men”. ‘Offenses’ so minor that one questions whether they even deserve the word. As a cornerstone of the hip-hop community, the attack on graffitiing culture would, of course, have an overwhelming effect on BME communities. This would not be the first time a New York Mayor attempted a crackdown on graffiti culture, dating back all the way back to the 1970s when graffitiing culture began to explode, and once again it existed under the pretence of maintaining order, as though somehow the aggressive policing of an act so minor would have a profound impact.

               This racialised form of policing was the backbone of Giuliani’s time as Mayor, set in stone by his approval of Crime Commissioner Bill Bratton, who would bring in sweeping “broken windows” policy reform. “Broken windows” policing has been well-documented by historians and critics in the decades since its introduction as an utter failure, designed to do little more than adversely effect Black and Minority Ethnic Communities, to help facilitate the prison-industrial complex. It’s introduction, alongside Bill Clinton’s grossly destructive “three-strike” criminal policy would spell disaster for young BME men across the United States. Previous misdemeanours, such as possession of small amounts of cannabis, would now stack up with devastating results. Reagan began the “War on Drugs”, but it was Clinton who would cement its legacy. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander highlights that “between 1980 and 2000, the number of people incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails soared from roughly 300,000 to more than 2 million.” Alexander exacerbates the destructiveness of this form of policing when she explains that “marijuana possession – a drug less harmful than tobacco or alcohol – accounted for nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s”. Throughout the United States the disproportionate effect of the “War on Drugs” on BME communities would not lay dormant, and it is no coincidence that hip-hop’s explosion into the public sphere in the 80s and 90s came alongside a corrupt and racist system expanding at a gross rate.

In New York in the mid-to-late 1990s this anger was aimed at none other than one man: Rudy Giuliani. Biggie raps on Everyday Struggle, “I’m seeing body after body and our Mayor Giuliani/Ain’t tryna see no black man turn to John Gotti”; with just a hint of an underlying threat towards New York’s infamous Mayor. Rumour has it that New York’s crime families debated placing a hit on Guiliani, with John Gotti the only one to vote in favour. The lyric seems to reflect Giuliani’s focus on racist predictive policing, catching black men before they inevitably turn into the next John Gotti, where the threat would then turn on Giuliani himself. Even Nas indulged in pure vitriol, referring to Giuliani as the “6-6-6”, whilst Big L fantasises about his crew hanging him on his legendary 7 Minute Freestyle with Jay-Z. Hardcore New York hip-hop crew Screwball would release the bluntest affront to Giuliani. Titled Who Shot Rudy? the song gleefully hypothesises Giuliani’s assassination, and whilst it is little more than fiction, the popular sentiment towards Giuliani in the hip-hop community is abundantly clear.

Giuliani and his brand of police fascism would not only come up against the hip-hop world in verse. On January 14^th, 1999 two officers of the Street Crimes Unit would fire eight shots at an unarmed young black man; thankfully they would miss all eight shots. The officers would claim they were retaliating to shots fired at them, despite no weapons or shell casings other than their own at the crime scene. The young man, whose car was pulled over in Bedford-Stuyvesant, who was acquitted of any crime, and who narrowly escaped with his own life, was none other than Russell Jones aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard. It’s a scene all too often played out in America. A young black man is pulled over in his car, a racist police officer mistakes a cell phone for a gun, and another innocent life is taken by a corrupt racist system. The sort of system that suggests a broken window, or a broken taillight, can be the indicator of a potential murderer, rapist or drug pusher.

A little over two weeks later a young man named Amadou Diallo would fall victim to the Street Crimes Unit. An immigrant from Guinea, he moved to New York in 1996 with his family, where he would peddle videotapes, gloves and socks along the sidewalk of 14^th Street during the day. As harmless as a squeegee peddler, Amadou fit the profile of a ‘dangerous criminal’ Giuliani had marked out six years earlier. He was unarmed and shot outside of his apartment 41 times by four plain clothes officers. They would claim to mistake him for a rape suspect from one year earlier. All four would be acquitted at trial for second-degree murder. There could be no doubting AZ - “we” [the black and minority ethnic community of New York] were most definitely “more fucked up with a Mayor named Giuliani”.