About a month ago, I invited the candidates up for election in West Orange to denounce the bigotry of one of their colleagues, Justin Goldsman (see here and here). Not one of them did. A few months before that, I had a conversation with West Orange Councilman Joe Krakoviak about the Mt Laurel inclusionary housing doctrine. The conversation touched on the prevalence of racism in the housing market. Krakoviak told me with great confidence that racism was a thing of the past.

Now, West Orange is in the midst of a sordid but utterly predictable scandal: both of the African American candidates in the election have been on the receiving end of racist comments designed to drive them, by intimidation, from the electoral field. Now, everybody is convinced that racism is a problem. And of course now everybody is doing their best to out-do their rivals in voicing their supposed abhorrence for racism, and their abhorrence of the failure to take a stand against it. But where were they a month ago?

I feel a certain measure of sympathy for the victims, but it only goes so far. They were as silent as everyone else. They’re all learning, as if for the first time, what I learned through hard experience fifty years ago when my family first moved to West Orange. I was, during the 70s and 80s (when I grew up in West Orange), the “Nigger” of the St Cloud district of town.

I wasn’t called a “nigger” all those years because I’m African American. I was called one because there were no African Americans in the St Cloud district, and my skin was dark enough to suffice. There weren’t any African American students or teachers in St Cloud Elementary School during the years I went there, either–1974-1981. There weren’t any because African Americans were deliberately kept out of the district. I know they were kept out because I heard the conversations of the people around me, explicitly intent on keeping them out. The people in question–not my own family but the people around us–sprinkled their speech liberally with the n-word, and still live in West Orange, blocks from where I grew up, and blocks from where my family still lives. That’s how racist the town was–and how racist it is. Old habits die hard.

St Cloud School, West Orange, New Jersey. Too bad the problems of the present were produced by the children of yesterday.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that racial problems are magically resolved by the sheer passage of time. West Orange is a perfect illustration of the old French adage: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. “The more that things change, the more they stay the same.” They stay that way when people are too cowardly and too volitionally stupid to figure out that justice delayed is justice denied, and that taking a stand is not something that can be outsourced to someone else.

That’s what’s happened here. This same asshole town that could have taken a stand last year when Justin Goldsman ran for office, failed to do so in 2025, and then failed again this year. Now, these same people who regard Justin Goldsman as a respected colleague want us to believe in their anti-racist bona fides. There’s no reason to do so. It was Justin Goldsman who started the trend which has led us where we now are. West Orange’s leadership could have made clear from the outset that they rejected the trend. Instead, they looked right at it and shook hands with it. Now they profess to be surprised that the leopard-like trend has bitten their faces off. That’s what trends like this will do.

I don’t mean that the candidates themselves are racists. I mean that they lack the courage, integrity, and moral strength to stand on principle when circumstances demand it. “This is not who we really are.” “West Orange deserves better.” Fucking please. Stop flattering yourselves. It is who are you, and you don’t deserve better. A town as saturated in racism and denial as West Orange can’t get off as easily as the invocation of cheap nostrums that re-affirm its self-image. It has to shatter its self-image and start over. It has to admit that the problem is there and demands solution.

It’s in poor taste, but I’ll say it anyway: I told you so, you fucking fools. I gave you a chance to take a stand. You either ghosted me, or you devised a million excuses to evade the issue and run away. Now, the issue has come to haunt you like the return of the repressed. I’m glad it has: the victims didn’t deserve the ill-treatment, but the event couldn’t have happened to a more deserving town. Bask in your racist glory, West Orange. You’ve earned it.