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Racism in the 1980s
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12769 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1987 |
3,907 Words |
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Dinesh D'Souza
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Howard Beach is a white middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, where, as Newsweek puts it, Italian-Americans go "to escape the blacks and Puerto Ricans moving into their old neighborhoods." Recently three black men who wandered into that community were, apparently without cause, assaulted by whites in a pizzeria. One of the blacks, in an attempt to flee, staggered across a highway into the path of an automobile and was killed.
The Incident has inflamed racial tensions in New York and set off at least one retaliatory act of violence by blacks against whites. In a bizarre twist, the racial element of the controversy was broadened when New York Mayor Ed Koch claimed the Howard Beach tragedy was something he expected "in the deep South," provoking one Mississippi Mayor to denounce Koch as a "Jew bastard," giving vent to his own brand of bigotry.
The Beach incident - coming after three decades of strenuous effort to extirpate racism through state action and social pressures - raises difficult questions about how far this society has come in its crusade against prejudice, what outcomes cultural and public policy pressures have generated, and what lessons can be learned for the future.
There is no question that the last few years have seen an upsurge in racial animus toward minorities, especially blacks, in middle-class communities. Harriet Michel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) correctly observes that the Howard Beach incident "is not an isolated one, so finding the culprits is not enough. The attackers felt they had a right to punish Michael Griffin," the lad who was slain.
An even more outrageous example of claiming the "right" to racism was the recent Ku Klux Klan-led demonstration in Cumming, Georgia. The residents of Forsyth Country, obviously proud of having managed to keep blacks out of their community, willingly embarrassed themselves on national television by engaging in violence to maintain their racial homogeneity. The country has perhaps not seen such arrogant exhibitionism since Bull Connor and the early days of the civil rights movement.
Interviews with residents of Howard Beach and other white middle-class communities suggest a rejuvenated rancor toward the claims of minorities - even to the point of rationalizing abominable assaults like the one at Howard Beach. Black leaders see the Reagan administration fomenting the crisis. "There is a steady drumbeat from this administration," remarks Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, "that somehow white males are being mistreated."
There is certainly the risk that right-wing rhetoric can lead to racist reaction. As conservative scholar Richard Weaver once put it, "Ideas have consequences." Civil rights leaders perceive the Reagan administration as arguing that welfare programs encourage laziness, that affirmative action deprives whites of jobs and college admissions, that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, that single-parent mothers in the ghetto rely on the rest of us to take are of their numerous offspring; it is perhaps only natural for them to conclude that the conservative ideology is the framework for horrors like the Howard Beach incident.
Even if this were so, there is an important recognition
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