A reexamination of race relations in America has been prompted by racial incidents that have garnered considerable coverage in the media in recent months. The essential question is whether these incidents are to be regarded as aberrations, or as indicators of a resurgence of racism in America.
If the former is true, then we can take comfort in the knowledge that, while there are still vestigial strains of racial tolerance in this country, such intolerance is exceptional rather than commonplace. But if the latter is true, we must face the disquieting prospect that race relations in America have taken a decided turn for the worse.
Judging by their words of late, black civil rights leaders have concluded that indeed racism is resurgent. Moreover, they place blame on the Reagan administration for this new racism they perceive.
In the aftermath of the Howard Beach incident, Julian Bond, the former Georgia state senator, went so far as to suggest that Reagan was somehow responsible. "That's not to say Mr. Reagan put the bat into those kids' hands," he told The New York Times.
"But I think it is reasonable to say the administration's hostility toward civil rights has been translated and absorbed by the general public to unjustly harass and intimidate minorities."
Along the same lines, Benjamin Hooks, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, maintained that the president "has created a subliminal message that blacks have gone too far. All this loose talk about welfare cheats and welfare fraud, and a supposition that a grown man can live out his life by drawing a welfare check, has fostered a lot of resentment about things that don't exist," said Hooks.
Between the lines
These comments are revealing. They betray little sympathy for the victims of these racial incidents and their families. And the outrage that should be properly directed at the perpetrators of these racist acts is, instead, directed at the Reagan administration, which in no way advocates or condones such malice.
And so it is that the racial incidents in Charleston, Toledo, and Howard Beach have been exploited for the purposes of some whose interests are not so much to promote racial understanding but to press a not-so-well hidden political agenda. The events in the aftermath of the Howard Beach incident offer ample evidence of this.
When C. Vernon Mason, a lawyer representing one of three black victims in the attack, was questioned at a news conference about whether his priority was to bring the murderer of Michael Griffith to justice or to organize the blacks of New York City, he brashly declared, "This is larger than Michael Griffth. We have an agenda."
The first thing on this agenda was a march on Howard Beach that attracted such fringe elements as gay and lesbian activists, communist organizers, and radical black separatists. So turned off were blacks by this unsavory mix that fewer
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