New York City's Howard Beach and Forsyth County, Georgia are prominent landmarks of 1980s racism. One is tempted to call it the new racism, but such a designation would be misleading. Sadly, this scourge has always been with us.
Still, the events of past weeks are disquieting. Racist mobs, Klan violence - it was assumed we'd put all of that behind us 20 years ago. But recent racial assaults in the North and South are merely the more visible manifestations of a festering problem.
Less grotesque forms of racism, which frequently serve as a breeding ground for violence, abound. Stereotyping exists in almost as many varieties at the ethnic, religious, and racial groups that comprise our society.
In the popular movie Brighton Beach Memoirs, which chronicles the struggles of a Jewish family during the Depression, Mrs. Jerome, mother of the protagonist, objects to the presence of the Murphys across the street.
"We know what they're like," she self-righteously proclaims to her sister, proceeding to discourse at length on the shiftlessness, alcoholism, and barbarism of "those people." To innocents not initiated into the mysteries of prejudice, it must seem a wonder that a nation of drunkards and degenerates could produce some of the finest novelists and poets writing in the English language.
There is no rhyme or reason to bigotry, or even much consistency. According to the mythology of anti-Semitism, for instance, Jews are simultaneously capitalist exploiters and communist agitators. It is further alleged that members of the tribe of Abraham are pushy (going where they're not wanted) and aloof (unwilling to associate with gentiles due to feelings of superiority).
Italians, their detractors maintain, are both criminal overlords and, as ethnic humor would have it, cowards as soldiers.
Discrimination often is the tragic consequence of such beliefs. If "those people" are indeed inferior, we certainly don't want to hire them, patronize their business, rent to them, live next to them, or socialize with them.
Healing the past
Efforts to redress past injustices, premised on race, are another major source of discrimination in our country today. Affirmative action quotas, which have rightly been called reverse racism, amount to nothing less than punishing certain whites for the offenses committed by Caucasians decades or centuries ago, while compensating some blacks for wrongs done to others of their race.
Tolerance of certain types of racial violence is itself a species of racism. The media seems to have developed a double standard when it comes to condemnations of these acts. The Howard Beach attack brought ringing denunciations. When Israel Rosen, a Hassidic Jew, was beaten senseless by a gang of young blacks in a New York subway station this summer and later died, no protests were forthcoming from the guardians of public morality.
Racial hatred and
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