Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Read Online Free Page B
Author: Anna Quindlen
Tags: Usenet
good old boys in small towns down South. They were given to understand that they were better, not because they were smart or capable, but just because they were white men in a world that hated anyone who wasn’t.
And then the world changed. But they didn’t.
A black kid died in Bensonhurst, and someone killed him. You could argue that the whole block did it, although Mayor Dinkins refused to countenance group guilt. But these are places where people keep watch on the street, and as surely as someone is going to give my kids hell if they step off the curb on my block, someone watched the mob and they’ve kept quiet about it all this time. And they always will. This is the code of the boys, wherever they live: Take care of your own. No matter what.
Keeping the code, and the illusion of superiority, becomes harder every day. The economy is in the toilet, buying a house seems forever out of reach, and even when you get a job, you turn around and the guy next to you is black.
Yusuf Hawkins died fast on the pavement. The world of the boys of Bensonhurst, the world they try to protect by any means possible, will waste away and die more slowly. But it will not survive to convince another generation of its own superiority, an illusory arrogance that someone thought worth killing for.
THE GREAT WHITE MYTH
January 15, 1992
In a college classroom a young white man rises and asks about the future. What, he wants to know, can it possibly hold for him when most of the jobs, most of the good positions, most of the spots in professional schools are being given to women and, most especially, to blacks?
The temptation to be short, sarcastic, incredulous in reply is powerful. But you have to remember that kids learn their lessons from adults. That’s what the mother of two black children who were sprayed with white paint in the Bronx said last week about the assailants, teenagers who called her son and daughter “nigger” and vowed they would turn them white. “Can you imagine what they are being taught at home?” she asked.
A nation based on laws, we like to believe that when they are changed, attitudes will change along with them. This is naive. America continues to be a country whose people are obsessed with maintaining some spurious pecking order. At the bottom are African-Americans, taught at age twelve and fourteenthrough the utter humiliation of having their faces cleaned with paint thinner that there are those who think that even becoming white from a bottle is better than not being white at all.
Each generation finds its own reasons to hate. The worried young white men I’ve met on college campuses in the last year have internalized the newest myth of American race relations, and it has made them bitter. It is called affirmative action, a.k.a. the systematic oppression of white men. All good things in life, they’ve learned, from college admission to executive position, are being given to black citizens. The verb is ubiquitous: given.
Never mind that you can walk through the offices of almost any big company and see a sea of white faces. Never mind that with all that has been written about preferential treatment for minority law students, only about 7,500 of the 127,000 students enrolled in law school last year were African-American. Never mind that only 3 percent of the doctors in this country are black.
Never mind that in the good old days preferential treatment was routinely given to brothers and sons of workers in certain lines of work. Perceptions of programs to educate and hire more black citizens as, in part, an antidote to decades of systematic exclusion have been inflated to enormous proportions in the public mind. Like hot-air balloons, they fill up the blue sky of the American landscape with the gaudy stripes of hyperbole. Listen and you will believe that the construction sites, the precinct houses, the investment banks are filled with African-Americans.
Unless you actually visit them.
The opponents of
And then the world changed. But they didn’t.
A black kid died in Bensonhurst, and someone killed him. You could argue that the whole block did it, although Mayor Dinkins refused to countenance group guilt. But these are places where people keep watch on the street, and as surely as someone is going to give my kids hell if they step off the curb on my block, someone watched the mob and they’ve kept quiet about it all this time. And they always will. This is the code of the boys, wherever they live: Take care of your own. No matter what.
Keeping the code, and the illusion of superiority, becomes harder every day. The economy is in the toilet, buying a house seems forever out of reach, and even when you get a job, you turn around and the guy next to you is black.
Yusuf Hawkins died fast on the pavement. The world of the boys of Bensonhurst, the world they try to protect by any means possible, will waste away and die more slowly. But it will not survive to convince another generation of its own superiority, an illusory arrogance that someone thought worth killing for.
THE GREAT WHITE MYTH
January 15, 1992
In a college classroom a young white man rises and asks about the future. What, he wants to know, can it possibly hold for him when most of the jobs, most of the good positions, most of the spots in professional schools are being given to women and, most especially, to blacks?
The temptation to be short, sarcastic, incredulous in reply is powerful. But you have to remember that kids learn their lessons from adults. That’s what the mother of two black children who were sprayed with white paint in the Bronx said last week about the assailants, teenagers who called her son and daughter “nigger” and vowed they would turn them white. “Can you imagine what they are being taught at home?” she asked.
A nation based on laws, we like to believe that when they are changed, attitudes will change along with them. This is naive. America continues to be a country whose people are obsessed with maintaining some spurious pecking order. At the bottom are African-Americans, taught at age twelve and fourteenthrough the utter humiliation of having their faces cleaned with paint thinner that there are those who think that even becoming white from a bottle is better than not being white at all.
Each generation finds its own reasons to hate. The worried young white men I’ve met on college campuses in the last year have internalized the newest myth of American race relations, and it has made them bitter. It is called affirmative action, a.k.a. the systematic oppression of white men. All good things in life, they’ve learned, from college admission to executive position, are being given to black citizens. The verb is ubiquitous: given.
Never mind that you can walk through the offices of almost any big company and see a sea of white faces. Never mind that with all that has been written about preferential treatment for minority law students, only about 7,500 of the 127,000 students enrolled in law school last year were African-American. Never mind that only 3 percent of the doctors in this country are black.
Never mind that in the good old days preferential treatment was routinely given to brothers and sons of workers in certain lines of work. Perceptions of programs to educate and hire more black citizens as, in part, an antidote to decades of systematic exclusion have been inflated to enormous proportions in the public mind. Like hot-air balloons, they fill up the blue sky of the American landscape with the gaudy stripes of hyperbole. Listen and you will believe that the construction sites, the precinct houses, the investment banks are filled with African-Americans.
Unless you actually visit them.
The opponents of
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