Apartheid. USA 1988

January 7, 1987:

‘Howard Beach,’ wrote Jack Beatty, senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine on the Op-Ed-page of the Times, ‘springs from the primal urban nightmare - having your car break down in the “wrong” neighborhood. Every American city has “wrong” neighborhoods: places where a white can't go, places where a black can't go.’ Racial division, all by

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itself, breeds prejudice. And so we would expect to find that the whites charged with the racial assault in Howard Beach had had no mollifying contacts with Blacks. In another passage, collegue Beatty referred to Howard Beach residents shouting to Mayor Koch, ‘go back to the synagogue.’ ‘Biologists know how deeply rooted the territorial instinct is,’ he continued. Territorial instinct is part of nature and also part of us. It is especially tenacious in those of us who make a virtue of our rootedness - who can't afford to move out, away, on, or up. Howard Beach showed further that American liberals reposed too much faith in the plasticity of human nature. South African born Jon Lester's relationship with black Ernestine Washington did not immunize him against murderous tribal emotions. ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’ Applied to Howard Beach, Immanuel Kant's aphorism lights up a region of being whose hurts politics can inflame but not heal.

Middletown, New York has a population of 23 000 and is 8 percent black. There are no blacks among the town's 51 police officers. No one is sure exactly what happened last December at the movies. But at some point, Jimmy Lee Bruce jr and his friends became boisterous and were escorted out of the theatre by two off-duty police officers. Bruce (20), and black, became involved in a struggle with one of the. officers, Harold Simpson (40), who held the young man in a choke-hold, even as he was weakening and pleading that he gave up. New York State Police are trained to use a choke-hold - where the arms are placed around the neck, cutting off the flow of oxygen to the brain - only as an alternative to using a deadly weapon. But NY police officers are also trained to use the choke-hold only if a life is in danger. Less than one hour after the scuffle, Jimmy Bruce was dead of asphyxiation caused by compression on the neck, according to a preliminary autopsy report.^17.

17. The New York Times, from a report by Neil A Lewis