Apartheid. USA 1988

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March 29, 1987:

Despite some significant progress in race relations, most New Yorkers say important divisions between blacks and whites are now as wide or wider than they were a decade ago. Blacks and whites alike speak of a troubling paradox. They do see some improvements in race relations, such as growing economic and educational opportunities for some blacks and increasing integration in some work places. But at the same time they find that any real movement toward achieving equality has stalled and that in some critical ways the overall racial climate has worsened. ‘The kinds of things that were being dealt with covertly are being dealt with overtly, and, unfortunately, with violence,’ said Charlotte M McPherson, a black professor at the College of Staten Island. ‘And I don't see anyone coming up with a rational solution. They are fixing a very deep surgical problem with Band-Aids.’

Tom McNiff, a white student at St John's University in Queens, and editor of the College newspaper put the problem as follows. ‘There is definitely a larger problem. It's a quiet problem, a quiet kind of racism. It's not like you see marches or Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings. It's more racial yokes and slurs between members of the same race. The battle hasn't been fought and won.’

From a New York Times poll on race relations it became clear that blacks and whites who concur on the general condition of race relations disagree on the cause. Blacks say discrimination has not only continued but also in some ways has become more overt in the recent past. Many whites, including some who marched in the civil rights movement in the 1960's, say violent crime by blacks has made them more fearful and less politically sympathetic. Much of the hostility may have existed all along, both average New Yorkers and race relations experts say, but they find people are now more inclined to act on it. ‘What we are seeing,’ said David J Garrow, a civil rights scholar and political scientist at

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the City University of New York,’ is the reappearance of latent racism.’

In a city like New York, famous for its multitude of distinct ethnic enclaves, some of them inviolable for generations, the public school system traditionally provided a place where children could meet and at times surmount neighborhood barriers. But in the last generation, the system has become more segregated, falling from 59.5 percent white in 1962 to 22 percent today. ‘The city as a whole is half-white,’ wrote reporter Samuel Freedman in the today's Times. Dr Gerald Deas (55), a black doctor in Hollis, Queens said, ‘I feel sorry for the white kids and the black kids today. The racial enclaves are set in place because people can't afford to move. The whites are pulling out of the schools. Now you don't get the interchange, and that's how racial trouble gets started.’^73.

73. The New York Times, from a report by Samuel G Freedman