Apartheid. USA 1988

September 12, 1987:

Robert Williams, 16 years old and black was distributing with another black youth of seventeen, Sears Roebuck advertising fliers to homes in the largely white neighborhood of Ozon Pak in Queens. At about 2:30 p.m. a group of 5 to 6 white teenagers walked past the two black youths and threw a small piece of wire, possibly from a coat hanger in Robert's direction. The black boy called out, ‘If you were in my territory, you wouldn't have done that.’ Words were exchanged, but no racial epithets, and the whites walked on. Robert's companion, who was on the other side of the street during the incident joined Williams, but minutes later the whites returned, four of them, wielding baseball bats. Robert asked, ‘What are you going to do, hit me with the bat?’

At the corner of 108 Street, the blacks came across their boss, another black man identified only as ‘Earl’. Earl was driving a van and when he was told of what happened, he told Robert Williams to get into the car. The whites walked up to the van and told Earl and the other youth, ‘We don't

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have a problem with you, it is that wise guy we want.’ When Williams was stepping out of the van again, the white youth told him, ‘You are a wise guy,’ and when Robert responded the white boy swung the bat striking Robert Williams on the head before fleeing on foot with the other whites. He suffered a skull fracture and a broken tooth but was in stable condition at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Robert's aunt and legal guardian, Gwendolyn Bady interviewed by the Times later, responded, ‘I don't know why they're making such a big deal over whether it was racial or not. My feeling is that my child is in the hospital with a fractured skull and he didn't do anything to anybody.’^141.

‘When I taught at the University of New Mexico,’ wrote professor of English, Morris Freedman on the Op-Ed page of the Times, ‘I got to know a Navajo (Indian) student, a pleasant and intelligent young man who couldn't wait to get back to the reservation. The only reason that he submitted himself to the white man's tribal ritual of freshman English, he told me, was to insure that his family got the subsidy of food and clothing the Government guaranteed for his first year of College. Farthest from his mind was the notion that college was a way into a fuller life or that his tribe might need his academic expertise.’

Professor Freedman then proceeded to examine the question why Americans continuously imposed majority values on minority members. We like to believe we no longer have to homogenize our pluralistic nation to provide opportunity for everyone. We openly celebrate group differences. It is no handicap in most walks of life to have a tawny or a dark pigmentation, a ‘foreign’ name or a foreign speech pattern. But we have not given up subtler devices to define and on occasion limit minorities, to impose majority values on them. We discriminate perversely by extolling traits as desirable in some way, even lovable. We fail to see that philo-

141. The New York Times, from a report by Todd S Purdum

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Semitism, to cite one example, can be just another way of separating out the Jew from the mainstream.

For all of the programmed goodwill toward Hispanic and black students at high-toned campuses, professors and peers regard them as almost bizarrely unique: traditionally non-academic minorities in anciently superior academic contexts. As Dr Johnson put the paradox in an earlier age: ‘Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ Minority students at Ivy League campuses are like women in pulpits. Black young men and women have repeatedly complained that they are looked upon as forms of exotic, even alien, life. They have to play double roles - themselves as well as imitations of their white fellows.

All youngsters find their adolescent years traumatic as they seek a comfortable sense of self on the way into adulthood. We compound the trauma for minority youngsters when we impose on them values and goals that they have not absorbed, that they themselves might not even sense. More even than their families perhaps, we, white society, want outstanding minority students to go to our best campuses. We do not want minority students to fail or succeed on their own terms, according to their own values. We reject those terms and values, which inevitably reflect the constricting effects of their culture of poverty. We will not patiently wait for that culture to develop ideals that reflect the expansive potential of our larger American society. We virtually demand that minority youngsters take on burdens and achieve results that we think they should whether or not the students or adults are socially and temperamentally ready to do so, or we are genuinely ready to help them. No minority person can comfortably survive in the majority world until he attains that dignity and strength of independent, individual identity that members of the majority enjoy. Most of us expect to be taken for what we are in ourselves and not for what we may seem to lack or to possess through our ties to a group. No doubt, my Navajo student, had he got his degree, would have been an asset to his people. He might

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have enjoyed a more affluent life-style. That was my distressed sense of the matter. He was oblivious to pressures to remain in college. But that was his decision, wasn't it, and he certainly did not become so starkly and so early the central figure of a private and social tragedy.^142.

142. Professor Freedman referred to tragic deaths of minority honor students from prestigious universities