Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0)

by Anna Quindlen

  I’ve walked many times down blocks like the one on which my father grew up. I’ve been a poverty tourist with a notebook, but I never felt ashamed of it until now.

  On that little street were the ghosts of the people who brought me into being and the flesh-and-blood kids who will be my children’s companions in the twenty-first century. You could tell by their eyes that they couldn’t figure out why I was there. They were accustomed to being ignored, even by the people who had once populated their rooms. And as long as that continues, our cities will burst and burn, burst and burn, over and over again.

  A CHANGING WORLD

  May 20, 1990

  These are dark days for the boys of Bensonhurst. Their world is fading as fast as the summer sun over the city some of their fathers and grandfathers helped build. They are angry the way people are angry when they see a sure thing slipping through their fingers.

  Life was easier a generation ago. They graduated from high school, or maybe they didn’t. It didn’t really matter, because someone from the family or the neighborhood could get them into the union or the civil service, could find them a job working construction or picking up trash.

  A couple of blocks away would be the girl pretty, with hair and eyes as dark as the subway tunnels, and then there would be the wedding, and later the kids. She would serve dinner on a tray table in front of the television if the game was on, or keep it warm if the boys wanted to get together to play a little ball. She did shirts just right. Looking good was the thing when the day’s grime was scrubbed away.

  That has not changed. Looking good is still important. Keith Mondello never had a hair out of place during his trial. Just looking at him you could hear the blow dryer going. Joey Fama was found guilty of murder. Keith Mondello beat the big charges but was convicted of being part of a riot. When the riot was over, a black kid named Yusuf Hawkins was dead on the Bensonhurst sidewalk. They said afterward that it ruined the Feast of Santa Rosalia.

  The people of Bensonhurst will tell you the boys were protecting the neighborhood. Common sense will tell you that it doesn’t take forty guys with baseball bats to protect a city street from four teenagers looking to buy a used car. It doesn’t take a gun.

  Maybe what they were after wasn’t Yusuf Hawkins at all but everything he represented. The lives the boys of Bensonhurst were banking on are as dead as Drexel Burnham Lambert, and for some of the same reasons. They liked to think they were tops in their neighborhood, and their neighborhood was tops in the city, and the city was the greatest in America, and America was the leader of the world.

  All ashes.

  America limps along, a superpower that, like a star high-school athlete grown middle-aged, ate too much but didn’t exercise. It carries a paunch of second-rateness.

  The girls that were once compliant talk back. They go out to work, and some of them even like it. The jobs aren’t there anymore. The boys don’t like to talk of slow housing starts or municipal cutbacks. They talk of how the jobs were all given away to blacks and Hispanics. Last week in Bensonhurst one of the delis put a picture of a watermelon in the window.

  While the trial was going on, a study was released showing that, after blacks and Hispanics, Italian kids are most likely to drop out of school in New York. This came as a surprise to academia, but not to Bensonhurst. The kids who go to college move away, from the neighborhood and from their families, and that’s no good.

  When you say these things people will say you are anti-Italian, but ethnicity is beside the point. The boys of Bensonhurst have cousins all over America, from Irish-American boys in parts of Boston to 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 fourteen through 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 affirmative action programs say they are opposing the rank unfairness of preferential treatment. But there was no great hue and cry when colleges were candid about wanting to have geographic diversity, perhaps giving the kid from Montana an edge. There has been no national outcry when legacy applicants whose transcripts were supplemented by Dad’s alumnus status—and cash contributions to the college—were admitted over more qualified comers. We somehow discovered that life was not fair only when the beneficiaries happened to be black.

  And so the chasm widens. The old myth was the black American incapable of prosperity. It was common knowledge that w
elfare was purely a benefits program for blacks; it was common knowledge although it was false. The percentage of whites on public assistance is almost identical with the percentage of blacks.

  The new myth is that the world is full of black Americans prospering unfairly at white expense, and anecdotal evidence abounds. The stories about the incompetent black co-worker always leave out two things: the incompetent white co-workers and the talented black ones. They also leave out the tendency of so many managers to hire those who seem most like themselves when young.

  “It seems like if you’re a white male you don’t have a chance,” said another young man on a campus where a scant 5 percent of his classmates were black. What the kid really means is that he no longer has the edge, that the rules of a system that may have served his father well have changed. It is one of those good-old-days constructs to believe it was a system based purely on merit, but we know that’s not true. It is a system that once favored him, and others like him. Now sometimes—just sometimes—it favors someone different.

  TYSON IS NOT MAGIC

  February Q, 1992

  Consider the case of two champions. Both are the best at what they do; both are black. And both are considered heroes to kids in communities that sorely lack them. Magic Johnson is the one who has taught young men to use condoms. Mike Tyson is the one who has taught them to use women.

  Mr. Tyson is on trial in Indianapolis, charged with raping a contestant in a black beauty pageant. People line up to shake his hand as he enters the courtroom, his atomic torso packed into a fine suit. He gets millions of dollars for doing within the perimeter of a ring what in the real world brings you an assault charge. This must be confusing.

  People say his eighteen-year-old accuser is a gold digger, that a man so sought after by women need not force anyone to submit to him. Such a remark not only confuses sex and rape but ignores the central fact of Tyson’s life: his profession is aggression. His trial is, inexplicably, being covered in the sports sections of many papers, as though it were just another bout. Perhaps that is how he sees it. Perhaps that is how he saw the night in question: I got her on the ropes now.

  The Tyson trial brings to mind the prosecution of William Kennedy Smith, who was acquitted of rape in Palm Beach. There is the same bedrock suggestion that a woman who goes to a private spot with a man in the early morning hours should know that sexual contact is inevitable and any story of force incredible.

  Mr. Smith’s lawyer, Roy Black, has predicted that Mr. Tyson will be acquitted and has said he would have liked to defend him. (At a bar-association luncheon he also added that Mr. Smith’s testimony describing two sexual encounters within a half hour had “helped him with dates,” illustrating that an attorney must have many skills, but having good taste need not be among them.) Part of the Smith defense was that his behavior was perhaps caddish but not criminal. Mr. Tyson’s lawyers have taken this even further. They suggest that their client is such a notorious lech that any woman who goes near him knows the risks.

  I’ve got only eight hundred words, so I can’t recount all reported Tyson maulings. There was the woman from Queens who said he grabbed and propositioned her in a nightclub, the ex-wife who said he beat her, and the lawyer who was reportedly told during a deposition exactly what he wanted to do to her, complete with hand gestures.

  At the Miss Black America event at which Mr. Tyson met the alleged victim, one contestant said Mr. Tyson was like “an octopus,” and the organizer, J. Morris Anderson, became famous overnight for characterizing Mr. Tyson as “a serial buttocks fondler.” But Mr. Anderson did not pursue a lawsuit against the fighter, saying he had “second thoughts about participating in the crucifixion of a black role model.”

  Why in the world should Mike Tyson, a man who apparently can’t pass a ladies’ room without grabbing the doorknob, be a role model? Whether he raped anybody or not, it’s clear he has disrespected black women from one end of this country to the other, as though they were hamburger and he were hungry. The cheerleader-cum-Sunday-school-teacher who says he raped her, so young that she refers to the way she felt afterward as “yucky,” said she pleaded with him that she had a real future, that she was going to college. She says Mr. Tyson replied, “So, we have a baby,” and then raped her without using a condom.

  In that alleged exchange you have the choices in the lives of thousands of poor kids in this country. College. Baby. Condom. Future. The role model is supposed to be the person who points you toward the right one.

  Every day those kids can watch Mike Tyson stride into the courtroom on the evening news, and they can see the middleaged white women touch his hand, as though he were Wayne Newton or Elvis come back from the dead. And the message of Magic, the message that you have to make something of yourself, be responsible, face your mistakes, be a gentleman, will fade. The kids in poor neighborhoods, like the one in Brooklyn where Mike Tyson was once a street punk, have already learned from the drug dealer on the corner what Mr. Tyson has to teach: that if you’re rich and dress well, you can do what you want. At least until you go to jail. Or until you’re washed up. Here is the difference: Magic will never be washed up. In all the ways that truly matter, Mike Tyson already is.

  TO DEFRAY EXPENSES

  March 1, 1992

  They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses.

  The Lost Boys made news. The television crews and the newspaper reporters went to that Neverland called East New York to take note of the fact that one of them, aged fifteen, had allegedly shot and killed two others in a high school hallway in what classmates called a “beef.” This means a disagreement.

  It could have been Bushwick or the South Bronx or any of the other New York neighborhoods that are shorthand for going nowhere. It could have been Chicago or L.A. or any one of dozens of other cities. The Lost Boys are everywhere. Most especially in prison. By then, unlike the children Peter Pan described, they have grown up.

  We reporters won’t stay long. The Lost Boys claim public attention for only a short time, and many of us are loath to walk in their neighborhoods, which makes us no different from the people who live in them. The mayor was at the high school the day of the killings. He came to tell the students that they, too, could build a future. For many of them, the future is that short period of time between today and the moment when they shoot or get shot.

  Homicide is the leading cause of death for black teenagers in America.

  There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger. Kids, particularly kids who live amid crack houses and abandoned buildings, have a right to think of their school as a safe haven. But it’s important to remember that a kid can get himself a box cutter and wait outside until the last bell rings. With a metal detector, you can keep the homicide out of the hallways. Perhaps with something more, you can keep the homicide out of the heart.

  “These boys die like it’s nothing,” said Angela Burton, whose boyfriend was one of the two killed in East New York.

  The problem is that when we look into this abyss, it goes so deep that we get dizzy and pull back from the edge. Teenage mothers. Child abuse. Crowded schools. Homes without fathers. Projects lousy with drugs, vermin, crime. And, always, the smell of urine in the elevator. I have never been in a project that hasn’t had that odor, and I have never smelled it without wondering, If your home smells like a bathroom, what does that tell you about yourself?

  One of the ways to motivate kids is to say that if you do this bad thing now, you won’t be able to do this good thing tomorrow. That doesn’t work with the Lost Boys. They stopped believing in tomorrow a long time ago. The impulse control of an adolescent, the conviction that sooner or later you’ll end up dead or in jail anyhow, and a handgun you can buy on the corner easier than getting yourse
lf a pair of new Nikes: the end result is preordained.

  “If you don’t got a gun, you got to get one,” said one teenager hanging with his friends at the corner of East New York and Pennsylvania Avenues.

  If news is sometimes defined as aberration, as Man Bites Dog, it’s the successes we should be rushing out to cover in these neighborhoods, the kids who graduate, who get jobs, who stay clean. Dr. Alwyn Cohall, a pediatrician who runs four school-based clinics in New York, remembers the day he was giving one of those kids a college physical, which is the happiest thing he ever does, when from outside he heard the sound. Pow. Pow. One moment he was filling out the forms for a future, the next giving CPR to another teenager with a gunshot wound blossoming in his chest. The kid died on the cement.

  “He never even made the papers next day,” the doctor recalled.

  The story in East New York will likely end with the funerals. A fifteen-year-old killer is not that unusual; many city emergency rooms provide coloring books on gun safety. Dr. Cohall says that when the students at his schools come back after the long hot summer, they are routinely asked by the clinic staff how many of their friends were shot over vacation. The good doctor knows that it is possible to reclaim some of the Lost Boys, but it requires money, dedication, and, above all, the will to do it. Or we can continue to let them go. To defray expenses.

  ACROSS THE DIVIDE

  May 3, 1992

  They say that one way the defense attorneys won the case was by playing that videotape over and over, freezing the frames so that after a while it was no more than a random collection of points of light, highlighting the movements of the suspect instead of the batons of the police.

  But no matter how many times I watch the four police officers beat up Rodney King, it still looks indefensible to me, and to the eight-year-old, too. Three times he watched the videotape and three times he brought his arms over his head in a double arch, as though to ward off baton blows. And finally he said, “Are they really allowed to do that?” It broke my heart, but it could have been worse. I pictured a mother and an eight-year-old watching the same clip, both of them black, the son asking the same question the mother forced to reply, “Yes, baby, they are.” The lawyers told the jurors that they had to pay attention to what happened before the videotape started rolling. Here’s what came before: Ronald Reagan, Willie Horton, rotten schools, no jobs, falling plaster, broken boilers, David Duke. Years and years of rage and racism, measured now in angry words and broken glass.