Conference turris::womannotes-v2

763.0. "On racial prejudice" by WMOIS::B_REINKE (If you are a dreamer, come in..) Fri Aug 25 1989 22:35

    This article was sent to me by a woman friend of mine
    who suggested that it would be of interest to the
    womannotes community
    
    ________________________________________________________________
    
    
    			WILLIE HORTON AND ME

					BY ANTHONY WALTON


I am a black man.  I am a young black man, born, let's say, 
between Brown v. Board of Education and the murders of Schwerner, 
Chaney and Goodman.  Or, in the years that followed the murder of 
Emmett Till, but before the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I am one of the young black Americans Dr. King sang of in his 
"I Have a Dream" speech:  I have a dream that...the sons of former 
slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit 
down together at the table of brotherhood...that my four little 
children will one day live in a nation where they will not be 
judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their 
character...I have a dream today!"

Though I have a living memory of Dr. King, I don't remember that 
speech.  I do remember my parents, relatives, teachers and 
professors endlessly recounting it, exhorting me to live up to 
the dream, to pick up the ball of freedom, as it were, and run 
with it, because one day, I was assured, we would look up and the 
dream would be reality.

I like to think I lived up to my part of the bargain.  I stayed 
in school and remained home many nights when I didn't have to in 
the interest of "staying out of trouble."  I endured a lonely 
Catholic school education because public school wasn't good 
enough.  At Notre Dame and Brown, I endured further isolation, 
and burned the midnight oil, as Dr. King had urged.

I am sure that I represent one of the best efforts that 
Americans, black Americans particularly, have made to live up to 
Dr. King's dream.  I have a white education, a white accent, I 
conform to white middle-class standards in virtually every choice, 
from preferring Brooks Brothers oxford cloth to religiously 
clutching my gold cards as the tickets to the good life.  I'm not 
really complaining about any of that.  The world, even the white
world, has been, if not good, then acceptable to me.  But as I 
get older, I feel the world closing in.  I feel that I failed to 
notice something, or that I've been deceived.  I couldn't put my 
finger on it until I met Willie Horton.

George Bush and his henchmen could not have invented Willie 
Horton.  Horton, with his coal-black skin; huge unkempt Afro, and 
a glare that would have given Bull Connor or Lester Maddox 
serious pause, had committed a brutal murder in 1974 and been 
sentenced to life in prison.  Then, granted a weekend furlough 
from prison, had viciously raped a white woman in front of her 
fiance, who was also attacked.

Willie Horton was the perfect symbol of what happened to innocent 
whites when liberals(read Democrats) were on the watch, at least 
in the gospel according to post-Goldwater Republicans.  Horton 
himself, in just a fuzzy mug shot, gave even the stoutest, most 
open, liberal heart a shiver.  Even me.  I thought of all the 
late nights I had ridden in terror on the F and A trains, while 
living in New York City.  I thought Willie Horton must be what 
the wolf packs I had often heard about, but never seen, must look 
like.  I said to myself, "something has got to be done about 
these niggers."

Then, one night, a temporary doorman at my Greenwich Village high
-rise refused to let me pass.  And it occured to me that it had 
taken the regular doormen, white and Hispanic, months to adjust 
to my coming and going.  Then a friend's landlord in Brooklyn 
asked if I was living in his apartment.  We had been working on a 
screenplay under deadline and I was there several days in a row.  
The landlord said she didn't mind, but the neighbors... Then one 
day, I was late for the Metroliner, heading for Harvard and a 
weekend with several yuppie, buppie and guppie friends.  I stood, 
in blazer and khakis, in front of the New York University Law 
School for 30 minutes, unable to get a cab.

Soaking wet, I gave up on the Metroliner and trudged home.  As I 
cleaned up, I looked in the mirror.  Wet, my military haircut 
looked slightly unkempt.  My eyes were red from the water and 
stress.  I couldn't help thinking, "If Willie got a haircut and 
cooled out..." If Willie Horton would become just a little middle
-class, he would look like me.

For young blacks of my sociological cohort, racism was often an 
abstract thing, ancient history, at worst a stone against which 
to whet our combat skills as we went winging through the world 
proving our superiority.  We were the children of the dream.  
Incidents in my childhood and adolescence were steadfastly, often 
laughingly, overcome by a combination of the fresh euphoria of 
the civil rights movement and the exhortations and Christian 
piety of my mother.  Now, in retrospect, I can see that racism 
has always been with me, even when I was shielded by love or 
money, or when I chose not to see it.  But I saw it in the face 
of Willie Horton, and I can't ignore it, because it is my face.

Willie Horton has taught me the continuing need for a skill 
W.E.B. DuBois outlined and perfected 100 years ago: living with 
the veil.  I am recognizing my veil of double consciousness, my 
American self and my black self.  I must battle, like all humans, 
to see myself.  I must also battle, because I am black, to see 
myself as others see me; increasingly my life, literally, depends 
upon it.  I might meet Bernhard Goetz on the subway; my car might 
break down in Howard Beach; the armed security guard might 
mistake me for a burglar in the lobby of my building.  And they 
won't see a mild-mannered English major trying to get home.  They 
will see Willie Horton.

My father was born in a tar-paper, tin-roof shack on a cotton 
plantation near Holly Springs, Miss.  His father was a 
sharecropper.  His father had been a slave.  My father came north, 
and by dint of a ferocity I still find frightening, carved an 
economic space for himself that became a launch pad to the Ivy 
League, to art school, to professional school, for his children.

As the song by John Cougar Mellencamp says it, "Ain't that 
America..." But a closer look reveals that each of my father's 
children is in some way dangerously disgruntled, perhaps 
irrevocably alienated from the country, their country, that 25 
years ago held so much promise.  And the friends of my father's 
children, the children of the dream Dr. King died to preserve, a 
collection of young people ranging from investment bankers to 
sidemen for Miles Davis, are, to a man and woman, actively 
unsatisfied.

DuBois, in "The Souls of Black Folks," posed a question perhaps 
more painful today that in 1903: "Training for life teaches 
living, but what training for the profitable living together of 
black men and white?"

I think we, the children of the dream, often feel as if we are 
holding 30-year bonds that have matured and are suddenly 
worthless.  There is a feeling, spoken and unspoken, of having 
been suckered.

This distaste is festering into bitterness.  I know that I 
disregarded jeering and oppositon from young blacks in 
adolescence as I led a "square," even dreary life predicated on a 
coming harvest of keeping-one's-nose-clean.  And know I see that 
I am often treated the same as a thug, that no amount of 
conformity, willing or unwilling, will make me the fabled 
American individual.  I think it has something to do with Willie 
Horton.

Black youth culture is increasingly an expresion of alienation 
and disgust with any mainstream (or so-called white) values.  Or 
notions.  Cameo haircuts, rap music, outsize jewelry are merely 
symptoms of attitudes that are probably beyond changing.  My 
black Ivy League friends and myself are manifesting attitudes 
infinitely more contemptuous and insidious; I don't know of one 
who is doing much more on the subject of Dr. King's dream than 
cynically biding his or her time, waiting for some as-yet-
unidentified apocalypse that will enable us to slay the white 
dragon, even as we work for it, live next to it and sleep with it.

Our dissatisfaction is leading us to despise the white dragon 
instead of the dragon of racism, but how can we do otherwise when 
everywhere we look, we see Willie Horton?

And we must acknowledge progress.  Even in our darkest, most 
paranoid moments we can acknowledge white friends and lovers.  I 
wouldn't have survived the series of white institutions that has 
been my conscious life without them.  But is is hard to 
acknowledge any progress, because whites like to use the smallest 
increment of change to deny what we see as the totality.  And, 
even in the most perfect and loving interracial relationships, 
racism waits like a cancer, ready to wake and consume the 
relationships at any, even the most innocuous, time.  My best 
friend, white and Jewish, will never understand why I was ready 
to start World War III over perceived slights at an American 
Express office.  In my darker moments, I suspect he is a bit afraid 
of me now.  In my darkest moments, I wonder if even he sees 
Willie Horton.

Some of you are by now, sincerely or cynically, asking yourselves, 
"But what does he want?"  A friend of mine says that the 
complaints of today's young blacks are indeed different from 
those of generations ago because it is very difficult to 
determine whether this alienation is a clarion call for the next 
phase of the civil rights movement or merely the whining of 
spoiled and corrupted minority elites who could be placated by a 
larger share in the fruits of a corrupt and exploitative system 
that would continue to enslave the majority of their brothers and 
sisters.

I don't think there is any answer to that question.  I also think 
that the very fact it can be asked points to the unique character 
of the American race question, and the unhealable breach that 
manifests itself as a result in our culture and society.  I don't 
think, for good or bad, that in any other ethnic group the fate of 
an individual is so inextricably bound to that of the group, and 
vice-versa.  To use the symbol and metaphor of Willie Horton in 
another way, I do not think that the lives and choices of young white 
males are impacted by the existence of neo-Nazi skinheads, 
murdering Klansmen or the ordinary thugs of Howard Beach.  I also, 
to put it plainly, do not recall any young black man, even those 
who deal drugs in such places, entering a playground and spraying 
bullets at innocent schoolchildren as happened in Stockton, Calif.  
It is not my intention to place value considerations on any of 
these events; I want to point out that in this society it seems 
legitimate, from the loftiest corridors of power to the streets 
of New York, to imply that one black man is them all.

And I want to be extraordinarily careful not to demonize Willie 
Horton.  He should not be a symbol or scapegoat for our sins; he 
is a tragically troubled man - troubled like thousands of others, 
black and white - who was unwittingly used by a President to 
further division and misunderstanding.  If anything, Horton is a 
particularly precise example of the willingness of those in power 
to pit us against one another.  One lately fashionable statement, 
about to slide from truth to truism, is that blacks have the most 
to fear from lawless blacks.  Any clear-eyed perusal of crime 
statistics will prove this.  But what does it avail if the media, 
if the President, use this ongoing tragedy merely to antagonize 
and further separate Americans?

I think that what I am finally angry about is my realization of a 
certain hollowness at the center of American life.  Earlier, I 
mentioned the sense of having undergone a hoax.  That hoax, as I 
now see it, is that the American community is putatively built 
upon the fundamentals of liberty and justice for all, that it is 
to be expected that the freedom to compete will result in winners 
and losers, and that the goal of society is to insure fairness of 
opporunity.  In light of the events of recent years, I begin to 
see that we are, competing or not, winners or not, irrevocably 
chained together, black and white, rich and poor.  New York City 
is a glaring microcosm of this interrelatedness, which can be 
thought of as either a web of fear ensnaring and enslaving us, or 
as a net of mutuality that strengthens us all.

As events like the Central Park rape illustrate, the world is 
becoming ever smaller, and it is increasingly difficult to 
consign social problems to realms outside our personal arenas of 
concern.  I see the connection between Willie Horton and me, 
because it affects my own liberty.  It was not always an obvious 
connection.

Another quote from Dr. King brings the issue into focus."...most 
of the gains...were obtained at bargain rates.  The desegregation 
of public facilities cost nothing; neither did the election and 
appointment of a few blacks to public officials...." To move to 
the next level of progress, we must face the fact that there are 
going to be costs, especially economic costs.  To hire two black 
firefighters means two white firefighters won't be hired, and 
this is no easy reality.  Racism is ultimately based on power and 
greed, the twin demons of most human frailties.  These demons 
cannot be scapegoated, as the saga of Willie Horton proves.  They 
are more like the Hydra, and will haunt our dreams, waking and 
other, regardless.

    I was wrong in stating that this came from this weekend's Globe. I
    know  I saw it in the magazine section of a newspaper, and my best
    guess  now  is  the  "New York Times Magazine". Probably either 27
    Aug. or 20 Aug., 1989.

--David

    Thanks David, The woman who sent it to me didn't include the source.
    I am normally quite careful to give proper credit to a published
    article and I appreciate your giving it here.
    
    Bonnie

    Thanks Bonnie.
    
    Kate
    
    

It was the 20-Aug issue of the New York Times magazine.  I knew I had
seen it, but couldn't remember where.

			Steve