Best Intentions
Anson, Robert Sam
T n June 1985, Edmund Perry was the 1 academic star of 114th Street in Harlem. He had just graduated from Exeter Academy and was due to attend Stanford, on a full scholarship, in the fall. On the...
...He saved that for Exeter, where everybody thought it was legitimate black rage...
...Intrigued by the incident, he set out to discover what really happened...
...1130 17th St., NW Washington, D.C...
...Wonderfully disciplined, Anson does not mar his story with pop-psychology, pseudo-sociology, or much commentary of any sort, though he gives his sources ample room to ventilate their commonsense conclusions...
...It was she who got him off to church every week, who enrolled him in special programs in school, who got him into Fresh Air Fund summer camps, and who pushed him to succeed in school...
...Being at Exeter, seeming so educated, I thought he was from some nice East Side neighborhood," a fellow student told Anson...
...In Harlem, the stereotype Eddie cultivated led him to drugs and crime...
...Distribution Center Department A 950 North Shore Drive Lake Bluff, Ill...
...It screeched with the anti-white, anti-American, antiassimilationist rhetoric of the black power movement at its angriest...
...Washington, D.C...
...Robert Sam Anson, a former Time reporter and author of such books as McGovern: A Biography and Exile: the Unquiet Oblivion of Richard Nixon, had a son in Exeter with Eddie...
...He persuaded other black students to dropout of Exeter...
...All of it made him seem cooler than the average preppie, but none of it was true...
...By senior year, after a year of schooling in Spain, he'd built an entire persona around this ultra-black, ghetto-tough image...
...He cultivated the black stud stereotype by joining a secret "sex club" whose members passed initiation by having intercourse, blindfolded, with a stranger on a seminar table in one of the Latin classrooms...
...The more disturbing question is, Why...
...He capped his Exeter stay by reading a vicious racial tract to a schoolwide assembly...
...David Brooks is book editor at the Wall Street Journal...
...In Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry, Anson journeys into Eddie's past...
...He stopped studying and became furious when contradicted in discussion...
...New Yorkers reacted to the incident as if it defied the laws of physics...
...The American Conservative Mmement: The Philosophical Founders is, says Russell Kirk, "the most serious study so far" of the American conservative movement...
...There had been some racial tension at Exeter—some students objected because blacks found it easier to get into Exeter, had grades leveraged up while there, and, with poorer academic records, were getting into better colleges than many white kids...
...Editorial Office: 1130 17th St., N.W...
...When he scraped a knee riding a bike during vacation, he told classmates he'd been injured in a fight...
...You've been living in an entirely different world," says one of Anson's sources, who made a similar ghetto-to-prep school transBEST INTENTIONS: THE EDUCATION AND KILLING OF EDMUND PERRY Robert Sam Anson/Random House/$17.95 David Brooks The Late Senator John East on The Origins Of The Conservative Movement "John East was a quiet and effective legislator who never wavered in his belief in principle and in his determination to keep our country strong...
...A study by researchers at the University of the District of Columbia recently found that black high school students limit their academic achievements so their peers won't accuse them of "acting white...
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...Eddie's problems, which took racial forms, seem to have had non-racial causes...
...Eagle Scout personality—close to his mother, respectful of authority, committed to black progress, friendly with peers, active in church...
...Harlem and blackness became his dominant, some say only, topics of conversation...
...Jimmy Breslin and others joined the angry chorus...
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...You redevelop a ghetto block with $25 million in HUD grants...
...Instead, his problems were pretty typical adolescent traumas—he had trouble with girls, he wasn't the center of attention any longer, he missed his mother, he had difficulty keepingfriends, he felt anxious, insecure, and alienated...
...After a few weeks of digging, however, he learned that the policeman's account was true: Eddie and his brother Jonah (who was attending Cornell) did brutally attack Van Houten...
...Such kids don't go mugging undercover cops, especially kids like Perry, who, by all reports, had an...
...C. Vernon Mason, a black candidate for District Attorney, thundered, "Officers of the New York City Police Department, your arms and hands are dripping with blood...
...By virtue of his grades, he was accepted at Exeter...
...Our shining star," a cousin called him...
...He began dealing drugs, selling marijuana and PCP to fellow potheads...
...The jagged fault-lines in Eddie's personality which Anson uncovers make the crime seem at least comprehensible, if no less troubling...
...E Perry's father is an alcoholic .1-2 / who seldom spent time with his son, but Eddie's mother more than compensated...
...By his second year, he was exaggerating his Harlem, street-wise background...
...When the story broke, Reverend Preston Washington, Eddie's pastor, declared, "They kill and ask questions afterward...
...On the evening of June 12 an undercover policeman, Lee Van Houten, was patrolling Morningside Drive when he was jumped by two muggers who, he claimed, choked and beat him, continuing even after Van Houten identified himself as a policeman...
...The Village Voice, calling Eddie "a future Moses for his people," raged, "If you're a young black person, each moment near a New York City Policeman has to send a blast of anxiety into your heart...
...He rewarded her efforts with lavish displays of affection and by earning good grades...
...How do you do it...
...With the help of his mother and a local teacher, Eddie was accepted into a program called A Better Chance, which sends ghetto kids to fine public and private schools...
...I enclose my check for $ MasterCardiVISA # (Expiration Date) Signature Name Address City State Zip Published by Regnery Gateway, Inc...
...He channeled those traumas into a radical black consciousness, which privileged society told him was the healthy thing to do...
...The clash of cultures was obviously taking its toll...
...Such are the effects of racial stereotypes...
...Lively in style and sagacious in observation," it is a fitting tribute to the Senator and can justly be called his life's work...
...He did very well his first year...
...After four years at prep school, he no longer fit into Harlem, despite his best efforts...
...His teachers and peers seemed to assume that black was not only beautiful, it was everything...
...You see that he gets a $175-a-week summer job at Kidder Peabody, and you see that he gets a full ride to a prestigious university...
...Black militancy didn't go over well there...
...He increased his use of profanity, and overplayed the strut in his walk...
...The police don't value black life at all...
...Ronald Reagan Essential Reading For All Those Wishing To Understand Conservatism And Its Relationship To Contemporary Politics The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders is a book of lasting value and importance that examines the political thought of Russell Kirk (the Bohemian Tory), Southern partisan Richard Weaver, Frank S. Meyer, Willmoore Kendall (the inveterate dissenter), Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin.and the classical liberal Ludwig von Mises...
...It's a new form of lynching...
...he was bright enough, and more self-disciplined than the average Exeter pupil...
...Eddie was no token student...
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...You got to snort more coke, smoke more reefer, shoot more baskets, give up more poontang...
...Instead of jiving down on the corner, you've been getting turned on to Nietzsche and Thoreau...
...Best Intentions is a straightforward, profoundly troubling look at this perplexing personality...
...But few students were overt racists...
...Edmund Perry seems to have died because he saw himself primarily as a racial entity...
...By the end, Eddie was almost totally isolated...
...You take one of the smarter kids from the block and send him, on scholarship, to an elite prep school...
...Later, he told them that he'd hit a teacher in junior highand that he'd had three friends murdered in Central Park...
...the purer the better...
...Former Senator John Tower REGNERY GATEWAY, INC...
...Was Edmund, like so many other victims in this city, just too black for his own good...
...Politically he adopted a Black Panther militancy, denouncing Martin Luther King in class and declaring contempt for white culture, especially for attempts by whites to help blacks...
...By trip's end, the flurry of demagoguery that greeted the Perry killing seems tinny and inconsequential...
...Senator John East is probably the most thoughtful and intellectually sound spokesman for conservative politics in the United States Senate...
...Senator East spent the last days before his tragic death correcting the proofs of this, his first and only book...
...M eanwhile, back in Harlem on vacations, he worked overtime to establish his blackness...
...And, indeed, at first there seemed reason to believe that Van Houton was lying...
...Nobody showed him how enslaving that perception is...
...He told his drug supplier that he'd clubbed two Exeter football players for racial reasons...
...Still, you've got to fit in with your friends...
...When one of the young men shoved the officer's Adam's apple into his windpipe—a potentially lethal maneuver that expert muggers use to knock their victims unconscious—Van Houten pulled out his gun and shot and killed Eddie Perry...
...He even alienated a corps of fellow rebels (all white) when he suddenly and brutally attacked one of them...
...But with total acceptance within his grasp, he turned away...
...r RETURN TO: Regnery Gateway, Inc...
Vol. 20 • June 1987 • No. 6
