Editorials
Editorials Time to do right In the spring of 1968 the Kerner Commission pointed to white racism as the fatal flaw that threatened to leave America divided in two. Today, the effects of...
...The Likud-Labor coalition government presents a solid political front, supported by the Jewish population...
...Though numerous political and legal barriers have been successfully challenged, we have done too little to refashion those economic and educational structures that perpetuate a divided and unequal society...
...It is called racism, that blinds us from seeing one another as members of the same human family We must, as a state, make as plain as we can that we will tolerate no violence in this society, and that we will be particularly firm with violence when it is motivated by bias.'' This is where the public response to racial violence must begin, with our elected leadership...
...His wealth of political knowledge and insight could not quite be disguised by his gentle and searching demeanor...
...I can shake their hands and walk off...
...The contents of that issue, as might be expected, covered a full range, from the eloquent and perceptive to the highly tendentious...
...were not the military equal of the Soviet Union...
...I hold no prejudice against anybody...
...Its editorial all but declared nonviolence the only option for Christians...
...Yet even blacks in management positions, who have moved up the economic ladder, frequently complain of "glass ceilings" between them and further advancement...
...On it, the victory hangs...
...The Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank appear equally united and equally unrelenting...
...Yet that visible accomplishment pales when measured against what he has done in the magazine itself over the years - his editorials on controversial secular and religious issues, complete with insightful qualifications...
...It attacks our minds and our hearts and our spirits...
...Those who speak with tongues and fists of flame spread fire to their own dwelling...
...No wonder the issue's support for the INF treaty was scarcely more than perfunctory...
...Yet, according to the Census Bureau, the disparity between white and non-white income groups is least where minority families have both parents present in a household...
...Today, the effects of racism-socially, economically, and individually-continue to plague our efforts to create a more equal society...
...The Urban League notes that 40 percent of black children are now raised in fatherless homes...
...four have been expelled, five others face expulsion...
...During the last year, racial incidents have been reported at the Citadel, Columbia, Tufts, George Washington University, and Purdue, to name a few major campuses...
...There are increaasing economic consequences for both the Israelis and the Palestinians...
...acquiesced by abstention in the December 22 UN Security Council vote deploring Israel's actions...
...I just want to live as one...
...it needs to be channeled by their elders into a plausible and realistic political plan...
...his sense of the timely and important in editorials and planning contents...
...Maintaining Perspective Last December, just before the summit meeting, Commonweal had a visitor from Poland...
...That's how I feel in my heart...
...But the fervor and solidarity inspired by the young Palestinians must not be wasted in futile gestures and empty rhetoric...
...Forgotten by their allies, as the silence of the recent Arab summit in Amman attests...
...Catholic bishops wrote twenty-five years ago, "public authority is obligated to help correct the evils of unjust discrimination...
...Such attractive, well-planned offices in a lower rent area had long been on his mind...
...The riots themselves are less a surprise than a dramatic manifestation of a long-standing stalemate...
...It is time for Israeli leaders to heed these voices...
...Among some American Jews there is a subdued but intense reaction against the Israeli response to the civil disorders...
...Sullen resistance...
...Now we are known for the Nazis," Fr...
...The Labor Department reported in a recent study, "Workforce 2000," that as the economy grows more complex and more dependent on "human capital," the standards of the educational system need to be raised for all Americans...
...there are the patient and loyal Arab citizens of Israel itself...
...Because jobs, education, and housing are so basic a means of achieving racial equality, they must become areas of government action...
...He was trained as a scientist, later studied theology, had lived in Africa, had been a member of a base community there...
...A more frenetic exercise of power cannot solve these mounting problems...
...What they had in common was a rejection of nuclear deterrence and the equation of peacemaking with nonviolence...
...And yet the disorders continue, reaching even Jerusalem where fighting broke out near the Dome of the Rock...
...Time to move Gasoline bombs...
...A versatile person who has been generously applying his manifold talents to giving effective Christian witness in a troubled time, Peter Steinfels embarks on a new career as chief religion correspondent of the New York Times...
...The rightward and nationalistic drift of Israeli Jews, especially the young, and their sense of security in being a Jewish state has blinded them to the multicultural, multireligious make-up of their own economy and society...
...Twenty years ago, four days before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr., told worshippers in the Washington National Cathedral that...
...Why was there room for both Archbishop Hunthausen and Bishop Gumbleton, for Gordon Zahn, Jim Forest, Eileen Egan, etc.-all veteran representatives of pacifism-but not any place for peacemakers who work within the just-war tradition...
...When nineteen-year-old Michael Washington and two friends were beaten by a gang of twenty whites last September in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, Washington told a startled Mayor Ed Koch at City Hall: "If we catch every one of those guys . . . [and]if they can look all three of us in the face and truly apologize, then I can leave it at that...
...In addition to long-standing forms of economic inequity we now see a widening gap between the poorest blacks and everyone else...
...his inspiring leadership and guidance of the editorial staff in the most recent years - not to mention his clever designs on Commonweal covers and foresight in bringing us stumblingly into the computer world...
...Like the bishops in their pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, our visitor believed, however reluctantly, that there was a moral basis for nuclear deterrence...
...The National Urban League reported this month that the present administration has reduced job-training programs overall by 70 percent, and has created "a climate in which racism has been allowed to fester and grow...
...The Catholic bishops, in their pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, affirmed both just-war teaching and nonviolence as valid options for the Christian conscience...
...Though the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not new and the implacability of both sides offers little reason for optimism, three notable and, perhaps unprecedented, events have occurred since the demonstrations began in early December...
...Still, it was clear that he shared with other Poles a certain basic conviction: that there would be less hope in the world for both peace and justice if the U.S...
...There remains yet a further rampart to be scaled...
...Israel has no intelligent choice but to pursue peace...
...Individuals and communities have a duty to claim their rights...
...The U.S...
...Especially in a publication of the NCR's influence, voices like those of our Polish friend should get a hearing...
...So we must help time, and realize that the time is always ripe to do right...
...Former Education Secretary Terrel Bell has spoken of racial jokes made during cabinet meetings...
...Israel's society has been altered, and distorted, by its being an occupying power...
...But there was something one-dimensional about the special issue, at least enough so to remind us of our Solidarity visitor from Poland...
...Hazel Dukes of the NAACP was correct when she criticized black lawyers and clergymen this month for "whooping and hollering" rather than working with deliberation and clear political goals against the violence and discrimination faced by minorities in New York City...
...The study mentions specifically that black and Hispanic workers must be fully integrated into the economy, and that education and training investment are crucial for creating equal employment opportunity...
...Racism, of whatever stripe or hue, wins its most devastating victory when it converts the victims themselves to racist attitudes...
...A number of the bishops' critics "from the right'' have objected that only just-war teaching deserves such legitimation...
...government protested the use of lethal force in the occupied territories...
...Was this conscious editorial policy or simply failure of imagination...
...As the U.S...
...He takes with him the grateful good wishes of us all...
...A RESOURCEFUL 17 YEARS That we find ourselves in new quarters on an obscure alley in Lower Manhattan after a quarter century on high-rent Madison Avenue is due to Peter Steinfels...
...According to the Urban League, the average family income for blacks in the 1980s is less than it was in the 1970s...
...One felt strongly that his own position had not been lightly arrived at...
...They serve as tangible evidence of all that Peter has put into Commonweal in some seventeen productive years...
...At the same time as these protests were being made, Congress was approving the omnibus budget bill with our annual aid to Israel, and a delegation of Jewish leaders went to the State Department to complain of the administration's criticism of Israel...
...Why should it be that among the distinguished contributors to the NCR, there was not room for a single voice, a single viewpoint like his...
...Israel has now become an American dependency because it cannot maintain both its standard of living and the state of war without at least $3 billion of American aid annually...
...and on January 5 cast a negative vote there against the Israeli decision to expel nine Palestinians, the first U.S...
...Almost forty demonstrators or bystanders have been killed...
...He was interested in the views of Catholics who rejected the nuclear deterrent (he had tried, but failed, to meet with Archbishop Hunthausen in Seattle), but he did not share them...
...Clarence Thomas, chairman of the Equal Opportunity Commission, told the press at the time that indifference to black appointments had been pervasive in the Reagan administration, and that the number of racial discrimination complaints filed by federal workers is on the rise...
...The NCR issue, on the other hand, equated peacemaking with nonviolence...
...Housing discrimination in the U.S...
...The two perspectives, they wrote, stood as complement and corrective to one another...
...Israeli hopes for a gradual acquiescence in the status quo will not be realized...
...his editing of articles...
...Although a step away from reliance on nuclear weaponry, the treaty is still based, in its many details as well as its general provisions, on the belief that armed balance between hostile states is at this point a crucial strategy for peacemaking...
...the action of their fellow citizens is a reminder that Israel's founding ideals imagined a different future than the one it is now being played out...
...Superior force and greater social and political cohesion give Israel the upper hand...
...In Wilson's analysis, the problem of the poorest blacks requires non-race-specific solutions: full employment, balanced economic growth, manpower education and training...
...and tightly controlled by Israeli security forces, young Palestinians have made the streets their political forum and civil disorder their political expression...
...A federal appeals court ruled last month that the city of Yonkers, N. Y., had violated federal civil rights laws by locating 97.7 percent of all public housing in one area of the city, perpetuating segregated schools and neighborhoods...
...Among other topics, our visitor spoke of the importance his fellow Poles placed on the strength, including the military strength, of the United States...
...Before the present troubles broke out, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg assessed the situation in an article in the New York Review of Books (May 28, 1987): . . . [S]inful though the Arabs have been, blaming them does not diminish Israel's burdens, for it needs peace more than the Arabs do...
...William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago, 1987), has described a tactical program for doing this without alienating other groups: "If we emphasize a program to put all Americans back to work, Americans will relate to that because it is not targeted to a particular group, and they could say, yes, I agree with that...
...ignored by the rest of the world...
...It comes through...
...the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are co-workers with God...
...The demonstrations and riots in the Gaza Strip and West Bank remind us that a new generation of Palestinians has grown up with all of the frustrations of political and economic powerlessness...
...The blatant symptoms of racism are still to be seen...
...For the first time, the 750,000 Arab citizens of Israel itself showed their sympathy and support for the Palestinians by participating in the December general strike...
...over a thousand Palestinians have been jailed...
...That is why it is important that Hartford voters elected the city's first black woman mayor, that Clara Watson has carried to the Supreme Court her hiring bias suit against a Texas bank, that residents of Hayden Lake, Idaho, have faced down their Arian Nations, interlopers...
...Niara Sudarkasa, president of Lincoln University, after an increase in the sixties and seventies, black enrollment in colleges continues to decline, and no one-the federal government, the states, or the schools-has committed long-term resources to reverse this decline...
...Against this the Palestinians have the weapons of the street and a rage born of the twenty-year occupation that is daily nourished by the growing Israeli settlement and control of the occupied territories...
...somewhere we must come to see , that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability...
...For a Cardinal Be-rnardin, for a Gerard Smith, who negotiated the SALT I treaty, for a Bryan Hehir...
...After shying away from the subject for too long, blacks are willingly recognizing the need to strengthen their family structures...
...Israel has many friends in this country...
...We think the pastoral letter represents a wiser choice...
...But the matter cannot rest there...
...Civil disorder is inching toward civil war...
...That is why it is important that 20,000 marched peacefully in Forsythe County, Georgia, last January to protest racial hatred, that the Asian-American community joined in vigils at Howard Beach, and that the Los Angeles City Council was forced to redesign its gerrymandered districts to include more Hispanics...
...Increasingly, it seems, the Palestinians also have the weight of world opinion on their side...
...Last year the Census Bureau reported that in 1984, while the income of white Americans was almost twice that of black Americans, the median net worth of black households was only one-tenth of white households...
...Bill Wassmuth told the New York Times, "but eventually we'll be known as the community that faced the Nazis and won...
...vote against Israel since 1981...
...More significant is the deep concern over growing Israeli resistance to resolving the problem of the occupied territories...
...Statistics relating to higher education are hardly more encouraging...
...Can anything come of this more critical outlook in the American Jewish community and the administration...
...In his State of the State Address this month, New York Governor Mario Cuomo addressed the crisis...
...NCR's special issue, unfortunately, takes exactly the same position in mirror form...
...In the federal government, the highest-ranking black official in the State Department, Alan Keyes, resigned last year, claiming he had been treated in a racially insensitive manner by his superiors...
...and at least 250,000 residents of the refugee camps have been placed under curfew and confined to their homes, some for more than a week...
...Immediately after having spoken of the ravages of AIDS, Cuomo continued: "There is another disease that threatens us all...
...According to Dr...
...Obviously, his own grasp of the complexities of East-West relations and nuclear armaments was greater than that of the average Polish citizen-or of the average U.S...
...This Polish visitor from Solidarity came to mind when we were reading the special December 4, 1987 issue on peacemaking which the National Catholic Reporter published to mark the Washington summit meeting of Reagan and Gorbachev...
...They might begin with two steps: call the long-proposed international conference and begin to reverse the encroachments on the Palestinian title to the occupied territories...
...Rock throwing...
...citizen...
...as the Palestinians on the West Bank become ever more numerous and more restless, Israel is in danger of becoming the Belfast of the Middle East...
...This list is far from complete...
...has been challenged-and endures...
...To take an editorial stand for nonviolence is, of course, the NCR's right, and in fact represents a long-standing leaning of that journal just as just-war teaching represents a long-standing leaning of this journal...
...By exclusion and dismissal, it seems to make that tradition the only legitimate one...
...It not only announces its own preference for the nonviolent tradition...
...And it is time for Americans, especially those in Congress and the administration, to plead with our friends in an unequivocal voice to pursue peace...
...Joseph N. Cooper, former head of the Labor Department's watchdog office for discrimination, resigned under similar circumstances...
...Racism is a more complicated and elusive foe than Americans imagined twenty years ago...
...An active member of Solidarity, under martial law he had spent a year in prison...
...Now, in Poland, he closely followed world events...
...Tire burning...
...The size and the persistence of the disorders and the active support of the population mark a new moment in the Palestinian protests...
Vol. 115 • January 1988 • No. 2
