Doing the right thing(s):

...The new racism is based on a sense of entitlement, and unlike the crude violence of events in Bensonhurst, Howard Beach, or Forsyth County, it has respectable defenders...

...Last June in a Harper's magazine article entitled, "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent...

...Seeing that both sides had merit did not require a solution that treated them with equal care...

...Justice O'Connor did not deny that "the sorry history of both public and private discrimination in this country has contributed to a lack of opportunities for black entrepreneurs...

...The neighborhood, which just a few hours earlier couldn't even be persuaded to carry out a boycott of Sal's, is suddenly united...

...NICOLAUS MILLS Nicolaus Mills teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, N.Y., and is completing a book on the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964.Project of 1964...

...The challenge for the 1990s will be building on such visions of the future, making sure they are not swallowed up by the tolerance for intolerance that an ethic of one-way victimization promotes...

...RACE RELATIONS DOING THE RIGHT THING(S) BEYOND ENTITLEMENTS For over two decades, we have slowly been retreating from the consensus that brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Act of 1965...

...Classifications based on race," she observed, "may in fact promote notions of racial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility...

...What about Sal, who has worked in the neighborhood for twenty-five years and cares about the people in it...

...In New York Cardinal John O'Connor goes out of his way to visit both the white victim of the Central Park "wilding" and a black Brooklyn woman, whose rooftop rape a week earlier drew scant media attention...

...Now, however, an even more divisive change is taking place...

...In his mind he must be paid and repaid, while Sal, despite the loss of his pizzeria, can never pay enough...

...Instead, he goes to Sal and demands his week's salary of $250...

...Speaking for a 6-3 Court, Justice O'Connor struck down the Richmond plan on the grounds that it denied whites the right to compete for a fixed percentage of city contracts solely because of their race...

...As Lee has written in a companion volume to his film, "The changes happen in Sal instead of Mookie because I feel black people cannot be held responsible for racism...

...Me black...

...For old and young, the riot is a moment of deli verance, and they stop their destruction of a nearby Korean grocery store, which they have resented, only when its terrified owner shouts, "Me no white...

...Rather it is treated by Mookie as a history that in the end doesn't merit defending...

...How do we escape the racial impasse that such thinking must inevitably produce...

...The black version of this ethic of one-way victimization is most visible today in Spike Lee's new film, Do the Right Thing, in the role Lee himself plays as Mookie, the delivery man for Sal's Famous Pizzeria...

...Now to be innocent, someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other's backs...

...To be entitled one must first believe in one's innocence, at least in the area where one wishes to be entitled," Steele wrote, and then went on to observe that in contemporary America, "Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power (in relation to each other...

...essayist Shelby Steele described the psychology of this new racism in terms of the feelings of guilt and innocence that fuel it...

...She then went on to argue that such remedies were inherently dangerous...

...It's not clear that we can...

...We are, and have been, the victims...

...In Washington, D.C., Georgia Congressman John Lewis, the former chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), observes, "We made a mistake when the movement turned against its first principle: integration...

...We are not in that position...

...What about the rights and feelings of minority contractors in a city that is 50 percent black and was once the capital of the Confederacy...

...He won't discuss the meaning of the night before with Sal, and when Sal, in a moment of both anger and affection, throws five $100 bills at him, Mookie hesitates only briefly before picking up all the money...

...A fight breaks out, and when the police arrive, they end up killing one of the men who had been fighting with Sal...

...The case, which was the forerunner of a series of Supreme Court retreats on affirmative action, arose when the city of Richmond, Virginia, acting on a 1983 study showing that over the previous five years less than 1 percent of its construction contracts had gone to minority-owned businesses, instituted a set-aside program that reserved 30 percent of its public works funds for minority-owned construction firms...

...After the police leave, Mookie, who up to now has easily moved between the pizzeria and the neighborhood, throws a garbage can through Sal's window, and a full-scale riot breaks out...

...The white version of this ethic of victimization may be seen in its most sophisticated and dangerous form in Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion in the Supreme Court's Richmond v. Croson case of last January...

...Only the victimization of one party (white construction firms currently competing for Richmond's business), she and the Court concluded, was compelling...

...But we can take hope from the effort being made...

...The turning point of the film, set in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the summer, occurs when two neighborhood blacks get into an argument with Sal over the absence of blacks in the pictures he has on his "Wall of Fame...

...After the riot begins, Mookie sits watching it from the curb, and the next morning he still shows no remorse, no concern over Sal's being made a scapegoat for the police...

...Your needs, your history no longer count...

...We have reached a point in post-consensus America where racism has acquired a status it hasn't had within most of our lifetimes...

...As with the blacks of Richmond v. Croson, his history is not ignored...

...What is happening at present is that this psychology of racism has evolved into an ethic of victimization in which both blacks and whites say to each other, "The wrong done to me is so great that anything I owe you is cancelled out...

...But that history, plus Richmond's record, were still not enough, she argued, to require remedial set-asides...

...The seeds that were planted twenty years ago have borne a very bitter fruit...