An editor's notebook
Baumann, Paul
AN EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS THE RHETORIC OF RACIAL VIOLENCE I woke early and a bit apprehensive the Thursday morning after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. It was around...
...A riot in a college gymnasium is not carnage in the streets ~~ ~ " ~ 19 June 1992:5 of a ghetto...
...And not all the violence at my college was intramural...
...This blessedly brief encounter—amplified that night when a car was torched in front of our building—brought back the ceaseless racial hectoring and politically charged violence of my college days in the early 1970s...
...Given the way things generally worked, I was fearful that nothing would be done about the incident...
...This was at the height of the black power craze, and the official black attitude toward whites was one of separatism and contempt...
...I volunteered to testify at a judicial proceeding...
...Racial violence is as impersonal as a plane crash—there is no slipping out of your assigned seat...
...Certainly no public disciplinary action was taken, and the incident has remained a paradigm for me of how empty good intentions can be if they are not anchored to some code of personal responsibility that transcends racial or other grievances...
...Like most of the white students at my exclusive New England college, I was embarrassed by American racism, humbled by the moral authority of blacks, and intensely sympathetic to black efforts for redress...
...I still am...
...I think it self-evident that the effort to authenticate violence as the "voice" of the oppressed does next to nothing for the poor and can only increase the cynicism between the races...
...It was a chilling and defining moment for me...
...Most whites were similarly timid or politically misguided...
...Confrontation and physical intimidation were routine, people were shot at, buildings burned, and one conservative student was burned out of his room...
...The game was rough, especially the behavior of one black player known for his volatility...
...Still, the blood on the floor and the hate behind the blows were as real as that in L.A...
...Intramural athletics created particular friction...
...she shouted...
...Policemen—or big football players—usually have to step in to save the innocent...
...A heavy-set black woman, ill-kempt and grim-faced, was leaning over the railing of the subway entrance...
...At such times, only the most mundane moral habits are likely to preserve human decency...
...I don't trust conservatives either, but at least they don't pretend to care...
...Whattaya gonna to do about California, black people...
...But the racial politics of the day prevented them from criticizing him...
...Finally—it seemed like forever but was only seconds or minutes, I imagine—a large white football player moved to stop the beating...
...As a consequence, I don't trust most liberals either to keep the peace or to pursue justice in difficult situations...
...There was little social contact between the races...
...Alas, it might as well have been zero percent...
...Paul baumann...
...I was in the stands, frozen by shock and fear as he mercilessly attacked my friend, the referee, over some imagined injustice...
...To do nothing, of course, meant watching a defenseless person be seriously injured...
...While he intervened, the football player's finger was bitten to the bone by the black student...
...Liberal tolerance turned out to be just another word for cowardice—and of course condescension...
...Fucking asshole," she said as I passed...
...It was not until my junior year that I learned, in a conversation initiated by a black hallmate of mine who was transferring to a large and less prestigious Midwestern university, of how oppressive some black students found the obligatory racial antagonism...
...Perhaps few of his black classmates liked this guy or thought he was justified in the abusive things he did...
...I can't help but see the riot in Los Angeles, and especially the predictable political debate that followed, in light of my college experience...
...My sophomore year the black team met the football fraternity in the intramural basketball championship...
...Indeed, South Central Los Angeles is already slipping from national consciousness, leaving the real victims of the so-called "rebellion" to mourn their dead among the ruins...
...The first thing the violent deserve is our condemnation...
...My university boasted of its "liberal" values, and had made a significant commitment to minority recruitment, which was then and still is a necessary goal...
...I waited, somewhat nervously, to be called upon...
...That was the last—and I hope the only—time I was in a race riot...
...Twenty percent of my class were minority students...
...To do otherwise is the real moral and racial conceit...
...On our campus radical black students, or at least their spokesmen, emphasized the utter irredeemability, if not the depravity of whites...
...The habit of moral action, not good intentions, is what counts in the crunch...
...She then turned and addressed some invisible multitude in the streets...
...I wasn't keen to find out what she had in mind...
...A friend of mine, a senior and a pacifist who was applying for conscientious objector status, was the referee...
...He thanked me, confessed dismay over the inability of the university to discipline the student involved, and assured me that something would be done...
...Bullshitters," he said of the school's black leaders...
...My friend offered no physical resistence, but merely tried to cover his face...
...Nothing happened as far as I ever knew...
...Near the end of the game, this guy went beserk...
...It was around 7, I think, when I headed toward the subway at 96th Street and Broadway...
...I went to the director of athletics the next morning...
...Outside the classroom the university exerted little authority and exhibited even less interest in the behavior of students...
...Whites and blacks squared off across the gymnasium, for to intervene was to invite a full-scale escalation of the bloodshed...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 12
