L. A. as Seen from Europe

...North African immigrants tend to be blamed...

...Racial strife could undermine normal life in some urban areas...

...There were a far greater number of deaths than in England—mainly because of the plethora of guns, yet also because of sloppy crisis management...

...Will "black townships" be in demand by 1995...

...and there would not be a rush of states willing to participate in the experiment...

...No less deplorable is the current slicing up of the U.S...

...Seen from Europe, however, the L.A...

...but when he needed a haircut he traveled to a town 250 kilometers away that had a black barber...

...What self-appointed censor has the right to say she's wrong...

...Tabloids owned by men hostile to the European Community (EC) have so whipped up xenophobic feeling that last summer, in widely separated English towns, gangs of youths threw stones at cars from Continental Europe and insulted foreign students attending courses on...

...He explained that his family had lived on the edge of a mainly Jewish quarter of New York City...

...and teachers are not more difficult to train than bomber-pilots...

...So, with the Jewish kids, he attended a high school where teachers encouraged and stretched him, and then college...

...Berlin's Turks were again battling with the police on May 1, and many Germans are not only demanding that they be sent home but that other Third World immigrants be kept out...

...English culture...

...Pakistanis and Carib-beans in London, North Africans in Paris, and Turks in Berlin have been involved in rioting and looting in recent years...

...Spanish and Italian officials, hitherto tolerant of Africans moving through their territories en route for France, have recently discovered that they, too, now have fast-growing communities of illegal immigrants...

...His knowledge of the Bible was impressive as well...

...Some West Europeans are saying that as South Africa abandons formal apartheid, America appears to be adopting it...

...His father, not an educated man but a wise one, told him at an early age: "Read and study like these Jews and you'll have an interesting life...

...A retired British Foreign Office man said recently that if the U.S...

...war effort after Pearl Harbor—to close the educational gap between black and white youngsters...

...Racism...

...This is happening, they maintain, not because white supremacists are powerful enough to impose the indefensible system, but because many black Americans seem to want "separate development...

...The problem is that the three Muslim states nearest Europe—Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco—can barely offer their inhabitants acceptable living standards, and that their population will double in less than 30 years...

...population into bicephalous tribes—African-Americans, Native Americans, et al...

...Another reaction to the Los Angeles explosion in Europe is unease and a demand for tighter controls on immigration from Africa and Asia...

...he wouldn't have the alibi of discrimination...

...Xenophobia is a more accurate term...

...were a single entity instead of a federation, "it might be a good idea for Washington to give the blacks some territory and a little Marshall Plan to launch it as an autonomous state and compensate whites who move out...

...He would shake our pale hands and use our bathroom...

...He said the thought of a white person touching his hair, or fondling him, disturbed him...

...Boat people" from North Africa have begun arriving at night on Spanish beaches, and Italy's cara-binieri and France's gendarmes say they "wouldn't be surprised" to see similar landings within a year or two...

...Some politicians, and hacks on newspapers like Rupert Murdoch's Sun, have built careers on it...

...Nominally a Protestant, he delightedly trounced a white Protestant minister in a biblical discussion...

...The grotesque injustice that detonated it could have been corrected juridically...

...In England too, legal, political and economic issues were entangled—notably in fierce battles between coal miners and police, and revolts against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's goofy remake of a 14th-century "poll tax"—and more damage was done by apolitical thrill-seekers and looters, white and black, than was done by political protesters...

...Hang around street corners and drop out, like too many of our young people, and you'll be just another dope...

...Americans already speak too casually of "black ghettos...

...Yes, sometimes...

...The black power people could go there and show us what they're capable of...

...And opinion polls suggest that the outburst expressed the anger of a high proportion of America's black citizens...

...If he didn't take it, that would be his own fault...

...One problem, I suggested, was that there might not be enough schools as good as the one he attended, or enough black parents ready to support teachers in raising teenage cultural standards...

...Hamstrung by governmental incompetence and corruption, unable to promote birth control (which is opposed by Islamic fundamentalist militants), and having wasted resources on military toys, the best these states can offer many of their youngsters is emigration...

...And blacks who stayed in the unsegregated United States could then know the satisfaction of being dehyphenated Americans...

...Jacques Delors being the chief executive of the EC...

...Every black kid in America should have the kind of educational opportunity I had...

...Here, though, is a slimy sample from the London Sunday Telegraph of May 3: "Surely no one should be surprised that the Andalusian people, with Latin and Arab blood in their veins, are susceptible to corruption...

...White Americans ought to remember that...

...And then, with or without acknowledgments to apartheid, "black homelands...

...It's worth making the effort to ward off a social Pearl Harbor...

...I find this ominous...

...Now, here he was, an asset to any civilized gathering, as informed on the Enlightenment and the Nouvelle vague as on Joyce and jazz...

...Will "American-Africans" be the next coinage...

...turmoil last month looked more sinister...

...Few West Europeans are interested in "isms" these days, still fewer in the lunatic fantasies involving race and "blood" that wreaked such havoc in the 1930s...

...Blacks, too, have a potential for racism," he remarked one day...

...California's night of wrath reminded me of a young black American (he would be offended to be tagged "African-American") whom I met several years ago in France, where he was spending a semester in order to improve his knowledge of the language and culture...

...The cliche depesti-fies the outrage and helps institutionalize it...

...There may well be "Afrocentrists" and other extremists in black and white American communities who would welcome clear-cut black separatism...

...Yet one need only reflect for 30 seconds on three widely accepted labels ?blacks," "gays" and "wasps"—to realize how meaningless and misleading they are...

...He couldn't blame white society...

...Ask any schoolgirl to name three famous Native Americans and she might well reply: "George Bush, Rodney King and Steve Spielberg...

...Marseilles, Perpignan, Nice, and a few other southern French cities on escape routes from Africa now have the country's highest crime-rates, after Paris...

...Perhaps Congress should declare "American Americans" a protected species so as to save them from being exploited by cranks...

...Was this social conditioning or incipient racism...

...Apartheid, like those imploded Utopias in Eastern Europe, was initiated by men who attached more importance to labels than to people: In both cases, human beings were no longer people...

...But it is hard to imagine the map of North America being redrawn in the present federal context...

...Still, it is important to distinguish between racism—a mental disorder, probably incurable—and xenophobia?which can be countered and discredited by personal experience, education and civilized media...

...In everyday life it is the "colored" man and woman, with nowhere to go except back to Africa or Pakistan, who are most likely to suffer the slings and arrows of xenophobia...

...but the word is used too often by lazy commentators...

...they were blacks, whites, coloreds, kulaks, Stakhanovites, even hyenas...

...To avert it, he said, Democrats and Republicans must agree on an immense effort—as determined as the U.S...

...Slings and Arrows Some complex-nursing Europeans are not unhappy to see the United States afflicted with communal problems...

...Are "Anglo-African-Korean-Americans" in the pipeline...

...Schools," he said, "are cheaper than military hardware...

...Nowadays, many American media-folk are unhealthily eager to classify their compatriots in largely imaginary categories based on color, conduct and "race" (and I admit that, for brevity, I sometimes find myself conforming to the trend...

...Apartheid in America...

...Sun-sponsored idiocy and vulgarity were displayed at a rally in southeast England where the paper's readers were exhorted to make obscene gestures in the direction of the Continent and chant "Up yours, Delors...

...Teachers in England complain that it is hard to convince uneducated white parents of the importance of their children's education...

...White students, tourists and others can, of course, simply stay away from infected areas...

...and local people say some streets are no longer safe at night...