Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (5 page)

I’ve got only eight hundred words, so I can’t recount all reported Tyson maulings. There was the woman from Queens who said he grabbed and propositioned her in a nightclub, the ex-wife who said he beat her, and the lawyer who was reportedly told during a deposition exactly what he wanted to do to her, complete with hand gestures.

At the Miss Black America event at which Mr. Tyson met the alleged victim, one contestant said Mr. Tyson was like “an octopus,” and the organizer, J. Morris Anderson, became famous overnight for characterizing Mr. Tyson as “a serial buttocks fondler.” But Mr. Anderson did not pursue a lawsuit against the fighter, saying he had “second thoughts about participating in the crucifixion of a black role model.”

Why in the world should Mike Tyson, a man who apparently can’t pass a ladies’ room without grabbing the doorknob, be a role model? Whether he raped anybody or not, it’s clear he has disrespected black women from one end of this country to the other, as though they were hamburger and he were hungry. The
cheerleader-cum-Sunday-school-teacher who says he raped her, so young that she refers to the way she felt afterward as “yucky,” said she pleaded with him that she had a real future, that she was going to college. She says Mr. Tyson replied, “So, we have a baby,” and then raped her without using a condom.

In that alleged exchange you have the choices in the lives of thousands of poor kids in this country. College. Baby. Condom. Future. The role model is supposed to be the person who points you toward the right one.

Every day those kids can watch Mike Tyson stride into the courtroom on the evening news, and they can see the middleaged white women touch his hand, as though he were Wayne Newton or Elvis come back from the dead. And the message of Magic, the message that you have to make something of yourself, be responsible, face your mistakes, be a gentleman, will fade. The kids in poor neighborhoods, like the one in Brooklyn where Mike Tyson was once a street punk, have already learned from the drug dealer on the corner what Mr. Tyson has to teach: that if you’re rich and dress well, you can do what you want. At least until you go to jail. Or until you’re washed up. Here is the difference: Magic will never be washed up. In all the ways that truly matter, Mike Tyson already is.

TO DEFRAY EXPENSES
March 1, 1992

The Lost Boys made news. The television crews and the newspaper reporters went to that Neverland called East New York to take note of the fact that one of them, aged fifteen, had allegedly shot and killed two others in a high school hallway in what classmates called a “beef.” This means a disagreement.

It could have been Bushwick or the South Bronx or any of the other New York neighborhoods that are shorthand for going nowhere. It could have been Chicago or L.A. or any one of dozens of other cities. The Lost Boys are everywhere. Most especially in prison. By then, unlike the children Peter Pan described, they have grown up.

We reporters won’t stay long. The Lost Boys claim public attention
for only a short time, and many of us are loath to walk in their neighborhoods, which makes us no different from the people who live in them. The mayor was at the high school the day of the killings. He came to tell the students that they, too, could build a future. For many of them, the future is that short period of time between today and the moment when they shoot or get shot.

Homicide is the leading cause of death for black teenagers in America.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger. Kids, particularly kids who live amid crack houses and abandoned buildings, have a right to think of their school as a safe haven. But it’s important to remember that a kid can get himself a box cutter and wait outside until the last bell rings. With a metal detector, you can keep the homicide out of the hallways. Perhaps with something more, you can keep the homicide out of the heart.

“These boys die like it’s nothing,” said Angela Burton, whose boyfriend was one of the two killed in East New York.

The problem is that when we look into this abyss, it goes so deep that we get dizzy and pull back from the edge. Teenage mothers. Child abuse. Crowded schools. Homes without fathers. Projects lousy with drugs, vermin, crime. And, always, the smell of urine in the elevator. I have never been in a project that hasn’t had that odor, and I have never smelled it without wondering, If your home smells like a bathroom, what does that tell you about yourself?

One of the ways to motivate kids is to say that if you do this bad thing now, you won’t be able to do this good thing tomorrow. That doesn’t work with the Lost Boys. They stopped believing in tomorrow a long time ago. The impulse control of an adolescent, the conviction that sooner or later you’ll end up dead or in jail anyhow, and a handgun you can buy on the corner easier than getting yourself a pair of new Nikes: the end result is preordained.

“If you don’t got a gun, you got to get one,” said one teenager hanging with his friends at the corner of East New York and Pennsylvania Avenues.

If news is sometimes defined as aberration, as Man Bites Dog, it’s the successes we should be rushing out to cover in these neighborhoods, the kids who graduate, who get jobs, who stay clean. Dr. Alwyn Cohall, a pediatrician who runs four school-based clinics in New York, remembers the day he was giving one of those kids a college physical, which is the happiest thing he ever does, when from outside he heard the sound. Pow. Pow. One moment he was filling out the forms for a future, the next giving CPR to another teenager with a gunshot wound blossoming in his chest. The kid died on the cement.

“He never even made the papers next day,” the doctor recalled.

The story in East New York will likely end with the funerals. A fifteen-year-old killer is not that unusual; many city emergency rooms provide coloring books on gun safety. Dr. Cohall says that when the students at his schools come back after the long hot summer, they are routinely asked by the clinic staff how many of their friends were shot over vacation. The good doctor knows that it is possible to reclaim some of the Lost Boys, but it requires money, dedication, and, above all, the will to do it. Or we can continue to let them go. To defray expenses.

ACROSS THE DIVIDE
May 3, 1992

They say that one way the defense attorneys won the case was by playing that videotape over and over, freezing the frames so that after a while it was no more than a random collection of points of light, highlighting the movements of the suspect instead of the batons of the police.

But no matter how many times I watch the four police officers beat up Rodney King, it still looks indefensible to me, and to the eight-year-old, too. Three times he watched the videotape and three times he brought his arms over his head in a double arch, as though to ward off baton blows. And finally he said, “Are they really allowed to do that?” It broke my heart, but it could have been worse. I pictured a mother and an eight-year-old watching the same clip, both of them black, the son asking the same question the mother forced to reply, “Yes, baby, they are.” The lawyers told the jurors that they had to pay attention to what happened before the videotape started rolling. Here’s what came before: Ronald Reagan, Willie Horton, rotten schools, no jobs,
falling plaster, broken boilers, David Duke. Years and years of rage and racism, measured now in angry words and broken glass.

Everyone wants to attack the jurors. Let’s be honest, white folks: They walked into that room with the baggage most of us carry, the baggage of stereotypes and ignorance and pure estrangement from African-Americans. They walked in from a world that thinks the cops are the DMZ between us and them. And the defense made the most of it.

It makes you wonder whether the jury system, that bedrock of our society, can truly work when there is a fissure in our foundation so deep that sense disappears into it. It makes you wonder how many others could say, as one of the King jurors did the other night on television, that it didn’t seem particularly significant that, just before the beating, one of the cops in the case said he’d had a call to a black household that was “right out of
Gorillas in the Mist
.” In some of our kids’ schools they do this sensitivity exercise in which the blue-eyed kids treat the browneyed kids like garbage for the day. But at the end of the day lots of the brown-eyed kids go back to being just white kids with brown eyes. They move back across a deep divide. We wore ribbons to show our support for the hostages; we wear ribbons to show our concern for AIDS. I wondered about ribbons to repulse racism and then thought about how naive I was, on my side of the divide, as I watched Los Angeles burn.

It’s as naive as thinking that because African-Americans go to Harvard and sit in the next booth at Burger King, it cancels out the neon sign that blinks
NIGGER
in white minds. It was rich with irony, that the fires raged as the last episode of
Cosby
was aired, the sitcom that let white America believe that being black was as easy as being brown-eyed, that their lives were just like ours except that their sweaters were better.

Somebody’s daughter was on the news from Howard University, and she said that we had lied to her, that her parents and all the rest of us had given the impression that while racism still existed, it was no longer legal. But the Rodney King verdict
taught her different. So smart. So sad. Even George Bush was wondering how to explain to his grandchildren.

I take solace in the fact that the outrage seems felt by both whites and blacks. Some white empathy may have dissipated with the violence; that same juror seemed to take considerable satisfaction in saying that what they were doing was much worse than what those cops had done. One black woman stood watching looters, tears rolling down her face, and said she couldn’t understand how they could bring their children to steal. “I’m ashamed of my own people,” she said.

I know that feeling. So why does it seem so impossible for her and me and millions like us to have a meeting of the minds until finally the met minds take precedence over the closed ones?

In 1968 the Kerner Commission released a report that talked of two Americas, one black, one white, separate and unequal. And I looked at my eight-year-old and thought that maybe in 2018, he would write the fiftieth-anniversary piece saying that nothing much had changed. I wondered if he would remember how he felt this last terrible week, or whether he would just be another brown-eyed child. I’ve tried to teach him that prejudice is intolerable, but watching the videotape he learned a different lesson. I wanted better for him. For all of them.

ERIN GO BRAWL
March 14, 1992

I never felt entirely at home at St. Patrick’s Day parades. As constituted by the Ancient Order of Hibernians—emphasis on the Ancient—they reminded me until recently of two perceptions of the Irish: as silver-haired civil servants redolent of Old Spice, and as intoxicated teenagers throwing up into the hedges of Central Park.