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Racism: A Modest Solution
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12774 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
1,268 Words |
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Don Feder
Don Feder is a Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist. |
New York City's Howard Beach and Forsyth County, Georgia are prominent landmarks of 1980s racism. One is tempted to call it the new racism, but such a designation would be misleading. Sadly, this scourge has always been with us.
Still, the events of past weeks are disquieting. Racist mobs, Klan violence - it was assumed we'd put all of that behind us 20 years ago. But recent racial assaults in the North and South are merely the more visible manifestations of a festering problem.
Less grotesque forms of racism, which frequently serve as a breeding ground for violence, abound. Stereotyping exists in almost as many varieties at the ethnic, religious, and racial groups that comprise our society.
In the popular movie Brighton Beach Memoirs, which chronicles the struggles of a Jewish family during the Depression, Mrs. Jerome, mother of the protagonist, objects to the presence of the Murphys across the street.
"We know what they're like," she self-righteously proclaims to her sister, proceeding to discourse at length on the shiftlessness, alcoholism, and barbarism of "those people." To innocents not initiated into the mysteries of prejudice, it must seem a wonder that a nation of drunkards and degenerates could produce some of the finest novelists and poets writing in the English language.
There is no rhyme or reason to bigotry, or even much consistency. According to the mythology of anti-Semitism, for instance, Jews are simultaneously capitalist exploiters and communist agitators. It is further alleged that members of the tribe of Abraham are pushy (going where they're not wanted) and aloof (unwilling to associate with gentiles due to feelings of superiority).
Italians, their detractors maintain, are both criminal overlords and, as ethnic humor would have it, cowards as soldiers.
Discrimination often is the tragic consequence of such beliefs. If "those people" are indeed inferior, we certainly don't want to hire them, patronize their business, rent to them, live next to them, or socialize with them.
Healing the past
Efforts to redress past
...
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