Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  Now we’ll never know. The night after we all got the news, there was a small gathering at Gardner’s apartment, a kind of secular wake. Some wept; others told the old stories, with examples of Fosse’s dark humor; all were in shock, because Fosse had been looking better than at any time in years. Later, wandering through Broadway in the rain, I thought that for Fosse, who so perfectly expressed a certain vision of New York, the worst thing about dying in Washington might have been that he closed out of town.

  VILLAGE VOICE,

  November 3, 1987

  PART VI

  POSITIO PAPERS

  These are pieces about certain aspects of American society in the last decade of the century. They were written by an American liberal who had come to distrust all dogma, including liberal dogma. For me, liberalism must be tolerant, generous, intelligent, and humane or it is no longer liberal. If social systems created by liberals — the welfare system, for example — no longer function for the good of human beings, it is stupid to defend them simply because they have been entered into some aging liberal catechism. They must be changed, gradually and humanely, and replaced with something better.

  It is also foolish for liberals to refuse to recognize uncomfortable truths. They need to look at racism as it exists now, not as it did while Martin Luther King was marching in the streets of the American South. They must identify and condemn white racism and black racism. They must separate the race hustlers from those seriously concerned about growth and progress. They must move beyond habits of complaint and blame to the creation of enduring solutions.

  Above all, they must reject grim sectarianism, whether practiced by radical feminists, the Christian Coalition, or Louis Farrakhan. They must be wary of exclusively legalistic solutions to deep societal problems. They must laugh at any insistence that an individual human being can be completely explained by the group to which he or she belongs. Liberals can’t be the thought police or the speech police or the gender police. They can’t go around all day telling strangers to put out their cigarettes. They can’t call the district attorney to solve problems of manners. They have to lighten up. They have to recover the confident, exuberant style of the liberal America that once believed we could have justice and the racetrack too. They have to do it soon. The other guys are at the three-quarter pole and pulling away.

  BLACK AND WHITE AT BROWN

  PROVIDENCE, R.I.

  When I was young and laboring as a sheetmetal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I sometimes imagined myself as a student on a college campus. This impossible vision of the Great Good Place was constructed from scraps of movies and magazine photographs, and was for me a combination of refuge and treasurehouse. The hard world of tenements and street gangs was replaced in my imagination with buildings made of red brick laced with ivy, and a wide, safe quadrangle where ancient oaks rose majestically to the sky. There was an immense library, offering the secrets of the world. The teachers were like Mr. Chips, at once stern, wise, passionate, and kind. And, of course, there were impossibly beautiful women, long of limb and steady of eye, talking about Fitzgerald or Hemingway, walking beside me on winter evenings with snow melting in their hair.

  I never made it. I went to other schools of higher learning: the Navy, Mexico, newspapers. I had absolutely no regrets. But when I walked onto the campus at Brown University recently, that old vision came flooding back. There before me were the buildings, the trees, the open quadrangle that I had ached for as a boy. There were the lights, like molten gold, in the library. There were the fine young women. I wondered how anyone here could be unhappy.

  But I knew that at Brown, and on many similar campuses around the nation, the malignant viruses of the outside world had proved impossible to resist. The worst of these was that ancient curse: racism. Last year, the Justice Department reported racial incidents on seventy-seven campuses, from state universities to the most elite academies, ranging from jokes to full-scale brawls. This was an increase of almost 50 percent over the year before, and Brown, the most liberal of the eight Ivy League schools, was not immune. This struck me as a heartbreaking phenomenon. I grew up believing that racism was a consequence of ignorance. But 8o percent of the students at Brown had finished in the top io percent of their high schools. If they were racist, the nation was doomed. I went to take a look.

  At the Wriston Quad, everyone I saw was white. At the other campus, called Pembroke (it was once a separate school, for young women), blacks chose to “hang” with blacks. On a visit to a cafeteria, I noticed blacks generally sat with blacks, whites with whites. I heard tales (from whites) of pledges from one of the black fraternities marching around campus in paramilitary style (“They look like the Fruit of Islam, for Christ’s sake”). I heard blacks complain about white “insensitivity,” or outright racism (shouts of “nigger” from white fraternity houses, watermelon jokes). Whites who called themselves liberals complained about black separatism, symbolized by the hermetic clustering of blacks around the college’s Third World Center. One white student said, “It’s self-segregation, and they’ve chosen it, not us.” One black student said, “When the whites see more than two blacks at a time, they think about calling the cops instead of saying hello.”

  None of this, of course, was like Mississippi in the ’50s, when the White Citizens Councils owned the night. But it wasn’t trivial, either. Many of the discussions here referred to two distinct series of events: The Incidents and The Attacks. The Incidents took place last spring. In April racist graffiti appeared in the West Andrews residence hall on the Pembroke campus. The message NIGGERS GO HOME was found in an elevator, MEN and WOMEN were crossed out on lavatory doors and replaced by WHITES and NIGGERS. Racist words were also written on the doors of minority students’ rooms and on posters.

  Then, on April 28, a flyer appeared on a bathroom mirror, again in West Andrews. It said: “Once upon a time, Brown was a place where a white man could go to class without having to look at little black faces, or little yellow faces or little brown faces, except when he went to take his meals. Things have been going downhill since the kitchen help moved into the classroom. Keep white supremecy [sic] alive! Join the Brown chapter of the KKK today.”

  Brown president Vartan Gregorian reacted the next day with righteous fury. He addressed a crowd of 1,500 students on the Green, threatened to expel anyone guilty of spreading racism or homophobia, and said, “There are many outlets for racism and bigotry in this country. Brown will not be one of them, I assure you of that.” By all accounts, it was a tough, persuasive performance. Students later presented Gregorian with that quintessential element of the ’60s, a List of Demands. He answered them the following week, and although his petitioners weren’t completely satisfied, the racist graffiti stopped. The identity of the faceless yahoo was never discovered.

  In the fall, The Attacks started. Within a period of three months, twenty-seven students were assaulted in the streets immediately adjacent to the Brown campus. All but four of the victims were white. All of the attackers were young blacks. Seven of the assaults were accompanied by robberies, but the others appeared to be simple cases of underclass black kids arbitrarily beating the crap out of rich white kids. On one level, they were a variation on traditional town-gown conflicts. But the racial factor was impossible to ignore. Gregorian was angered again, called for help from the Providence mayor and police chief, beefed up campus security, but was reluctant publicly to characterize The Attacks as racially motivated. “Until we have clear evidence one way or the other,” he said in a letter to parents, “we are treating them as what, in all cases, they clearly were — assaults or assault and battery.”

  But on campus, there was a continuing discussion of the racial context of the violence. Some black students said that the outsiders were aware of The Incidents in the spring and The Attacks were their way of striking back at racism. This interpretation — the Mugger as Freedom Fighter — infuriated other students. Some whites noted that the organized black students were quic
k to complain about words directed at blacks, but were generally silent when punches were directed at whites.

  “The blacks don’t want to admit that there’s black racism,” one white student told me. A black student seemed to confirm this: “There can’t be black racism, it objectively can’t exist. When a man fights back against his oppressor, that’s not racism.”

  Out there in the real world, of course, there is as much evidence of black racism as there is of white racism. I’ve met West Indian blacks who look down upon American blacks, light-skinned blacks who can’t abide dark-skinned blacks, southern blacks of the old Creole aristocracy who are uneasy with (or terrified by) the homeboys from the housing projects, and blacks of all classes and pigments who hate whites because they are white. Racism is a grand refusal to see individuals as individuals, each responsible for his or her own actions. No race is immune to the virus.

  But at Brown, there are some specific institutions that seem to exacerbate the wounds they are intended to heal. All freshman minority students are invited to come to the campus three days early to take part in the Third World Transition Program (TWTP). The intention of the program is honorable: to help minority students feel comfortable in this new environment, where whites are in the majority. Hearing about it from some minority students, I realized that if I’d ever made it to a place like Brown, I might have been singled out for the same kind of help, as a Catholic among Wasps, as a semihood from Brooklyn among the gentry. I also knew that I would have resisted with full fury any attempt to register me in the Street Punk Transition Program. I’d have held off anybody who draped a fatherly arm over my shoulder to tell me I had been so severely maimed by poverty that I needed special help.

  So I found myself agreeing with much of the criticism of the TWTP at Brown. It is race-driven; it assumes that nonwhites are indeed different from other Americans, mere bundles of pathologies, permanent residents in the society of victims, and therefore require special help. “They’re made to feel separate from the first day they arrive,” one alumnus said. “And they stay separate for the next four years.” During those three intense days of TWTP, critics say, friendships are forged within a group that excludes whites. By the time white students arrive on campus, defensive cliques have already been formed, racist slights or insensitivities are expected (perhaps even welcomed as proof of the victim theory), and the opportunity for blacks to know whites more intimately (and vice versa) is postponed during a long process of testing that is sometimes permanent.

  The term Third World, as used at Brown, is itself laughable; I can’t believe that even a semiconscious professor would allow such slovenly usage in the classroom. The grouping includes, for example, Japanese and Japanese-American students in an era when Japan is virtually the center of the First World. It also includes those minority students from financially privileged backgrounds who came down the track of prep schools and grew up infinitely more comfortable than most whites. Alas, at Brown, Third World is not used to describe people from developing nations (or from economically deprived sectors of the U.S.); it is a racial concept that includes everyone who is not Caucasian.

  That some forms of racism exist at Brown and other campuses is undeniable; they are American institutions, after all, and there is racism in American society at all levels. But after I talked with students, faculty, administrators, and a few alumni, the deeper reasons for the emergence of campus racism remained vague and provisional. In one report, Gregorian suggested some possibilities: “The economic dislocations of the 1980s, a shared sense of ’brotherhood and risk,’ ignorance of the civil rights struggles of the ’60s and ’70s, rampant consumerism, cynicism, narcissism.” The Reagan years.

  There are other possibilities. Many of today’s college students were born in the ’60s. The more radical students might have a certain nostalgia for that era, when the goal of every young American wasn’t limited to the service of greed. There could be other factors: the growing stupidity of all Americans, the decay of high schools, a reaction to twenty years of affirmative-action programs that are perceived by some as giving blacks unearned advantages, a spreading reaction to the disorder of the underclass. I don’t have a single explanation for the phenomenon of campus racism, and I don’t think anybody else does, either.

  But walking around campus, talking to students, I found my own reactions shifting between anger and envy. In their desire to be what Brown students call P.C. (politically correct), some of these privileged young people seemed to be denying themselves the fullest experience of the social and intellectual feast at which they were guests. Too many black students were postponing (perhaps losing) the chance to learn to function in the country Out There, where blacks make up only 13 percent of the population and where, for good or bad, true power is attained through compromise and connection. Instead of getting to know white people (thus demystifying them, forging alliances with them on the basis of a common experience), the separatists substitute too much ’6os-style oratory about empowerment for hard thought. They waste precious hours on such arcane matters as whether the words black or African American are P.C.

  Worse, by insisting upon being special cases, by institutionalizing the claim of victimhood, by using imprecise nomenclature (“white America,” whatever that might be), they become perfect foils for true racists. On campus, those whites who might start with a vague prejudice against blacks find easy reasons to give it a hardened form. White liberals, committed to integration, throw up their hands (often too easily) and give their energies to other matters. News of this is both infuriating and sad. If anything, black students with true pride in themselves and their race should be commanding the destruction of the patronizing, self-limiting concept of a Third World ghetto on campus. That would take some courage. But in an era when all of Orwell’s “smelly little orthodoxies” are being swept away, nobody should waste a single precious hour on being politically correct. There’s too much to do Out There.

  That was the basis for my feelings of envy. These young people were the most fortunate of all Americans. While some of them continued arguing the gnarled social issues of the postwar period, their century was being shaped by the great change sweeping across the Soviet Union and Central Europe. The wasteful ideological contests that had mauled my generation were swiftly becoming obscure. That meant these young people were free to enter a new century that might be infinitely better than the dreadful one now coming to its exhausted end. And they could only make that exciting passage with the intellectual tools they acquired at places like Brown. With any luck, in their time even the new idiocies of racism would become a wan memory.

  So I envied them that splendid prospect as I did their certainties, and their passion, and yes, the red-brick buildings and those libraries, and all the fine young women coming across the quad in the wintry light with snow melting in their hair.

  ESQUIRE,

  April 1990

  THE NEW RACE HUSTLE

  That morning, my wife and I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, listening to talk radio. We could have been in any of a hundred other cities in America because, on the radio, the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid was already hammering away at the remnants of our common civility. Whites slandered blacks and blacks returned their oratorical volleys, while the host fueled the ugly duel. As we plunged deeper into Brooklyn, news bulletins fed the talkers: The trials of two whites charged with killing a black youth in Bensonhurst moved toward verdicts; a black boycott of two Korean grocery stores continued into its fifth month; a Vietnamese man was in critical condition, his head broken by a black kid who called him a “Korean motherfucker” while beating him senseless with a claw hammer. Ah, the melting pot. O ye gorgeous mosaic.

  We parked beside the second-oldest church in the city, its Dutch stolidity and simple, combed lawns summoning images of a time long gone, and then walked a few blocks to the boycotted Korean store. My wife, Fukiko, was uneasy. She is a Japanese writer; if Vietnamese could be mistaken for Korean, so could Japane
se. There have been signs that Asians are increasingly becoming targets of various forms of American resentment. In 1982 two Detroit autoworkers beat to death a Chinese American named Vincent Chin, thinking he was one of those terrible Japanese who had “ruined” the American auto industry. All through the 58os, other patriots burned crosses or tossed bombs at the homes of Vietnamese in Texas, Florida, and California. Cambodians have been attacked in Boston. Last year, in Stockton, California, a man walked into a school yard with a machine gun, murdered five children from Southeast Asia, and wounded many more. If you’re Asian, it can get scary out there.

  But on this morning, there was more posturing and rhetoric than danger. About fifteen picketers were in the gutter outside the Red Apple grocery store. They were protesting because one of the Korean shopkeepers had quarreled with a fifty-two-year-old Haitian woman over the price of some plantains and limes and then — the woman claimed — assaulted her. The picketers occasionally chanted slogans (“Koreans out! Shut ’em down!”), screamed at blacks who were breaking the boycott (“Traitor! Traitor!”), glowered for TV cameras, and refused to speak to reporters, including my wife. “They think all reporters are racists,” said a black TV reporter. “Even me.” The racism charge was amusing — in a ghastly way. The black picketers had spent weeks shouting slogans about chopsticks and fortune cookies at their Korean targets; they had called them “yellow monkeys”; one of their major supporters was a race hustler named Sonny Carson, a convicted kidnapper who insisted last year that he wasn’t antisemitic, he was antiwhite. The Legion of the Invincibly Stupid is an equal-opportunity employer.