Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 11 November 1995 — Page 2
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THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11,1W5
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Time to end racism on college campuses
EDITORIALS The death of Yitzhak Rabin Hatred is such an easy master. You simply pick a point of view and from that point you ho longer have to think. You can just hate your enemies or those you perceive as enemies. You can call yourself a warrior in whatever army you serve and you can shoot down unarmed old men or you can blow up tiny children and call yourself a warrior. You can plot and scheme for ways to kill and destroy. You can become a deliverer of terror. You can say you are doing God’s work while ignoring the commandment “Thou shall not kill.” You can get a radio program or a television show, talk of your hatreds and share with others the mean rhetoric full of references about destroying people. Or you can sit around and talk incessantly about the evil of those who disagree with you. You can make your enemies things instead of people. Things don’t have granddaughters and children who love them. Things don’t have dreams and visions of a better world. Things are easy to shoot or bomb or maim or terrorize. Creating a climate for hatred is easy. Creating a climate for justice and tolerance is hard. On the day he was assassinated, Yitzhak Rabin said “ For 27 years I was a military man. I fought all the time, and there was no chance for peace. I believe that there is now a chance for peace and we must take advantage of it.” Apparently he was killed because he held such views. There are violence prone sects of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religions which speak loudly and easily about the killing of their enemies and the destruction of all who don’t agree with them. We’ve seen many wars fought over religious doctrine. Bitter and cowardly wars which claim the very old the very young and the very weak. We continue to see the use of religion to justify racism and anti-Semitism. We see religion used by others to justify their hatreds for Arabs and Africans. In America we suffer the rhetoric of the religious right as it preaches the rhetoric of hatred and damnation directed at those who don’t believe as they believe. Pakistan and India stand on the brink of a terrible religious and ethnic war to be fought in the name God. We have seen Bosnia kill itself. Are we now faced with the prospect that men such as Yitzhak Rabin are to be maligned and ridiculed by enemies of mercy and peace in life and that they live to be struck down by unknown little people who have been incited to kill by all of these evangelists of death. For some time, all of those who have attempted to forge peace in the Middle East have been marked for death by the rhetoric of numerous factions. And it continues even after the death of this good man who tried to forge peace with his country’s enemies. The enemies of peace and justice and tolerance are everywhere. Let us hope that we can save our young from poisons that these men and women have brewed. Young men like Yigal Amir the confessed killer of Rabin have drunk from this poisoned cup. He joins several other sad young men who have listened to the voices of hatred and who have recently joined an evil army. In memory Yitzhak Rabin, a brave soldier in the fight for peace let us all continue to pray for peace and justice all over this world.
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— ■mu ■
The topic of race relations is on everyone’s lips for the moment. It is a time when a million African-Ameri-can men send the signal that they will not sit idly by and be stereotyped,
written off and forgotten.
Thanks to the O.J. Simpson case;, it is a time when millions of white Americans are confronted with our nation’s differing perceptions about the criminal justice system. It is time
when a horribly misleading, inaccurate, but brilliantly written and dangerous book pronouncing the end of racism gets great media coverage, while a powerfully moving, insightful and frightening book on poor children of color giving in the South Bronx area of New
York City gets little, if any, note.
Events of the autumn have made race relations, racism and racial justice the issue of the moment. But the more important question for the national conversation is not whether race is the issue of the moment, but whether it will be
the issue of the rest of the century.
As some clamor for a 1990s Kemer Commission study on race in America, even though the 1968 report has been all but ignored, the more important question for our nation is what are we going to do about the educational inequities, about the housing segregation, about the lack of economic development in communities of color that we already know exists across the nation. The most important question is not what are we saying about race relations and racial justice, but what are we going to do about the fact that we are still two nations,
separate and unequal.
Even as I write this, I have a telephone message from a graduate student suffering from racism on her campus. When I call back, I hear the same story I heard from another African-American woman on the same campus last year, a story of a deep gulf even among our young people. Racism is alive and well in America and perhaps even growing. What are we as individuals prepared to do about it? What are we as parts of institutions prepared to do about it? How can we really wrestle with this demon, which so few want to admit still lurks beneath both public and pri-
vate relationships?
One group has taken up the challenge. Iris Films is a Berkeley, Calif.-based group which has produced a series of videotapes showing real life college student? talking about race and confronting their own race-related beliefs and practices. Called “Skin Deep andTalking About Race,” these tapes show students dealing honestly, openly and sometimes painfully with each other during a weekend retreat. It is accompanied by a workbook facilitation guide, which has been put together by a number of college educators and which can be, used in showing the films to other groups. If our colleges and universities produce the next generation of leaders for our nation, then
Gvil
Rights Journal
By BERNICE
POWELL JACKSON
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no student should be able to graduate from college or from graduate school without having had such an educational experience. No business leader, no educator, no clergyperson, no scientist, no artist, no
government leader, no community leader of, the 21st century should have graduated from college without having had to examine the impact of race on their own experience and
outlook.
Only if our colleges and universities take
this challenge seriously can our nation be prepared for the next century, a century where there will be no racial/ethnic majority in this nation. W.E.B. DuBois predicted that race would be the significant issue for our nation during this century. Only if our nation’s future leaders are prepared to deal with it, in the next generation, can we really hope to deal with race relations and racial justice during the next one. For more information on "Skin Deep and Talking About Race, ” write: Iris Films, 22-D Hollywood Ave., Hohokus, NJ 07423. The phone number is (800) 343-5540.
Thepresident needs to look intopolice misconduct
What has Mark Fuhrman taught us about police misconduct and citizen’s rights? Acute tensions between cops and those they’re sworn to protect undermine the harmony and safety of communities. When complaints of gross police misconduct rise in urban pressure cookers, sometimes they boil over dangerously. Remember the riots — the big one in Los Angeles and the aftershocks across the nation — because the police who beat Rodney King were exonerated. Tensions are rising once again in cities (hat already have prob-
lems with crime. The list of recent abuses is familiar and frightening. In Philadelphia, a federal grand jury is investigating patterns of police misconduct against poor Blacks, including charges of fram-
ing people with false evidence and lying to secure search wanants. Already more than 40 criminal convictions have been overturned and another thousand are under review. If former detective Mark Fuhrman’s notorious tapes are based on fact instead of fiction, then the Los Angeles Police Department should soon come under similar scrutiny. The abuse is not confined to Blacks. In a recent Washington Post article titled “Bullies in Blue,” syndicated columnist Robert Novak recounted a run-in with an officer that blew up way out of proportion
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to his minor traffic offense. This incident prompted Novak to worry: “If this is how the police treat white men in suits, what will they do to African Americans?” Since the federal constitutional rights of American citizens are at risk, I call upon President Ginton to create a national commission immediately to address this crisis in urban law enforcement. The role of such a commission will not be to conduct a series of hearings across the country, to engage in endless fact finding or to investigate anew the root causes of urban crime. The commission’s more focused and time-limited charge from the president would be to: * Gather testimony, evidence, ' findings and dispositions from relevant grand jury investigations and civilian complaint proceedings. * Ascertain whether there are recurring patterns of abuse and, if so, what kind. * Analyze the strategies and tools needed by police departments to combat the more violent and sophisticated forms of crime that plague cities today. * Issue findings about the depth and frequency of abuse of citizens’ constitutional rights. * Promulgate a model code of police conduct consistent with the U.S. Constitution. The very creation and highly publicized distribution of this code of police conduct would place heightened pressure on police departments to comply. The overarching constitutional issues that the presidential commission would address are too important to be left to local police commissions or civilian complaint review boards. American citizens deserve aggressive federal protection of the constitutional rights against abuse by lawless cops.