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THE WAY WE LIVE What If We All Stopped Lying?

Of course there is still racism. But there’s also an open door-and even success.
By Jim Schutze |

A few days before the Super Bowl riot, I got mugged in downtown Dallas. A group of young black men came swinging through downtown attacking people for the fun of it. It was right after lunch, and the sidewalks were busy with business people.

They first threatened a guy driving down Olive Street-banged on his car, grabbed at the door handles, yelled at him. Then they slid up behind me as I was walking along Pacific, where one of them hit me across the back of my head as hard as he could.

I got away from them and ran into a bank building. While the bank guard and I were chatting with the 911 lady about cross street ;, the muggers reappeared right in front of I he bank door. They jumped on top of a courier and began bashing him in the head an> 1 kicking him.

They were just doing it. The one who hit me didn’t si ?m drunk or stoned. It was just fun for him. It wasn’t about race. The courier they attacked was black.

The scenes in downtown during the riot, in which young black men and women socked and kicked and kneed innocent victims to bloody heaps on the sidewalk, were also about fun. They were just doing it.

The whole business of riots has been on my mind since last spring. Just after the Los Angeles Rodney King riots, I attended a meeting of a Dallas community group-a kind of semiformal advisory panel that watchdogs pertain federally funded programs for low-income people in Dallas. There was a mood of anticipation in the group. The assumption was mat the riots and the promises that would be made in the upcoming presidential campaign would produce a mammoth increase in funding.

And why wouldn’t people assume that? That’s how it has always worked. A race riot shakes the tree. Pretty soon some money falls down. It’s what Tom Wolfe called “steam control.”

And yet, half the story of the black experience since World War II-the half that is much more sensitive than discrimination, much harder for everyone to talk about candidly-is success. Drive the streets of the suburbs if you don’t believe me: Lots and lots of black people in this country have seized the opportunities opened by the civil rights victories of the 1950s and ’60s. They have marched on out into the larger society, gone to college, become successful, raised good kids and put them in good suburban public or private schools.

But it seems that in black society, the one thing successful people cannot do is publicly lay claim to their own success. Tony Brown, the black columnist and television personality, has written movingly about the kind of grief he gets for reporting on the successes of the black middle class-for example, die fact that 75 percent of African-American males today earn middle-class incomes. It is still counterrevolutionary for a black American to say, “I worked very hard. I am very smart. I am socially adept. No white man had anything to do with my fate. I made my own damned success myself.”

Can’t say it. Because if you do, you are implying that the poor black people who have been left behind in the city are also responsible for their own fates. That is still Uncle Tomism. It’s breaking ranks with the movement.

The really important message from the new conservative black writers in this country is that it’s a waste of time for black people to wait for white people to fix their problems at the fundamental level where personal motivation, pride and responsibility abide.

I think almost all of us white folks are about ready to admit that we’re just not smart enough to fix those problems. Many of us can barely manage this stuff in our own lives. Tell us how we’re going to do it for somebody else.

The sin in the doctrine of victimization is that the left-behinders-the poor black people who are not going to college, are not moving to the suburbs, are not ever even going to get jobs-are left with a terrible and poisonous untruth: That nothing is their fault.

This is a travesty and a defamation of the true story of the black struggle. We have to remember: The civil rights movement was the grand historical and moral event of our domestic society in this century. And during that time, it was indeed historically correct and historically necessary for black people not to break ranks, to maintain a totally united front against white bigotry and to argue that white racism was the principal shaper of all black lives.

But the movement succeeded. The doors are open. That’s the best anybody’s ever going to get. That’s all America has ever offered anybody: an open door and a chance to kill yourself with work.

Of course mere is still racism. But there is also sexism, homophobia, parochialism, religious bigotry, simple conformisrn-a million ways in which human beings will always come up morally wanting. At some point, we all have to soldier on with the hands fate dealt us.

Today the real challenges are moral and personal, not political. There was no politics in what happened in downtown Dallas on the day of the post-Super Bowl parade. It was just evil. Wickedness.

As the Rev. Jerry Hill of the Austin Street Shelter said afterward, “It was just criminal behavior.’’

That’s all.

All I ever hear white people say these days is that they have no idea what to do about the danger and the social poison posed by things like the post-Super Bowl riot.

I know the feeling. It’s usually the last thing white people say before they move to Richardson. Where they meet all those nice black people who moved there 10 years ago for the same reason.

But what would happen if we all stopped lying? If we did not open the sluice and reward people with money for riots? If we said we think hitting people and kicking them is wicked and illegal and that we will accept no racial or political or historical excuses?

The thing that changes people is what other people think of them. What if we started saying what we really think? All of us.

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