From: nyt@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.culture.caribbean
Subject: Crown Hts & the Struggle Vs Racism
Date: 18 Dec 92 06:04:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:0uqyVB10w165w@nyxfer.uucp:1369885152:000:4788
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!nyt    Dec 17 22:04:00 1992


Subject: Crown Hts & the Struggle Vs Racism
From: nyxfer!nyt (NY Transfer News)

Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


CROWN HEIGHTS AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST RACISM

By Pat Chin and Shelley Ettinger 
New York

The campaign to whip up racism against the African American and 
Caribbean community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn 
escalated recently with a brutal attack against a homeless Black 
man.

On Dec. 2, Ralph Nimmons was beaten and maced by a gang of 20 to 
30 members of the right-wing, ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Hasidic 
sect. He was left bleeding in an alley. During the attack racial 
slurs were hurled at him.

The beating of Nimmons followed a Nov. 22 incident involving 
14-year-old Kiya Wint and her brother, Kevin. A group of 50 
Hasidic men chased and attcked the Wints, both from Jamaica. Kiya
Wint was punched in the mouth. Although she identified some of 
her attackers to police, no arrests were made.

But in a highly unusual move, police arrested and charged Moshe 
Katzman in the Dec. 2 attack on Nimmons. This led to a firestorm 
of protest from the Hasidim that was heightened when Mayor David 
Dinkins, an African American, condemned the attack.

PITTING GROUPS AGAINST EACH OTHER

The right wing's Crown Heights campaign has been accelerating 
since Lemrick Nelson, a Black youth, was acquitted Oct. 29 in the
stabbing death of Yankel Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum, a Hasidic man from
Australia, died during an anti-racist rebellion that erupted in 
August 1991.

That uprising was sparked when a speeding car carrying the 
Hasidic leader careened through a red light, killing a 7-year-old
Guyanese, Gavin Cato. When police failed to arrest the driver, 
the Black community exploded.

The ultra-right portrays the August 1991 rebellion as an 
anti-Semitic pogrom. But that deliberately misses the point. As 
in Los Angeles last May, the explosion was ignited by the 
despair, hopelessness and rage engendered in Black youths in this
racist society.

The ruling class has worked for years to pit the Hasidim against 
the Third World residents of Crown Heights. A small grouping of 
whites who live in the midst of a highly oppressed Black 
community, the sect has allowed itself to be used as a pawn in 
the big-business game of divide and rule.

The Hasidim have accumulated for themselves many privileges not 
enjoyed by the Black community. In contrast to constant police 
brutality and harassment against Black youths, the cops have a 
hands-off attitude toward Hasidic vigilante gangs that terrorize 
Black youths. A 24-hour police escort is even on hand for the 
sect's top leaders. Although the Hasidim compose less than 20 
percent of the Crown Heights population, they hold most seats on 
the local community boards and school board, according to a 
report in the City Sun, a local Black newspaper.

After Nelson's acquittal, attacks against Dinkins reached a fever
pitch. Full-page ads appeared in the press smearing Black people 
as pogromists. They drew a specious parallel between the 
acquittal of white police officers in the videotaped beating of 
Rodney King and the freeing of Lemrick Nelson by the Brooklyn 
jury.

The big-business press played right along, never exposing these 
false parallels and failing to place the situation for people of 
African descent in its social and historical context. 

CAMPAIGN TO SOW DISUNITY

The whole campaign is overtly racist. It's directed against 
Dinkins in particular and the African American and Caribbean 
community in general.

High-profile reactionaries--including mayoral hopefuls Rudolph 
Giuliani and pseudo-liberal City Council President Andrew Stein, 
Sen. Al D'Amato, Police Benevolent Association head Phil Caruso 
and former mayor Ed Koch--have opportunistically joined the 
chorus condemning the mayor as an anti-Semite.

These right wingers don't speak for the Jewish community of New 
York, with its long history of progressive politics, union 
organizing and social activism. Instead, their goal is to break 
up the potential for multinational unity in New York, which has 
been hit very hard by the economic crisis.

Under these conditions, building class solidarity among different
groups becomes more difficult. But as the rebellions in Los 
Angeles and Crown Heights show, it's a necessary part of the 
struggle against the profit system that thrives off racism and 
other divisions.

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; email: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org; "workers"
on PeaceNet; on Internet: "workers@mcimail.com".)


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