From: lkk@panix.com (Larry Kolodney)
Newsgroups: ca.politics,soc.culture.asian.american,soc.culture.african.american
Subject: VICTIMS (was 1 white male among new San Jose firemen of 22)
Date: 25 Jul 92 17:34:24 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC

In <yBLgoB2w164w@netlink.cts.com> galan@netlink.cts.com (Greg Gross) writes:

> 
>On the other hand, I wouldn't have much problem with black criminal
>suspects experiencing some of the emotional trauma they inflict on 
>their victims -- especially given the fact that the overwhelming
>majority of their victims are black, anyway.

Apropos of this, I post the following excerpt for comments:

From "I, the Jury" in *Notes of a Hanging Judge* by Stanley Crouch:
March 12, 1985

[Speaking in the aftermath of Bernard Goetz shooting in the back four
young black men on a NYC subway after they had accosted him with a
screwdriver]

....

	Ironically, the metaphor of victimization is now so well
circulated that it is used to explain everybody's predicament: the
teenagers wounded by Goetz were victims of poverty and barren social
services; Goetz was the pawn of frustration in face of threat,
flagrant dope dealing, and the justice system's revolving door;
[Eleanor] Bumpurs [an unarmed black grandmother shot by cops trying to
evict her] was victimized by police callousness or racism;
Sullivan [the cop who shot her] suffered as fall guy for the failures
of the society and District Attorney Mario Merola's antipathy toward
the police; while he was apparently defacing public property, Michael
Stewart [grafitti artist beaten to death by transit cops] became a
casualty of color prejudice; the six transit cops were wrongly charged
because of the hysteria whipped up by the media; and our poor boy down
among the corpses, [Chief Medical Examiner] Elliot Gross [charged
with altering autopsies to favor police] is the target of professional
enemies.  Such a sweeping sense of victimization implies that the
idea of individual responsibility has fallen by the wayside and no
one, purported mugger or clairvoyant shootist, polceman or casualty,
coroner or grand juror, is truly accountable for his or her actions.
Human beigns are no more than silly putty pulled and shaped by forces
beyond their control.  That might be meat for a Marxist or behaviorist
analysis in which human beings are piano keys that go out of pitch
when the weather is inclement and need only a master tuner to get them
in order, but such explanations are the antithesis of civilization,
brought into battle by so many different parites in these cases
because they ahve worked so well for criminals-prompting even police
to use them!

Such developments could intensify the cynicicsm tantamount to fatalism
that neither this city nor this nation can afford.  The only way
solutions can be reached is for people to stop acting as though
America is a monarch - this *is* a democracy, and the repsonsibility
for bird-dogging elected officials is theirs   This is especially
important in terms of the black community.  As playwright Charles
Fuller says, "We have to take back the streets.  Us. Black people.  We
ahve to involve ourselves in the workings of society and play our role
in what is not only good for us but good for the general society.
There is no truly segregated reality in America.  All we have is
different styles.  Crime is the same for all of us.  Fear is the same
to all of us.  Education and safety are equally important to all of
us.  We cannot abrogate our role as participants in American life."

Nor can black people ignore the truth.  Less than 1 percent of the
people in the most dire economic conditions deface public property,
commit violent crimes, or frighten residents from the streets of their
own communities after dark.  Those who do are by and large black
teenagers and the children of teenage mothers.  As Dorothy I. Height,
president of the National Council of Negro Women, points out in the
March 1985 *Ebony*: "We find that in 1950 only about 18 percent of all
black infants were born out of wedlock, and only about 36 percent of
all black infants born to teenage mothers were born to unmarried
women.  In 1981, 65 percent of all births to black women were out of
wedlock.  Among black women under 20 the proportion was over 86
percent.  The fastest growing black family formation today is that
headed by teenaged mothers."  From these huseholds come many of hte
violent criminals who lord over the night.  As one resident of 152nd
Street reports, "You see these kids throw a cat on the tracks and
watch it get run over.  They have no compassion because they've never
felt any.  It has never happened to them-the feeling of love, I'm
talking about.  ALl they know is life on an animal level.  They're
only conscious of their needs; they lack the capicity for
self-conscious awareness of irght and wrong.  Right is what you can
get away with; wrong is the mistake that keeps you from getting away.
That's all they know.  They're beasts.  Savages.  Capital punishment,
hard *hard* labor, and long sentences in the penitentiary are the only
thigns that will straighten them out."

You hear the word savgaes quite often, though it never comes
trippingly off the tongue.  It is usually uttered with the combination
of pity and bitternss, knowledge of how dangerous thigns become when
teenaged mothers discover that parenthood is at least a 20-year
sentence and become abusive.  In too many cases the male children
deflect that abuse onto the society itself.  One man I know threatend
to take his daughter to court and fight for the custody of her son if
she didn't stop letting his buttocks become raw because the cost of
changing the boy's Pampers would cut into her nickel bags.  She had
married too early, gotten tired of motherhood, and treated her son
with a malicious indifference.  "She has no sense of sacrifice," he
says.  "She thinks that if she doesn't come first something is wrong.
I tolder her she was a barbarian, and when I heard her try to read, I
was convinced of it.  Illiterate, selfish, and incapable of
comprehending any kind of subtle ideas.  Her mother was ignorant, my
mistake was getting her pregnant and letting her raise the girl on
welfre.  But I'm not going to let my grandson be destroyed like his
mother was."

According to Ulysses S. Kilgore III of the Bedford Stuyvesant Family
Health Center, 40 percent of the mothers of these girls with teenage
pregnancies don't know the most fertile time of the month themselves.
"these children are surrounded by ignorance and the only thing that is
ging to change the sitaution is rolling up our sleeves and putting
aside the textbook rhetoric for a while - a long, long while," he
says.  Kilgore understands that black people themselves must act to
solve this problem; wheat he terms "textbook rhetoric" is no more than
the defeatist sneerign at destiny rather than wrestling with it.  That
the cases under discussion rise rise from the subway to an eviction,
descend from the grand jury to the morgue, accentuate the need for
accountability from law enforcement agencies and call into question
that quality of urban life and the necessary support systems that
define it, suggests that Fuller's observation about hte need for Negro
participation in the workings of American life is absolutely on the
mark.  It is only through participation that the social morale of both
the black community and the nation at large can be raised.  "It all
has to come from us," says Kilgore.  "If we make the thrust, roll up
our sleeves and *work* at fighting the things that hamper the progress
of black people, others will follow.  BUt now, I think we have to make
the first move and second and however many more are necessary to get
something going."


Getting something going is obviously a big job that calls for a enw
vision of social action from Negroes, not as outsiders but as voters,
taxpayers, and sober thinkers.  All civilized societies know that
unless what is largely the sexual energy of adolescent men is
channeled, anarchic behavior is almost automatic.  Unless people get
education sufficient to compete in the world, they will either become
criminals or welfare leeches draining off funds that oculd be used to
better life rather than sustain dead-end poverty.  Unless ther eis a
reciprocal respect between citizens and law enforcement agencies, and
adversary relationship develops that creates mutual contempt and
paranoia.  Unless young women learn that this is the best time in
history for them to take on carers and explroe their talents, they
will continue to give birth to children with dubious futures.  The
history of Negro Americans, for all its heartbreak and tragedy, is
also one of  extraordinary accomplishemnt in the face of ruthless
resistance.  If all the shootings and the controversies serve to alter
both Negroes and the society at large to a grander struggle, none of
the shock and despair will have been in vain.


END EXCERPT

-- 
larry kolodney:(lkk@panix.com) 
_(*#&)#*&%)@(*^%_!*&%^!)*&#+!*&$+!?&%+!*&^_)*&#%)*&^%#+&
The past is not dead, it's not even past.   - Wm. Faulkner
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