[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 64 (Wednesday, May 5, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E865-E867]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            EXPOSING RACISM

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON

                             of mississippi

                    in the house of representatives

                         Wednesday, May 5, 1999

  Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, in my continuing efforts to 
document and expose racism in America, I submit the following articles 
into the Congressional Record.


[[Page E866]]



  Missing Point of Affirmative Action; Black Hens Shouldn't Cater to 
                              White Foxes

                        (By Leonard Pitts, Jr.)

       As if Florida didn't already have problems, here comes Ward 
     Connerly to pick a fight over affirmative action.
       The thing that makes you sit up and take notice, of course, 
     is that Connerly is black. Who isn't fascinated at the sight 
     of a hen campaigning for the foxes?
       This particular hen is pretty good at what he does. The 
     Sacramento businessman has spearheaded ballot measures that 
     overturned affirmative action in Washington state and his 
     native California. Monday, Connerly announced a petition 
     drive aimed at doing the same thing in Florida. God must hate 
     the Sunshine State.
       Don't get me wrong. I think there's good reason to question 
     affirmative action, if not to oppose it outright. It seems 
     fair to ask if, by setting aside contracts and classroom 
     seats for minorities and women, government does not 
     inadvertently reinforce in them a victim's mentality--an 
     insidious sense that they lack the stuff to earn those things 
     on their own merits.
       That observation, however, must be balanced by the 
     observation that white men have long enjoyed a kind of de 
     facto affirmative action. After all, for generations, the 
     nation used every legal and extralegal means to deny women 
     and racial minorities--blacks in particular--access to 
     education and entrepreneurship. It retarded the progress of 
     those groups while offering white men set-asides and 
     preferences that allowed them to move ahead by prodigious 
     leaps.
       It's not too much to ask the country to make right what it 
     made wrong. Especially considering that the hostility toward 
     blacks and women has hardly ended, but only become more 
     subtle. If we don't redress the inequity through affirmative 
     action, fine. But how do we do it? Because it's crucial that 
     we do.
       It'd be good if Connerly showed any grasp of this. Instead, 
     his stated reason for opposing affirmative action is that 
     it's racially divisive.
       Which is such an asinine assessment that you hardly know 
     where to begin responding to it. Perhaps it's enough to 
     simply ask which campaign to open closed doors was ever 
     anything but divisive. The Civil Rights Movement? That was 
     divisive. Feminism? Yep, divisive, too. The United Farm 
     Workers boycott? Pretty darn divisive. The Civil War? Golly 
     gosh, that was about as divisive as it gets.
       Hell, division is predictable. Those who enjoy privileges 
     seldom surrender them easily or willingly.
       But it's not simply the abject stupidity of Connerly's 
     reasoning that offends. Rather, it's the way that reasoning 
     offers aid and comfort to the new breed of white bigotry. The 
     one which tells us that white people are the true victims of 
     racism.
       You know the rhetoric . . . victimized by preferences, 
     victimized by employers, victimized by political correctness 
     that accepts a Miss Black America pageant or an Ebony 
     magazine but, darn it, would have hissy fits over Miss White 
     America or a magazine called ``Ivory.'' The most virulent of 
     modern white bigots will tell you with a straight face and 
     evident sincerity that he is only fighting for equality. And 
     never mind that by virtually every relevant measure, white 
     men--still!--enjoy advantages that go well beyond simple 
     parity.
       Most people--black, white and otherwise--understand this 
     and recognize cries of white victimization for what they are: 
     only the latest effort to turn the language of the civil 
     rights movement to the cause of intolerance. Only the most 
     creative attempt to dress racism up as reason.
       There are valid reasons for disliking affirmative action. 
     That it's divisive is not one of them. And while it's 
     troubling that some white guys won't understand this, 
     disconcerting that they would embrace an image of themselves 
     as powerless and put-upon, it's downright galling to see that 
     ignorance validated by a black man.
       Some would call Ward Connerly an Uncle Tom. It is, to my 
     mind, an unfortunate term that's been too often used to 
     discourage black intellectual independence. I won't call 
     Connerly that.
       I will, however, suggest that he is a confused Negro who 
     should know better than to allow his skin color to be used as 
     moral cover by those whose truest goals have little to do 
     with liberty and justice for all.
       If this hen has any sense, he might wonder at the motive of 
     the foxes at his back.
                                  ____


      Children Grow Emotionally as They Enact History's Struggles

                            (By Naomi Barko)

       New York.--An argument erupted in a New York middle school 
     recently over a subject that in most classes would have 
     elicited only a yawn: the Treaty of Versailles that ended 
     World War I. The class had been divided in half, with one 
     side asked to look at 10 specific points of the treaty 
     through German eyes, the other through the eyes of the 
     Allies.
       An immediate murmur ran through the room: ``It isn't 
     fair!'' could be heard from many corners--and not only from 
     the ``Germans.''
       Besides losing most of their army and navy, substantial 
     territory and all their colonies, the Germans had been forced 
     to accept both the responsibility and the expense for all the 
     loss and damage suffered by the Allied governments and their 
     civilian populations.
       But were the Allies really only after revenge, teacher 
     Veronica Casado asked her students. ``No,'' argued one of the 
     Allies. ``We wanted to make sure that Germany would never 
     again be strong enough to start a war, and we wanted to 
     safeguard all the new little countries that had been 
     created--Austria and Poland and Czechoslovakia!''
       In this class, called Facing History and Ourselves, the 
     emotions these seventh and eighth graders were feeling were 
     as important as the facts they had learned, said Casado, who 
     teaches at the Dual Language Middle School, an alternative 
     public school in Manhattan. They were beginning to understand 
     the German anger and resentment that helped to seed the rise 
     of Nazism and the onset of World War II.
       Cited by both the U.S. Justice Department and the 
     Department of Education as an exemplary program, Facing 
     History and Ourselves was founded in 1976 in Brookline, 
     Mass., to help middle and high school teachers throughout the 
     country learn to teach not only the facts, but the ``why's'' 
     of history. ``The goal is to help people understand that 
     history is not inevitable, that individual decisions and 
     actions matter,'' said the program's executive director, 
     Margot Stern Strom.
       ``Facing History concentrates on prevention, not 
     memorializing history,'' she says. ``It helps students to 
     engage with it. We learn that it is hard work to keep 
     democracy alive and what happens when it fails. We learn that 
     myth and misinformation tend to distort judgment, that 
     sometimes people respond to complex issues by simply dividing 
     the world into `Us' and `Them.'
       ``It is the students themselves who continually raise the 
     questions of responsibility and whether one person can make a 
     difference,'' she emphasizes. ``When the students stop 
     playing the game of education--just raising their hands or 
     filling in the blanks--and see their teachers struggling with 
     difficult and complex material, they see that these issues 
     aren't easy, and that they don't go away.''
       Using not only texts but novels, drama, art and personal 
     reminiscences, the program begins by exploring how people 
     develop a sense of identity, both personal and national, and 
     how they come to the sense of the ``other,'' the 
     ``different.'' Then using the history of Germany in the '20s 
     and '30s as a case study, it shows how the Nazis came to 
     power, how peer pressure was used to make people conform, how 
     other nations responded or failed to respond, how the 
     Holocaust developed, and how individuals made choices to go 
     along, to resist or simply to do nothing.
       Just how immediate these lessons can become was illustrated 
     in another middle school here a few days later by a 
     discussion of stereotyping and the role it had played in an 
     explosive case reported that day in the New York City press. 
     Four white undercover policemen had fired 41 shots, killing 
     an innocent and unarmed West African immigrant who they 
     thought might have been a criminal with a gun. The class 
     composed of black, brown, white and Asian preteens agreed 
     unanimously that racial stereotyping had played a large part 
     in the killing.
       ``I never heard of a white person being shot so many 
     times!'' exclaimed a white boy during a class session in 
     February at the Center School, a performing arts magnet 
     school in Manhattan.
       ``Well, I think it was racially motivated, but the guy 
     should have frozen,'' objected a white girl.
       ``They always say they thought there was a gun!'' argued a 
     black girl. ``How come they always say that?''
       ``What are we saying about the prejudices of our society?'' 
     observed teacher Rhonda Wilkins. ``A policeman may not be a 
     racist, but in this kind of a situation he may tend to 
     prejudge because of color.
       ``And is it only black people who are stereotyped?'' she 
     asked. ``What about a man you see walking down the street 
     with a yarmulke and a beard? Do you immediately think he must 
     have money and be sharp in business?''
       ``It happens to me too,'' called out a girl in a 
     wheelchair--one of three such in the classroom. ``People 
     always stare at me as if I'm different. Why do I have to be 
     the different one? Maybe they're different.''
       ``What's normal?'' mused a classmate. ``Maybe normal 
     doesn't exist.''
       The course's exploration of identity empowers many 
     ``different'' children, say teachers in other cities. A 
     particularly poignant story is told by Terry NeSmith, an 
     English teacher at Craigmont High School in Memphis, Tenn. 
     ``This youngster came to class always looking worn and 
     troubled,'' he recalled. ``But as we talked about books and 
     the curriculum she began to open up and express herself.''
       At the beginning of the term, NeSmith asked the class to 
     write an essay about their heroes. The students wrote about 
     people like the singer Whitney Houston and the basketball 
     player Shaquille O'Neal. After that, they studied the 
     Holocaust and also read the book, ``A Gathering of Heroes,'' 
     by Gregory Alan-Williams, who rescued a Japanese-American man 
     at the height of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
       In the book, Williams tells of his anger at hearing of the 
     acquittal of the policemen who had beaten King, and how, 
     driving home he began to think of his own troubling 
     experiences as an African American. But his

[[Page E867]]

     memories also led him to think of the people who had helped 
     him to get where he was now as a writer: his courageous 
     mother, a neighbor who had acted as a wise surrogate father. 
     These and others were his heroes, and he realized that 
     everyday people like himself could be heroes if they acted 
     justly. He found himself driving toward the center of the 
     riot where he rescued the man who had been beaten by the mob 
     and was being dragged from his car.
       ``At the end of the term I gave the same assignment,'' said 
     NeSmith. ``And the essays were so amazingly different They 
     wrote about their moms, their dads, ordinary, everyday 
     heroes.
       ``And this young lady,'' he said, ``wrote such a moving 
     essay that I sent it to Facing History in Brookline, and they 
     published it in a study guide. She mentioned that often the 
     car in which she was driven to school was the place where she 
     had slept at night. This was a biracial child,'' says 
     NeSmith, ``and she confessed that she had always been torn 
     about her own identify. Now she thought it was wonderful to 
     be able to experience both cultures. And she realized that 
     even when she slept in a car she always had a home because 
     her father was there and made it a home. And that was why he 
     was her hero.''
       Facing History has six regional offices in Boston, New 
     York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis and San Francisco that 
     help teachers with the program. To date it has reached some 
     22,000 educators from throughout the country and has also 
     held institutes in England, France and Sweden. About a 
     million students have taken part.
       The teachers, who are trained in weeklong sessions during 
     summer vacations, come from private as well as public schools 
     and from disciplines other than social studies, since the 
     program can be adapted to many kinds of curricula.
       For instance, NeSmith's assignment to write about heroes 
     was connected with a unit on Greek mythology in his English 
     class. At the Center School here, where Wilkins teaches, 
     students made elaborate and moving posters and dioramas about 
     their family history to illustrate their sense of identity. A 
     few blocks away, Casado of the Dual Language School, teachers 
     Facing History as part of the regular social studies 
     curriculum.
       The value of Facing History was recently judged 
     independently by an intensive two-year research study on 
     intergroup relations among youth funded by the Carnegie 
     Corporation of New York.
       The nonprofit foundation surveyed 246 eighth-graders who 
     had enrolled in Facing History, along with a similar number 
     of whose teachers ``cared and taught about social issues, but 
     who didn't use the program,'' explains Dennis Barr, Ph.D., a 
     Harvard developmental psychologist who headed the research 
     team. The study found that Facing History does affect the way 
     young people relate to their peers and think about social 
     issues and their role as citizens.
       ``It's a very impressive program,'' says Barr. ``It has an 
     impact on something that is very hard to have an impact on--
     what you could call character development.''
       This effect seems to last. Among those quoted in Facing 
     History's last annual report are Derrick Kimbrough of 
     Cambridge, Mass., now 25 years old, who took part in the 
     program when he was only 13. Three summers ago, Kimbrough, 
     who is African American, founded the Survival & Technology 
     Workshop, a nonprofit group that involves teens in improving 
     their local communities. ``Our workshop graduates have 
     renovated a local teen center and movie theater, established 
     a local recycling project and created an after-school jobs 
     project,'' he said.
       Kimbrough added, ``Facing History taught me the value of 
     teaching kids responsibility and the importance of letting 
     them think of themselves.''
       Twenty-nine-year-old Seth Miller of Boston remembers that 
     as the only Jewish member of a school hockey team he had 
     played on a Jewish holiday because he'd been embarrassed to 
     tell his teammates that he had to go to services. Since then 
     he has not only faced his own identity but has founded the 
     Rocky Mountain Youth Corps in New Mexico.
       ``At 13, Facing History was a real breakthrough for me,'' 
     he said ``I was suddenly turned on to academics in a way I 
     hadn't been before. It seems that my whole interest in 
     pursuing a career that was fulfilling to me as a human being 
     and not just for gaining money or status started then.''


     
                                  ____
   Prosecutors Say Racial Hate Was Motive for Man Indicted in Fatal 
                                Shooting

       Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (AP).--A man accused of shooting and 
     killing a black woman as she sat in a car with her white 
     fiance has been indicted on charges of murder and attempted 
     murder.
       And while the accused wasn't charged with a hate crime, 
     ``We will argue hate as a motive for the murder,'' said 
     assistant state attorney Tim Donnelly.
       Robert Boltuch was indicted Thursday for the slaying of 
     Jody J. Bailey, 20. She was killed Feb. 24 when the driver of 
     another car pulled up and opened fire.
       Her fiance, Christian Martin, 20, who wasn't hit, told 
     police the shooter had tailed their car, screaming at the 
     couple before firing seven shots when they stopped at a red 
     light.
       Martin and Ms. Bailey were high school sweethearts who had 
     dated for three years. Both were students at Florida Atlantic 
     University.
       Boltuch, 23, had been working as a waiter at a restaurant 
     until the shooting. He was arrested March 2 at a friend's 
     house in Plantation.
       While the words ``hate crime'' appear nowhere in the 
     indictment, prosecutors said they intend to tell a jury that 
     hate was a factor.
       A hate crime classification upgrades the possible penalties 
     if there are convictions. But since a capital murder case 
     already involves the ultimate punishment, the hate crime 
     statute ``really is inapplicable,'' Donnelly said.
       About 25 minutes before the shooting, two men allegedly 
     overheard Boltuch say he was going to go out and kill a black 
     person, police said.
       The manager of the restaurant where Boltuch worked called 
     the police the day after the shooting when he saw the 
     composite sketch of the suspect in the newspaper and Boltuch 
     failed to show up to work.


     
                                  ____
                         Hate Crime Sentencing

       Clarksburg, W. Va. (AP)--A 20-year-old Harrison County man 
     convicted of pouring gasoline in the shape of a cross on a 
     black family's yard and lighting it on fire has been 
     sentenced to 200 hours of community service.
       Michael Vernon Wildman must complete his community service 
     at Mount Zion Baptist Church. He also must take a course on 
     race, class and gender relations at Fairmont State College.
       Wildman was convicted Feb. 2 of violating the civil rights 
     of Raymond Parker Jr. and his family and destruction of 
     property.
       Harrison County Circuit Judge Thomas Bedell originally 
     sentenced Wildman to spend 10 years in state prison, one year 
     in the county jail and pay $5,500 in fines.
       However, Bedell suspended the sentence saying sending 
     Wildman to prison may ``teach him more hate and racism.''
       ``I feel that if we sentence him to the maximum, we may be 
     creating another racist,`` Bedell said during Wednesday's 
     sentencing hearing.
       Bedell said requiring Wildman to work with the church and 
     take the class would be more beneficial.

     

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