Another Child Dying As Racism Lives
Lenard Clark might be dead by the time you read this.
He’s a black 13-year-old from Chicago who, according to authorities, sustained massive head injuries after being attacked last week by three white teenagers. They are alleged to have pulled the child from his bike, slammed his head into a wall and kicked him repeatedly, later bragging that they wanted to “take care of the niggers in the neighborhood.”
Frank Caruso, 18, Victor Jasas, 17, and Michael Kwidzinski, 19, were captured after neighborhood residents - many of them white - helped police mount a search. Prosecutors asked for $1 million bail for each of the alleged attackers; a judge set them free on TOTAL bail of $350,000.
Meantime, Lenard Clark languishes in a coma.
The attack on him came six years after Rodney King was beaten by a mob of white cops, five years after white trucker Reginald Denny was maimed by black rioters, four years after white men burned a black tourist alive in Tampa, three years after Susan Smith murdered her own children and blamed their disappearance on a black carjacker, two years after a white soldier in North Carolina executed a black couple on a sidewalk, one year after a rash of church arsons that was motivated, at least in part, by bigotry, and approximately two days after the last time a white man told me to quit talking so much about race because hatred is gone now, a relic of the past.
The attack also came just weeks after aides to President Clinton told reporters that the chief executive is planning a major offensive on the issue of race. If you missed it, I’m not surprised; the story came and went pretty quickly.
Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to it. No one knows yet what form the initiative will take and observers say the president will be severely restricted by political and budgetary realities. And I find that I just don’t care. At the moment, it’s simply enough to hear that the president of the United States thinks it important to address the nation’s racial divide.
Especially at a time when the nation would just as soon ignore it. Indeed, so many white Americans live in denial that it might as well be the 51st state. They are fond of describing race relations as either hunky or dory, except that black people won’t stop caterwauling about imagined injustices.
Yet racial animus is worse than it’s been in many years. It’s not just that hate crimes are flourishing, communication failing, housing discrimination rampant and O.J. free. Not just that every day, some company’s plantation mentality lands it on the front page. It’s also that there is a renewed nastiness afoot, a reborn meanness that expresses itself in the coded bigotry of political demagogues, the shrill idiocy of conservative talk radio and the separatist harangues of the Nation of Islam.
People, said a friend the other day, are going crazy. And small wonder: Race - meaning the schism between black and white - is and has historically always been our most divisive issue. It is the only one that ever sent us to war against ourselves, the only one that periodically requires troops to be stationed on the streets of American cities. It is the most important domestic issue we face, underlying all the others - poverty, crime, education, the environment - like a snake coiled under a table.
Yet American presidents have historically failed to address it unless forced to by crisis. Some have used race to pander to the worst in white voters. Others have allowed it to fester, ignored.
So our hopes lie in tatters, Lenard Clark in a coma, and it is, at least in part, because no president since Lyndon Johnson has put the moral authority of his office behind the conviction that racism is repugnant and wrong. Our presidents, like many of our people, have grown comfortable pretending racism is dead and gone, or intractable and insoluble.
I recall what Jefferson said about slavery, decades before the Civil War: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
And I wish Bill Clinton Godspeed.
xxxx