Despair in Brooklyn

A PHOTOGRAPH IN LAST Thursday's New York Times showed James Sinkler after hearing that his son, Tyrone, was one of two students killed in the corridors of Brooklyn's Thomas Jefferson High School.

The odd thing, however, was that Sinkler wasn't sobbing or hysterical--neither was Linda Moore, whose son Ian was also shot to death, in another picture. Rather, Sinkler is seen wearing a baseball cap, one hand resting on his hip, the other on a gate in the school. His eyes seem closed, but they're not. He's just looking down to the cement ground, as if the answers are to be found in the cracks on the pavement.

From the picture, the only sign that Moore has been crying is the white tissue hanging from her hand. Otherwise, her expression is almost identical to that of Sinkler, in the photo above--upper lip tucked in under lower lip, eyes blank. This same expression covers the faces of the teenage girls whose pictures were taken on the scene of the incident at Thomas Jefferson High.

What does it mean when people are so desperate, so hopeless, so shocked by random violence that they can't even express their emotions? Or when children are so used to misery that they react to it with the callousness of adults who have witnessed years of tragedy?

THE INCIDENT AT Thomas Jefferson was not just "one more illustration of the horrors of Black urban poverty," as so many white liberal columnist will undoubtedly term it over the course of the next few weeks (if they choose to write about it at all). Rather, it was an outrageous and tremendously upsetting event bred from a system of institutionalized and governmental imprisonment and oppression.

Worlds such as East New York, where the shooting took place are just that--isolated, enclosed prisons. As a social worker last summer for a group in Manhattan which advocates in family court for poor kids from broken families, I went to East New York several times. From Canal Street in lower Manhattan, it's good half-hour subway ride to the eastern heart of Brooklyn, and the land of East New York.

Like Roxbury and Dorchester and other urban ghettoes across America, East New York sits far away from the glitter of the center of the city. The term "inner city" is ironic--ghettoes like East New York, Bedford Stuyvesant and Jamaica, Queens in Brooklyn are about as far away as one can get from the inner city without actually leaving the metropolitan area. They're isolated, lonely places whose evils and troubles are not permitted to touch the sanctity of the true "inner city."

Perhaps the most striking thing about East New York is its enclosed, suffocating feeling. Most of the people live in the city's housing projects--brown brick buildings with narrow, dimly-lit corridors and miniature apartments. The schools, such as Thomas Jefferson High, have thick steel mesh spread across each broken window, and iron fences topped with masses of razor wire which surround the school and its playground.

Some of these school--unlike Thomas Jefferson--force their students to march through metal detectors in the beginning of each school day.

The point is that symbols and facts of imprisonment, of oppression, are everywhere.

WHEN I TRAVELED to East New York, it was always to visit children who were no more than five or six years old. They were always foster children just like Frank, the seven-year-old foster child living in Linda Moore's apartment. In fact, many families in East New York take one or more foster children into their homes, an act which brings cash into the household, but which also adds more children to a ghetto already flooded with them.

Underneath all this gunfire and poverty lies a sea of children, born and bred, or born and brought, to East New York. The cycle is obvious and it is apparent on the faces in the pictures. The young kids in East New York today will inherit about as much hope as their older sibling possess, and they in turn absorb the desperation and the pain of James Sinkler and Linda Moore.

The cycle needs to be broken, and it won't happen by dumping metal detectors in every ghetto high school. Of course, this move might prevent kids from bringing weapons into the classroom. But it's hardly reasonable to suggest that yet another mechanism of entrapment, one more resemblance to prison life would answer the dejection which thrives in East New York.

That's why it's so discouraging to watch the Democratic candidates squabble and bicker when they could be changing the way things work in this country. Mayor David Dinkins was on his way to Thomas Jefferson to visit what it termed one of the most violent high schools in New York when the shooting took place. What should have been an easy media sound-bite ended up as Dinkins trying to comfort an auditorium of terrorized students.

He shouldn't just have been there on a pointless political mission. To firm up his image during charges of corruption, Dinkins might find it convenient to seem as if he is doing something positive instead of just squandering public resources. But, to really make a difference, he should find something substantial to do for these children.

The dead bodies of Tyrone Sinkler and Ian Moore, as well as the unsalvageable life of young Khalil Sumpter, the 15-year-old "gunman," testify to the fact that ghetto violence and ghetto frustrations are no longer confined to the streets. No longer can we assume that kids leave their problems at the wire fence entrance to the schoolhouse.

In fact, it seems that in East New York, where each dark corner brings a new worry, and children are raised on barred windows and by single parents, the only thing strong enough to break through society's barriers is an intolerable and fuming desperate frustration--and bullets.