Schoolboy Racists

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The new upper-class white racism, introduced on our campuses by upper-class white kids at Dartmouth College through The Dartmouth Review and brought to Harvard by The Harvard Salient which is now joined by Peninsula magazine, must be put on notice in the firmest language that its viciousness toward Black people will not be tolerated.

Black at Harvard--students, faculty and staff--have a special obligation to make this unmistakably clear, to let the neurotic racists who run Peninsula like Roger Landry and Adam Jones understand that their offensive racist games at the expense of Afro-Americans are unacceptable.

This point of refusing to tolerate the neoconservatives' and the New Right's white racist shenanigans must be made as strongly as Rabbi Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League has made it clear to Americans that a rebirth of anti-Semitism (like the vicious movement of deny the existence of the Holocaust) will no to be tolerated. "Never again...Never again..."

As the Peninsula's sick little poster displaying a Black female stripping in the presence of a white male audience indicates, there is a spreading pathology of white racist perspectives among too many of our countrymen.

In face of this rot, I don't believe that Afro-Americans can afford the Booker T. Washington-tyupe of calmness or indifference toward racist patterns that so many neconservative Black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and Glenn Loury traffic in.

I, for one, do not traffic in this Washingtonian and Black conservative delusion. I daresay that Roger Landry, Adam Jones and other members of Peninsula would not dare fashion an anti-Italian poster with a denigrating reference to the Mafia, or an anti-Jewish poster with a denigrating, anti-Semitic reference to Jewish Americans. The Peninsula crowd of schoolboy racists would not dare do this....

Let me conclude by expressing my concurrence with the cogent and sharp response to this latest racist incident at Harvard that one of our Black undergraduates, Tamara Duckworth '92, made in an interview to The Boston Globe. Duckworth, remarked that--"I consider the language of this [Peninsula] poster to be nothing less than hate speech, and that this kind of racism can be cloaked under the guise of free speech in an outrage." Martin L. Kilson   Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government