A More Perfect Union

In 1903, W. E. B. Dubois wrote The Souls of Black Folks. One of the text's central themes is how it feels to be a problem. He was speaking to the dilemma in which African-Americans found themselves around the turn of the century. In 1997, the issue of African-Americans and their relationship to the body politic of the United States is still crucial.

While at Harvard, I have been able to focus most of my attention on academic questions concerning race and ethnicity in the United States. Given progressive attitudes that usually permeate this campus, many of the problems that my fellow brothers outside college face in their day-to-day lives are conspicuously absent from mine. As I near the end of my tenure at Harvard, however, the problems that have been raging beyond its ivory walls are encroaching upon my life.

For several months now, I have anxiously awaited my return to New York City. Having spent the majority of the last eight years in New England, I feel ready to re-assume residence in my place of birth. At the same time, I am fearful of my homeland. In 1993, Republican Rudolph Giuliani defeated David Dinkins, an incumbent Democratic mayor. That was one of the first signs of the impending conservative shift that swept the nation in 1994.

Giuliani won on a platform stressing that he could eradicate crime in the city, then considered to be spiraling out of control. Since he became mayor, crime in white middle-class neighborhoods has fallen. Unfortunately, I live in a weak working-class-to-poor neighborhood comprised mostly of Caribbean immigrants. Since Giuliani's take over, we have not seen the decrease in crime promised; instead, we have seen an increase.

The surge has come from police officers.

Since taking office, Giuliani has crippled the Civilian Review Board and supported the New York Police Department (NYPD) in all actions, at best ignoring and oftentimes supporting white supremacist officers in their destruction of civil rights. When the New York Civil Liberties Union found that the number of police brutality claims had risen 32 percent in one year during his tenure, Mayor Giuliani did not rush to scrutinize his army in blue, but blasted the report.

The most troubling aspect of this rampant violence is the attitude of white New Yorkers. Most continue to support the police department and Giuliani in spite of the Mayor's racially polarizing politics and supremacist actions.

When I see a mayor gutting a Civilian Review Board, saying that it has no right or authority to monitor the police department, I begin to wonder about the "democracy" in which I reside. When I see white New Yorkers and the media--with the single exception of the Village Voice--ignoring the rise in police brutality cases and praising the Giuliani administration's "tough on crime" stance, I wonder what kind of community the United States is.

In 1989, the United States condemned China's government for supporting military action against students in Tiananmen Square. In 1997, a mayor who has made the police department the private army of city hall with no accountability to the citizens of New York City remains popular among his constituents. They have conveniently chosen to disregard the lack of action against the police, even as three unarmed black men were killed between June 13 and July 4 of 1996.

Like most residents of the United States, I think that crime is abhorrent and below contempt in a civil society. But I also believe that the worst crime is state-backed violence against a citizenry. When most of my white colleagues leave Harvard, they will enter a world where violence is something viewed on the evening news or in a Quentin Tarrantino movie. I, on the other hand, will not only see it in my community, but have a good chance of being a victim myself. To whom can I take my concerns?

The very people employed by my tax dollars to create a high "quality of life" are the ones who pose a danger to both my civil rights and my own well-being. The NYPD and the many others like it throughout the nation purvey America's most treacherous kind of violence.

Such issues, however, go undiscussed at Harvard. While the community seems willing to discuss the effects of affirmative action, black majority congressional districts and "discrimination" against white people, no one at the University has addressed issues of systematic white supremacy. No one cares to discuss inequalities in the criminal justice system, the intentional underfunding of schools with black and Latino majorities and police brutality which continue to threaten the lives of blacks and Latinos throughout the nation.

Intelligent white people are so caught up in the idea of combating crime in post-Cold War America that they are unable to see that their support of the prison industrial complex and the virtually all-white police force is the greatest threat to "quality of life" in the nation.

Yet I am not surprised at the direction the United States has traveled. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, white supremacy reared its ugly head, rolling back the progressive laws enacted to secure the freedom and agency of black Americans. After 1877, the New South planted fields of cotton drenched in the blood of black men savagely murdered by lynch mobs that contained town sheriffs, in much the same way inner-city police continue to murder African-Americans without restraint, remorse or reproach.

The United States has no moral integrity. For over 200 years it has inculcated its citizens with lies and pipe dreams about a nation of "immigrants." It tends to disregard the millions of Africans brought as cargo, the millions of Native Americans who had occupied the land for centuries before the first European arrived and the millions of Latinos whose forbears slept one night and woke up the next day as a people oppressed by the United States.

I still feel, however, that there is hope for humanity's most radical experiment. The nation can be saved before becoming the greatest tragedy in recorded history. But this can only happen if European-Americans no longer rely on demagogues like Giuliani, Gingrich, Wilson and Buchanan for the cathartic feeling of being fed lies packaged in pretty phrases.

Instead of looking at inner-cities as colonies to be tamed and exploited, white people must wade in the water and challenge the systemic and personal racism which has retarded the spiritual and moral growth of the nation and destroyed urban centers. The search for enlightenment must replace the surge of repression if the United States is to strive and thrive in the next century.

Joshua D. Bloodworth is a senior living in Pforzheimer House.