Invisible Prejudice

ON OCTOBER 27, the New York Mets won the World Series, and a race fight broke out on the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst. Strange, that a baseball game should touch off a series of white versus Black fights, vandalism and harassment. Or is it?

Baseball is, after all, a wholly American past time, with a wholly American past. The major leagues banned Black players until Jackie Robinson made it to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. And Boston schools were segregated until the 1970s. Racism is hardly lacking a past in this Land of the Free or in its favorite sport.

But racism is no longer a fashionable topic of discussion either here at Harvard, on other college campuses or in the Real World. It's not talked about in the dining halls or in the Yard as it was in the '60s and '70s. Has racism dissipated? Has it become accepted? Is racism just not overt anymore?

A GOOD FRIEND of mine was a class representative for the 350th celebration in September. One day she and her parents were waiting in the Quincy House lobby along with the families of the other representatives.

Her father, a Black man in his fifties, was dressed in a business suit, as were the other men in the lobby. Like the other men in the lobby, he was not wearing a name tag. A Harvard employee approached him and asked who he was and what he was doing standing in the lobby.

She didn't approach any of the white men with name tags.

When my friend told me of her experience, I was shocked and angered that she would be insulted and harassed here at Harvard, in the liberal North. I live in the deep South and have come to expect such despicable behavior there. The parents of a friend of mine there, for example, did not allow him to watch The Jeffersons because the sitcom was about a Black family.

My "liberal Yankee" views quickly gave me the reputation in high school of being a "nigger-lover." Many of my high school classmates were outraged when I refused to agree with them that Blacks are inferior to whites. I came up to school here in the cold North hoping to find something different. Instead, I have found a community often uncommitted to change, or at least unaware that it needs to change.

People here do not see the shacks along the backroads of Mississippi and Louisiana--broken down huts that are homes to rural Blacks. They don't see urban classrooms in which students must leave the communal books before they go home in the afternoons, the classrooms in which 11th graders are taught English as a means of understanding a telephone book or deciphering a movie schedule in a newspaper.

Racism, like most evils, exists in varying degrees. Attitudes in the South--and elsewhere, even at Harvard--are desperately in need of reform and probably will be for years to come. Saying that everything is okay now, that the fight for civil rights was fought and won in the 1960s is naive and dangerous.