A Call to Educational Arms

GIVEN the recent Supreme Court decisions narrowing the scope of civil rights, minority leaders agree that the gains procured by the 1960s Civil Rights Movement have been effectively set back. African Americans as well as all other minority groups in this country will have to accept the harsh reality of a new era being thrust upon them.

In the latter half of this decade it has become too apparent that the conservative right is no longer willing to tolerate affirmative action policies as a means of redressing past injustices. This harsh new era has also seen the zeal of the Civil Rights Movement wane in a generation that did not experience the horrors of sanctioned and institutionalized racism.

The stark reality is that the movement's message has become like a tiresome and empty reverberation of a steel drum upon disinterested ears. If minorities are ever to move beyond the call for true equality and actually achieve it on all levels in this nation, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s has got to give way to an updated version suitable for the 1990s.

BEFORE that can occur, however, it must be realized that the racism that exists today is not the same as that which precipitated the movement for equality almost thirty years ago. Segregation, for example, although no longer legal, quite ostensibly still mars many of this country's major businesses.

This newer form of racism is a much more insidious, much subtler one that would not even make headlines if its steady undercurrent had not pervaded the ethos of lower-class white Americans. The gruesome consequence of this ethos can be seen in two noteworthy instances: Howard Beach and, more recently, Bensonhurst.

Even Harvard is not immune to such occurrences, as I learned first hand from an episode almost two years ago when I was a first-year student. It came unexpectedly from a white student who, under normal circumstances, was cordial to me. But during one evening of heavy drinking, he came at me, unprovoked, hurling out that much abhorred racial epithet that is a corruption of the word "Negro."

Out of the naive fear that a victim sometimes feels of causing a potential scandal, compounded by my being a newly-arrived student, I chose almost immediately not to report the incident. It certainly served, though, to dispel any assumptions that I'd been under of Harvard's being solely a place of enlightened beings. Although he did apologize later, the student had quickly displayed his readiness--no matter how irrational--to take out his frustrations on someone different from himself.

Though many lower-income white Americans would not go to the extreme of exhibiting such violence, they nevertheless harbor as much pent-up anger. They feel that policies such as affirmative action--established to bring African Americans and other minorities to economic and social parity--infringe upon their rights. After all, they contend, they are not responsible for the grave injustices perpetrated against African Americans 30, 50 or 150 years ago.

HOW must we combat or, at the very least, address such hostility? Certainly, racially-motivated attacks by a few ignorant individuals must continually be denounced. But the new Civil Rights Movement must also move beyond what has now become merely an habitual sounding for the prosecution of such persons.

An effort at dialogue with society at large, such as that which Spike Lee has attempted to generate with his latest film Do the Right Thing, has got to be pursued now more than ever. Otherwise, today's subtler version of white racism will continue to go unnoticed, and more poor, uneducated Blacks will respond to their economic plight with the much publicized alternative that seems the easiest way out--turning to drugs.

Besides the maintenance of dialogue with the general population, civil rights leaders of this new era must also realize that, to a larger extent, change will have to come from within.

Education will have to emanate from the top directed specifically toward the lower economic stratum of the community, who were never great economic beneficiaries of the advances made by the movement. The alternative is the perpetuation of an endless cycle of a selectively small percentage who are able to go on to higher education while the vast majority languishes uneducated.

Educated African Americans, then, will have to bear the responsibility--perhaps an unfairly greater and more burdensome share than in the past--of reaching out to and educating the remainder of the community. They will have to carry it out with the passion--with the intellectual militance--that characterized the pursuit for equality in the early 1960s.

Adopting this new attitude is necessary if ideals are to be radically transformed, so that books, for example, can be seen to be more important than any status gotten from the stereotypical gold chains.

If this country hopes to adequately combat racism and the resulting inequality, the first step inevitably must be a new agenda. As the Bush administration sends out the signal that civil rights have not suffered as severe a setback as the flag, the concept of African American self-education, coupled with vigorous dialogue with the general population, will have to figure more prominently in the decade to come.