The Mutiny

[This is the third installment of the Mutinyblogging series. You can find the first two parts here and here.]


Chief Engineer MacPhearson: "Gentlemen, it seems that we are not all in agreement"
Mike Nelson: "I disagree!"

Chief Engineer MacPhearson was one of the main mutineers in the 1988 sci-fi cinematic abomination Space Mutiny. He joined forces with those trying to undermine the leadership of Captain Santa Claus and steer their ship, the Southern Sun, in a new direction. What made him do it? It's not entirely clear, but any time the chief engineer of a spaceship agrees to ally with someone whose plan involves blowing things up on that spaceship, he must be serious. If Space Mutiny were actually a good movie and not just easy pickings for the folks at MST3K, it might have explored what happens to a person to make him turn on those to which he was once loyal. What does it take to sever that bond? At what point does someone fall out of line to the point of rebellion?

A year after this turd went straight to video, I started high school in suburban Philadelphia. My family moved to the area in 1987 and I started my freshman year at Wissahickon High in Ambler in 1989. Wissahickon was a more diverse school than I'd ever attended in the past. Being the public high school for four separate (and demographically diverse) communities, it had students from families who ranged from the extremely wealthy to the barely scraping by. The school was still mostly white, but African-Americans and Asian-Americans comprised over 10% of the student body each.

As with any school district, its growing diversity was an important subject for parents in the district. More and more families in the wealthier communities of Blue Bell and Lower Gwynedd were sending their kids to private school, while it was an open secret that some students, nearly all African-American, were registered as residents of a relative's house in order to avoid having to go to a Philadelphia public school. The school had a reputation for being a failing school (by suburban standards), which I never quite understood, but was apparently the reason why so many of my neighbors in Blue Bell attended the local private schools.

During my senior year in the fall of 1992, a few racially charged incidents prompted an effort by school officials to address the problem with a "Multicultural Awareness Week." As a result, a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer came to the school, sat in on classes, interviewed a bunch of my classmates, and wrote a series of articles about the "Fast Forward Generation," a term that was quickly trumped by the infamous tag "Generation X." But despite all of this exposure and soul-searching on who we were and how we were changing the rules on race relations, the opposite of the desired effect occurred. People became more polarized and more angry over the incidents that happened. At the time, I paid little attention to what happened or why, but as the years wore on, I never stopped wondering what happened that year at Wissahickon High.

After being unable to find those articles online, or even in the Inquirer archives, I contacted the reporter, Tanya Barrientos, and she was kind enough to send them to me. This is the one on race relations that described one event that led to the unraveling of our administrators' good intentions.

STUDENTS RUSHED IN FROM FOOTBALL practice, cheerleading and a host of other obligations and entered the soft lights of the school auditorium. In the presence of the wide wooden stage, the empty seats and the room's dark calmness, they lowered their teenage voices to almost a whisper.

They'd come for rehearsal, the last one before the big show, and their nerves were tight. Typical pre-show jitters.

But this performance wouldn't be like others at Wissahickon High School. It wouldn't be Lil' Abner or The Sound of Music or even Death of a Salesman. It would concern life the way Wissahickon students live it every day, and its message would be a plea for understanding and tolerance between people of different races and nationalities.

During rehearsal, they concentrated on the little things - a turn of the head, a brush of the hand, a lilt in the voice. Afterward, they plopped down on the soft carpet in front of the stage, sitting cross-legged or lying on their sides. A white girl leaned into the lap of a black boy. Two Asian students tore open a bag of potato chips and passed them around. Hands of all different shades of pink and brown reached into the sack.

The actors talked about the show, eating, laughing, worrying. Maybe the skits were too harsh. Maybe they should have thought of some other way to discuss such a touchy subject. Maybe they should just forget it.

"I don't know what kind of reaction to expect," said Tom Kanter, a lanky white freshman with a touch of a European accent.

"I wonder if people will be honest," added Paul Oh, a Korean American who sat next to his black friends.

Assistant principal Priscilla Linden clapped her hands to get the actors' attention.

"We're going to have you come off the stage after the skits and open the discussion," she said. "It may get emotional. Remember, we're striving for an understanding of different opinions."

Linden tried to prepare them. Be ready for anything, she said. It might get ugly. It might get mean.

THERE WAS, REALLY, LITTLE NEED TO WARN this group about conflict. They are members of the Fast Forward Generation, schooled in the hard knocks of rising unemployment, disintegrating families, street violence and racial tension. They have largely foresworn the optimistic idealism of their parents' generation for a steely-eyed pragmatism.

Their parents may have worn bell-bottoms and Afros and protested the Vietnam War or marched for civil rights, but for Fast Forwards that's history. The majority of the Class of '93 was born in 1975, more than a decade after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream with an ailing nation. For them, events that moved a previous generation, such as the march from Selma to Montgomery, are just snippets of grainy black-and-white video they see in class.

In their lifetimes, they've seen David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klansman, run for public office - and win - on a white supremacist platform. They've seen Jesse Jackson, a black civil rights leader, try to win the presidency on the strength of a "rainbow coalition." They were sophomores when Rodney King was beaten on the streets of Los Angeles, juniors when the city erupted after four officers were acquitted of assault in the case. In the fall of their senior year, Bill Clinton headed for the White House after a campaign guided by the politics of inclusion. This spring, on the eve of their graduation, they watched the nation search its own stance on racial equality as a second jury weighed the evidence and presented a mixed verdict in the second Rodney King trial.

Their experience offers no coherent view of where their society is heading. Instead, they've been left to find their own way. Sometimes, it leads to uncertainty, fear or worse.

...

The Fast Forwards are the children that Dr. King was dreaming about when in 1963 he voiced the hope that one day "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

The scene at Wissahickon High over the last school year suggests that the dream has been at least partly realized. The Montgomery County high school draws its 979 students from the communities of Ambler, Blue Bell, Whitpain and Lower Gwynedd; they live in financial circumstances that run the spectrum from modest rowhouses to rambling country estates. The student body is 77 percent white, 11 percent African American, 10 percent Asian, 1.3 percent Hispanic and 0.2 percent American Indian.

Black, Asian, white and Hispanic youths play together, go to school together and live in the same suburban developments. They'll be the first to say that racism is not as blatant as it was a generation ago, that open bigotry is not socially acceptable. Many of them enjoy interracial friendships that are deep and honest. Some share interracial love.

But even where Dr. King's dream has nurtured harmony, misunderstandings, resentments, even covert hatreds have lingered.

NOBODY EVER CAME UP TO my face and said any racial slurs or anything," says Tamira Fennell, a Wissahickon senior who is black. "But it's like you hear stories about other kids in the school being racist, about kids you see every day. They are friends to your face, but they do things behind your back. It's weird. "

In a survey of more than 2,000 of the nation's top-achieving high school students, 43 percent of the black students and 29 percent of the white students reported some sort of racial violence at their schools. The survey, administered by Who's Who Among American High School Students and released in January, also found that 56 percent of the black students said they had experienced racial discrimination. Fourteen percent of the white students said they had, too.

On any given day at Wissahickon High, you can see black and white and Asian students sharing the halls, the lunchroom and casual friendships with one another. Signs posted on the corridor walls invite all comers to the Asian Studies Club and the Black Studies Club. Black and white cheerleaders cheer the Trojans to victory together. Aspiring musicians, black and white, work together to create rap songs about getting along.

But there are invisible walls, vague lines that mark forbidden territory. Wearing a T-shirt with a slogan ("It's a black thing / You wouldn't understand") or a baseball cap emblazoned with DUKE (as in David) can be interpreted as an act of disparagement. Perceived insult can flare into fiery debate, anger and sometimes violence.

After I got my driver's license, I inherited my mom's '84 Oldsmobile to get me to and from school every day. I was beginning my junior year at Wissahickon. Even at that age, I'd developed a strong interest in politics. My dad, a lifelong Democrat from Brooklyn, introduced me to a show he'd been listening to on New York's sports radio station. It became a staple of my morning drive to class for the last two years of high school. The host was an obnoxious curmudgeon, surrounded by a cast of characters doing impersonations and telling off-color jokes. While most of my politically apathetic friends and classmates were listening to Howard Stern, I was tuned into Imus in the Morning.

Towards the end of my junior year, Bill Clinton appeared on the show right before the New York Democratic Primary. And after he won that primary, Don Imus proudly boasted about helping this southern Governor as he was on his way to becoming the first Democrat elected to the White House since I was a toddler. And while some may have looked at him as the man coming along to heal this nation's racial divide, I certainly didn't see him that way. He was just a skilled politician playing to the crowd. Besides, America's racial divide had already been healed - or at least that was the impression I had.

Looking back at my years at Wissahickon, I don't remember any invisible walls, and I certainly don't remember a lot of forbidden territory. I found Wissahickon High to be a place where my classmates and I had equal opportunity and lived by the same rules. We all had the same teachers, the same textbooks, and the same silly dress code in gym class. It was a place where if you had respect for others, you received respect back. If you worked hard, you were rewarded. If you made mistakes, you were punished. Race played no role in that.

My recollection of what the school dubbed Multicultural Awareness Week is kind of spotty. My friends and I approached the week with a heavy amount of cynicism, but that could have been said about almost anything. We weren't part of "the problem" and we weren't affected by it. We already had a diverse group of friends, and we were comfortable enough with our (mostly superficial) cultural differences to joke about them. We didn't offend each other, and racial tension didn't exist. As one of the small number of Jews in the school, I never experienced any kind of anti-Semitism or exclusion. Racism was something from the past that you could draw humor from, and we often did. Even things like the Rodney King verdict seemed like more of an issue of class over race to us. But as we'd find out that week, not everyone in the school was removed from the black eye of America's past as much as we were.

Multicultural Awareness Week was certainly filled with good intentions, but it ended with an environment where anyone wearing a Duke University hat or a Malcolm X hat had to prove to everyone that they weren't a racist. Those who wanted to make race an issue at Wissahickon succeeded.

Howard Ehrlich, director of research for the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence in Baltimore, says many suburban teens are confused about racism because they don't see economic and social inequalities based on race firsthand.

Students at Wissahickon agree, saying that some white students can't understand how a black student who lives in an exclusive neighborhood and drives an expensive car could experience discrimination.

"It confuses them, it confuses their parents, it confuses the whole society," says Ehrlich. "That's because we've done such a poor job explaining to these young people what the demographic situation really is in our society."

At Wissahickon, students learned how insidious that confusion can be.

THE DRAWINGS FIRST APPEARED during the 1991-92 school year.

Crude stick figures were drawn on the chalkboards in math class and English class and science, strange drawings of a stick man blasting a gun at other stick figures. Underneath were the letters SWAT.

"We didn't have a clue to what it was," says Lynette Wright, a black girl who is now a senior.

The drawings stayed up on the boards. Nobody erased them.

Then swastikas appeared. In the bathrooms. On lockers.

And somebody took soap and scrawled a swastika on the windshield of a Jewish student's car. She just walked out to the parking lot and found her car defaced one day. And the next. And then again the next.

Rumors began to swirl. Who could have drawn such things? There were no skinheads at the school. No army-booted, heavy-handed racists. No in-your-face junior Klansmen. Not that anyone knew about, anyway.

Through the grapevine, students learned what SWAT stood for: Superior White Attack Team.

Nobody knew just how to react.

"When we found out what it meant, it was still on the chalkboard," says Wright. "So one of us got up and erased it."

But rubbing out the letters didn't make SWAT go away.

When school elections rolled around, SWAT got to the ballots.

"No niggers in office" was the handwritten protest scratched on a handful of the ballots. Four black girls were running for office.

Assistant principal Linden says students complained about the insulting graffiti and lodged "reports of some strong-armed tactics," like pushing and shoving and name-calling by SWAT members before and after the elections.

The school administration cracked down, suspending the half-dozen SWAT members whom students helped identify. But the administrators knew that SWAT had done much more than physical damage to Wissahickon.

Principal Henry VandeWater says he wanted to be open and honest about what had happened, and what it meant. With the students. With the parents. With himself. "We had to spend time on it," he says, "just to make school a safe place for kids and, further, to have respect for other human beings."

TWO DOZEN STUDENTS - black, white, Asian and Hispanic - came to Linden and asked her to help them heal their school. But, Linden says, the students were pessimistic, convinced there was little they could do to change their classmates' minds about racism. "So we (the faculty) said, if you can't change people's hearts, what are you going to do to change their behavior?"

The group came up with an idea: Sensitivity Day, a day of honest evaluation. A day to teach and learn about each other. They decided to perform skits depicting incidents of intolerance that had actually happened in the hallways of Wissahickon.

"The group came in voluntarily over the summer to talk about it and plan it," says Linden. Gradually Sensitivity Day grew into Multicultural Awareness Week, an event that included not only the skits, but three other days of activities including guest speakers and an ethnic food festival.

But it was the skits that the students cared about most.

"I didn't expect anyone to take it seriously," says Nelson Stewart, one of the actors. "I thought everyone would think it was a big joke."

Linden told the actors to be prepared for a serious response. The group would do the skits for each class - freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors - in separate performances. After the skits, Linden would ask the students to comment on the show.

She asked for honesty. Yet nobody expected the reaction they got, especially from the seniors.

THE AUDITORIUM DARKENED AND the senior class settled into a restless hush.

Stage lights came up. The actors appeared.

The first skit: students in class. The teacher says today's lesson is about the black poet Langston Hughes. What about the Irish? one student asks. What about the Native Americans? What about the Spanish? The students on stage stand and look at the audience. "We all contributed to America," they shout.

Blackout. The audience is quiet.

Second skit: Students on stage act as if they're hanging out in the hallway, watching two Asian boys walk to class. The bystanders whisper and call out insults as the boys pass by: "Rice paddies." "Slanted-eye gooks." ''Ohhh, here comes Bruce Lee." The Asian boys stare straight ahead. Then one of the white bystanders asks a white classmate for the answer to a math problem.

"Why don't you ask those Chinks over there?" he replies. "They always have the right answer."

Blackout. Muffled giggles ripple through the audience.

Third skit: There is a locker on stage. One student walks up to it and paints KKK, saying: "We just want to keep our white culture pure." Another student draws a swastika on the locker. A third walks up and writes "SWAT," then turns to the audience and punches his fist into the air. "White Power!" he yells.

Blackout. The audience grumbles, growing uneasy.

Fourth skit: Four black girls appear on stage, hanging out. "What's up, black?" says one to the group. "What's up, nigger?" says another, giving her friends a high five. A white girl walks up to join the group. "What's up, nigger?" she says. The black girls freeze, stunned. "Who you calling nigger, white girl?" they say in unison.

Blackout. A voice, bold and angry, pierces the dark: "Yeah, that's right!"

Last skit: A black boy and a white girl walk down the hallway arm in arm. Black girls hanging around in the halls throw out insults. "I can't handle that jungle fever." "She's gotta be givin' something up to get him. "''Ohhh, look at the hoochie." "Hey, blood, why you with her?"

Blackout.

The show was over. There was little applause. Now, it was time to talk.

We were stunned. Sitting way up in the back of the auditorium, my friends and I weren't sure what the hell we'd just watched. It was like a series of bizarre comedy sketches that weren't funny. Whatever it was, it had absolutely no relevance to our daily lives. At the time, I hadn't even heard of SWAT and knew nothing of the other incidents. Having gone to a more rural elementary school where I actually witnessed and experienced some discrimination as a Jew, I had no idea why it was so important to explain tolerance to a student body that, for me, seemed so far ahead of the curve on that front. If someone had actually just explained to us the incidents that prompted this soul searching, we might have had some context. But instead, the assumption was made that all of this latent racism was just simmering under the surface, ready to boil over. Instead, what was simmering under the surface was a resentment over how easy it was becoming to paint so many of us as being racist and in need of a week to address the problem.

As I left Wissahickon at the end of that year, my inclination was to believe that the attempts to fix the sins of our racially intolerant past were becoming a greater threat than the lingering racism itself. Reading the article again, one thing that really struck me was the eerie parallel between what happened with the Duke hats and last year's spectacle in Durham. Many of my classmates would have killed to be like David Evans, Reade Seligmann, and Colin Finnerty. As far as spring sports went, baseball got second-billing at Wissahickon. Lacrosse was king. Our lacrosse team was often ranked in the top 10 in the state, and was sometimes the only public school on that list. A lot of the best lacrosse players in the area would go to private school, but for those who remained at Wissahickon, it was still a great opportunity to excel at a sport that few people played, do well on the SAT's, and maybe end up playing lacrosse at a prestigious school like Duke.

As I'd mentioned, after multicultural awareness week, the school became well-aware that a Duke hat or T-shirt might not be a sign of being a fan of the Blue Devils. It might be a sign that the person wearing it was a racist. No one could know for sure. Just to be safe, though, it made sense not to wear those things at all, lest you be misunderstood. And as we found out with the Duke Lacrosse case, this phenomenon can still happen today. For those whose motivation is to always make race an issue, it was easy to look at the accused and draw a conclusion based upon little more than their Duke lacrosse uniforms. Even the District Attorney got caught up in the hysteria and managed to spike his career over it.

It's been over 14 years since that assembly, and it seems like we've actually gone backwards when it comes to race relations. The latest embarrassment was when Don Imus, who in 1992 was so proud of helping Bill Clinton make his way to the White House, was forced to put down his microphone after saying something offensive in a lame attempt to be funny. We've become so focused on race and oversensitive about what offends us that we've completely lost our ability to just treat people as people. Watching Don Imus get painted as some kind of common bigot made me wonder who has changed more, him or us. And if it's us, is the change actually doing anything to improve the situation?

There's no doubt that real bigotry still exists in this country, but as we've tried like mad to be hypersensitive about what we say and who we offend, the racial divide just continues. We've scrubbed the textbooks and put Huckleberry Finn back on the shelf, but the same arguments keep happening, only with different words and symbols. As the senior class of Wissahickon High sat in that auditorium in the fall of 1992, a mutiny was about to take place.

LINDEN CAME TO THE MICRO-phone and explained that the students had the opportunity to discuss the skits, or their reactions to the skits, or anything else they wanted. The actors stood in a clump in front of the stage. Nobody in the audience responded.

"We don't want you guys to just sit there," said one of the actors. "If you feel something, say it."

The comments came first in a trickle, and then in a stream, and then they flooded the auditorium with tension.

"The government and the media promotes racism," said a white student. ''Like on college applications, you have to mark what you are, like Hispanic or black or whatever. I mean, it just puts everybody in categories."

"All the skits were overexaggerated," said another white student. "I don't think it was right to put up the SWAT thing, because that's pointing out a group in our school. "

One of the black actors responded: "That's the point. These are things that have happened at this school. "

"If anyone knows the story behind SWAT," began a white student, "it was a black person who blew it way out of proportion. . . . You guys are offended by the KKK or a swastika, well, I'm offended by Malcolm X."

"What do you know about Malcolm X?" a black student shouted out.

"Look, Malcolm X hates," the white classmate replied. "He preached against white people, and the people who wear those X hats know that. "

Another black student shot back: "I don't understand how anyone here can say SWAT was a big joke. It was no joke. You don't joke about that. If we are going to make this world a better place, we're going to have to start here. "

The arguments ran from interracial dating to SWAT to Malcolm X and from white pride to black pride. Students blamed the media. They blamed each other. They blamed their parents. They blamed political correctness.

The teachers, struggling to stay out of the conversation, were visibly uncomfortable.

"Like this Rodney King thing," said a white student. "Rodney King was on drugs, it was his fault. . . . It wasn't a racial thing, but the media turns everything into a racial scandal. They showed that tape over and over and over, and you never saw a tape of any white people getting beat up. "

A black student shouted out: "Oh, please. You didn't see that white truck driver over and over? "

"Look," pleaded one white student, his voice cracking with emotion. "You won't be able to change people. Sometimes your parents are just one way, and if you're brought up like that. . . . You have to be able to live with your family. "

"Well," answered a black classmate, "your parents may not be right."

"The welfare lines are black, crime is black, and that's why people are racist," a white classmate said.

A black student came to the microphone.

"Why don't we all just judge people as people? Stop wearing X's and Duke hats. It's all about hate. I know because... because...."

She began to sob. Her words were incomprehensible. She looked up, horrified, and ran out the door.

The bell rang. Sensitivity Day was over.

Graduation day and college couldn't come soon enough for me. On graduation night, my friends and I drank beer in the woods behind my house - until the arrival of several cops, who shined a flashlight on us until we abandoned our illegally acquired goods and hightailed it to Route 73. But we were still kids with opportunity, and we were ready to enjoy it as we ventured off to college that fall.

Once I returned home from Ann Arbor the following spring, the taste of extra freedom that we all got as college freshman led to a summer of testing the limits back home. With little more to do around Blue Bell other than getting wasted and going to the movies, we'd often drive around in the evening, passing a bowl around the car and stopping at Wawa (Philly's version of 7-11) whenever the munchies took hold. For once, we actually looked forward to the end of summer and the start of the new school year. For some of my friends, though, it was a last hurrah, as several of them dropped out of school in their second year.

Back in Michigan, I stayed focused on my goals, and continued to work towards graduation. I found Ann Arbor to be an amazing place to go to school. The diversity of the student body made Wissahickon seem homogeneous, but the students there still tended to make friends among those with common backgrounds. It happened to me too. For the first time in my life, I wasn't "the Jew." I had mostly Jewish friends and actually started to learn about the religion that my dad lost interest in before I was born. But I also joined a student group with many international students, as it was always in my nature to be around those who were different from me.

On October 3, 1995, I found myself in such a situation. It was the beginning of my junior year, and I was in the campus Student Union building inbetween classes. A large crowd of students were gathered around the television sets outside the food court. Nearly every single one was African-American. As the verdict was announced, there was jubilation. I stood among a crowd of bright young African-American college students celebrating a man getting away with a double homicide. Earlier that year, I'd sat speechless as a black classmate of mine adamantly refused to consider that OJ Simpson could have been guilty. It was obviously a frame-up, he pleaded with me. There was something I wasn't understanding here.

By this time in my college career, I wasn't going back home so much. That was probably a good thing. Dull nights of driving around and smoking weed turned into lines of coke at house parties in the mansions of Lower Gwynedd. By this point, I'd gotten over the myth that drugs control you rather than the other way around, but I still found it convenient to only be surrounded by it while on break from my classes. As we partied the nights away back then, we still talked about our dreams and our goals in life. Even for those whose college careers ended early, opportunity never really dried up. There were no shortages of second chances to go around.

My senior year at Michigan was a great culmination to my years in Ann Arbor. I lived in a house with 7 friends, a group as diverse as my days at Wissahickon. I shared the top floor of our off-campus house with a junior from suburban Columbus. Like me, she went to a diverse suburban high school. Also like me, she'd spent a lot of the time she was back home driving around with her friends with little to do. Unlike me, however, she didn't smoke pot, or even drink. And also unlike me, she'd been pulled over by the cops 13 times in 2 years. She was, of course, black. I must admit, the connections didn't really hit me right away, but the reality was right there for me to see. Her situation was far from unusual for someone in her shoes, and my situation was far from unusual for someone in mine. If I were an African-American, doing what my friends and I normally did, my ass would have been in jail by then.

After college, I moved out to Seattle, and the trips back home became even more infrequent - but more of the same. My friends were still living nearby, working, taking classes, getting by. One night, with supplies dried up and boredom setting in, one of them decided to take us into the city. He'd been selling insurance door to door and was getting familiar with even the neighborhoods that many white suburbanites dared not venture to, especially at night.

It was well after dark, and we drove to a neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Shabby rowhomes lined the dimly lit streets. Few people were outside. We drove to a corner where my buddy knew he'd be able to buy what we wanted. He'd done this maybe once or twice before. It's possible that he could've gotten some from someone in his own apartment building and just took us down there to impress us. I have no idea.

He parked the car near three teenagers along a chain-link fence. Everything I'd learned in my life up to that point led me to one conclusion. I was not in a safe place. White people weren't welcome in neighborhoods like this. It didn't matter who you were or what you'd ever done. In places like this, the residents seethed with hostility towards whites and you didn't want to be the one wandering around there after dark. As my buddy got out of the car, I feared the worst. Just buy the shit and let's get out of here. But as soon as the three guys saw my friend, something I absolutely didn't expect happened. The kid closest to us, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sporting a frizzy afro, turned around, faced the chain-link fence, and put his hands on top of his head.

Of all the people in that auditorium back in 1992, I doubt anyone believed that prison would be their destiny in life. And even as I sat there in the car that night, I was afraid, but not of being arrested. In all those times that we were breaking the law back then, I always assumed that if we were ever arrested, I'd be able to prove that I was a hard-working person who wasn't a threat to anyone. Even with laws that I thought were incredibly stupid, I still expected the system overall to be fair. Thankfully, I never learned how wrong I was the hard way. But the realization I had that night, and from everything I've seen since then, is that for much of black America - and even among other minority communities - the system is far from fair. What that young man was doing that night was no more of a threat to society than what we were doing. Yet for him, the mere sight of a white person instantly made him accept the fate of a trip downtown. There is a divide in this country, and it is vast.

SENSITIVITY DAY WAS SUPPOSED TO GET people talking about such things. But four months later, students still were confused.

"I don't know if we accomplished anything," said Kendra Johnson, a black student who was one of the actors. "There was a lot of anger that came up, and it was hard for us to come up with something to do after that, after everything we talked about. What do you do next? We didn't know. "

Ehrlich, of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, said this feeling was common. "In fact, what we're seeing is that there hasn't been much in the way of serious inter-group education in the past 16 years," he said. "There is a general perception that women and people of color have already made it and that we don't need to talk about those things anymore. "

"Look," said an Asian American student named Solomon Kim, trying to sum up what Wissahickon had learned from Sensitivity Day. "Our society is not colorblind. The generation in control in this country is not colorblind."

His fellow actors nodded their heads in agreement.

"It has to change when we grow up and lead our country. We have to work towards that."

In today's very polarized political climate, there are two main schools of thought on how we need to fix the lingering racial divide. One side sees the solution as one of providing economic assistance to the black community and trying to change people's behavior so that they no longer offend others. The other side sees the solution as one of expecting greater self-reliance in the black community and removing all attempts to identify ourselves by race. One side looks at hate speech and white institutional racism as the reason the black communities in this country lag behind. The other side sees rap music glorifying violence and irresponsible parenting as the culprit. Forty years beyond the civil rights movement, it seems that we are not all in agreement on how we can move forward.

I disagree.

I think both sides agree about one very big thing. Both sides in this debate choose to ignore the real culprit in what's keeping the racial divide in this country going - the drug war. And it's far more than just a series of anecdotes from my own life that demonstrate this. The statistics have become too staggering to ignore.

America's entire prison system is bursting at the seams. Despite only having 5% of the world's population, we have 25% of the world's prisoners. And within that group, the percentage of minorities is staggering. Under apartheid South Africa in 1993, 851 of every 100,000 black males were locked up in prison. In America today, the percentage of Latino males in prison is twice that high (1,717 of 100,000), and the percentage of black Americans in prison is 6 times higher (4,919 of 100,000). One out of every eight black males between the age of 25 and 29 in this country was in jail in 2004.

A lot of people look at these numbers and draw the conclusion that the black and Latino communities have become a criminal class. They believe that a person in the these communities is more likely to victimize others and that we're justified in locking so many of them up. But this ignores the reality of how most of these individuals end up behind bars in the first place. Most of them begin the all-too-common journey with a drug arrest, for standing on a corner selling drugs, for being busted with a bag of weed, for being willing to help an undercover cop find a drug dealer, or sometimes for absolutely nothing at all. Most of them don't end up in prison for victimizing others. They end up in prison for doing things that large numbers of well-to-do people in white communities get away with every day.

The issue is not that law enforcement officials are racist (most of them aren't). The issue is that the drug war allows for the kind of selective enforcement that makes it acceptable to only focus intense drug law enforcement in certain areas. Drug stings and aggressive police tactics only get employed in the areas where the voting public feels that there's a threat. And sadly, this makes many minority communities targets while other areas are ignored. As a result, the prejudices that many white Americans have about the dangerousness of minority communities have their prejudices furthered when the police are able to go into these communities and start arresting people, even though they'd be able to arrest people in any community that way.

I posted a video this past week of a drug sting that was shown on an old episode of COPS. In the video, the sting was set up on the front porch of a home. One after another, black and Latino men were walking up to the man on the porch and buying a bag of weed. As soon as the transaction was complete, a police officer (or sometimes two) would run over and tackle the person, handcuffing them and telling them they were going to jail. You could've done this sting on any college campus across America and arrested the same number of people. But these law enforcement tactics don't happen on college campuses, because if they did, there would be widespread outrage at the brutality of seeing young white college students who happen to also smoke weed being treated this way. But when it's done in a minority community, it shows up on TV in order to entertain those who've already been conditioned to believe that these people need to be taken off the streets and put behind bars.

The case of Oklahoma State basketball player JamesOn Curry is another example of the double standard in drug law enforcement. Curry was the top high school basketball player in North Carolina in 2004 and was getting ready to play ball at the University of North Carolina that fall. Instead, he was arrested along with 48 other students on drug charges after a massive undercover drug sting at the schools in his town. What had happened was that an undercover cop enrolled as a student and began asking around for help in scoring drugs. Curry had befriended the man and obtained some weed to sell to him. He was charged with four separate counts all involving possession or sale of marijuana. An undercover cop could've walked into Wissahickon High School and arrested half the senior class that way.

Curry lost his scholarship to Chapel Hill. Thankfully for him, his basketball ability led to a second chance. But for most young men in his shoes, an arrest like that just becomes the beginning of a life where there's no opportunity and little hope. Once someone has a drug conviction like that, even if they don't serve a lot of jail time, it'll be nearly impossible for them to receive financial aid, or to find good jobs. The usual result is that they stay in the drug trade, and become that kid on the street corner selling even harder drugs, waiting for the inevitable return trip back to jail.

The tales of injustices that I've seen in the past few years of following these cases are too numerous to recount here. The infamous case in Tulia, Texas is one of the most well known. A racist cop by the name of Tom Coleman was able to send 10% of a town's black population to prison despite the fact that he completely manufactured the entire case out of little more than knowing their names. It showed that in some parts of this country, the system is broken at nearly every step. But that hides the reality revealed by cases like Curry's, that show that even when cops follow the rules, they can still send large numbers of people to prison using tactics that are like shooting fish in a barrel.

Beyond law enforcement tactics, the laws themselves have also widened this divide. For over two decades now, mandatory minimum sentences for offenses involving crack-cocaine and powder cocaine were different. As a result, black defendants were funneled into prison at much higher rates than white defendants because they were more likely to be caught with the cheaper version of the same drug. All these factors, along with overly aggressive prosecutors and corruptible crime lab employees, have led to a slowly unfolding disaster in this country with the effect that our drug laws are having on minority communities. The following chart (taken from this site) shows the number of prison admissions for drug offenses per 100,000 people for both blacks and whites. It's important to remember that there's no difference in illegal drug usage rates between the two groups.



The end result in all of this is that much of the rationale for the drug war is self-perpetuating. The lack of opportunity caused by having a drug arrest on one's record leads to drug distribution networks being rooted in the same targeted neighborhoods, where there are more people who come of age believing their only path in life is to do the low-rung high-risk job of selling drugs and being carted off to jail. This, in turn, just convinces more and more people outside of those communities about the need to go in there and arrest more of them. The individuals running these drug gangs and distribution networks are almost always able to avoid being taken down, as police departments are content to just grab the low-hanging fruit in order to claim that they're making progress.

The way that these gangs compete is no different than how the organized crime syndicates of alcohol prohibition and their successors in the years since have competed - by violence. In the multi-billion dollar illegal drug industry, the most vicious people are the ones who eventually make the profits. This level of violence terrorizes our inner cities and isolates the mostly minority communities where the battles are waged. There's fear on both sides of fence, as those inside our poorest inner-city neighborhoods fear both their neighbors and the police equally, while those on the outside fear those on the inside and just want the police to fix it. All the while, the demand for drugs - coming mostly from outside those neighborhoods - is what continues to drive the market.

Culture is shaped by how people view authority. This is something that we have a lot of trouble understanding not just here, but in Iraq, as we slowly bleed to death in our occupation of that country. When a community has trust in those whose job it is to maintain justice and provide security, there's a greater sense of both liberty and opportunity that goes along with it. But when a community loses trust in those whose job it is do those things, there's a greater tendency towards rebellion, paranoia, and hopelessness. Regaining that trust is hard, but it starts with ensuring that justice exists for everyone. And when you have a system as we do here, where laws meant to protect people from their own mistakes are abused to the extent that's happening today, something needs to be done.

The progressive movement is ascendent in this country right now, and even though it hasn't been so afraid to challenge the long standing taboos over opposing a war or rejecting authoritarianism in response to terrorism, there's still very much a reluctance for anyone at a high profile in the movement to discuss this issue. The idea of even decriminalizing marijuana is still too taboo a subject for the main contenders vying for the Democratic nomination in 2008. While I understand how years of drug misinformation and fear have made those topics a difficult subject to address, the fact remains that race relations in this country are still broken, and they won't be fixed until we take away the weapon that does most of the damage. That weapon is the drug war, and it does way more damage than offensive radio personalities, rappers, or even the drugs themselves.

I count myself as being part of the progressive movement in this country. And I disagree with the broader libertarian idea that government can't be used in positive ways. But one thing that I agree government is not capable of doing is dictating our individual morality. People need to discover their own personal limits in life and to learn for themselves what sets of behaviors are most suitable to them. I was able to do that, as are most people who grow up in the parts of this country where there's privilege and opportunity. I was never a criminal for doing some of the things I did that were illegal, even though I may have been stupid for doing them. But I learned from those experiences and I'm a better person for it.

The progressive movement needs to address this problem soon. But I fear they won't. I fear they'll keep playing politics and avoiding the tough decisions that need to be made in order to start dismantling this atrocious war that has devastated our minority communities. I fear that one day I'll be part of the eventual mutiny, as those who truly want to close the divide in this country look for some other political movement to be the real deal and actually deliver on the hopes for racial reconciliation. At what point does that happen? How much time do we allow for those leading the charge in the soon-to-be-post-Bush era to start doing the right thing?