By David D. Horowitz.
“Horowitz. Ssssssss… Horowitz!” hissed the student sitting to my right.
“What’s up?” I whispered back.
“You see that window on the second floor?” The student, whom I’d known from elementary school in our St. Louis suburb not far from Ferguson, nudged his head in the direction of the window. It was above us and across a sunlit rectangular opening in the middle of the junior high school building which we had just begun attending the week before.
“I’ll bet you a dollar that one in five students who passes by that window is a ni****. Wanna bet?”
“No,” I whispered. “I’ll pass.” I was surprised—indeed, horrified—he would use the “n” word. I’d lived in St. Louis County for over four years, and it was September 1967; race relations seemed tense almost everywhere. Yet, this casual a reference, although whispered, jolted me. And the student: he was the son of a local police chief.
Well, for the next several minutes, at least one black student in five did pass by the window, causing my neighbor to smile knowingly. He’d felt he’d proven his point. I felt glad I hadn’t bet. And I felt uneasy he considered his prediction cause for satisfaction.
Racial hatred might have learned to whisper and wait, but it found opportunities to vent. For example, one afternoon, some of my friends and I were walking home from school. My friends, sons of respected liberal parents, agreed they wished all blacks could be gathered in the school gymnasium, so a nuclear bomb could be dropped on it and all the blacks killed.
Now, I had been raised in a very politically liberal home. My parents when young had joined the Communist Party. They quit over the 1956 Soviet crackdown on Hungary and other outrages committed by the Soviet leadership, but they remained very much in the left-wing of the Democratic Party. I was raised to revile racism, to never tolerate use of the “n” word or any other derogatory ethnic epithet.
And, yet, in seventh grade I witnessed and was victimized by continual school violence and threats. I’d made new friends, to be sure, and these included black students with whom I conversed about music, sports, and classwork. Nevertheless, I’d also been threatened and accosted by bullies, many of them black, for money, for looking at someone “the wrong way,” near my locker, after gym class, on the long walk home, in almost every male bathroom in the school. My political training taught me to denounce racism and intolerance, but my gut was screaming the same epithets I ostensibly reviled. I was not alone. My older brother suffered similar theft and threats. It never seemed to end. Indeed, just after his high school graduation he landed a job driving an ice cream truck; his route edged into one of St. Louis’ black ghettos. He was several times threatened with a knife or broken bottle and, one afternoon he was joined by two presumed helpers who surreptitiously stole $30 from his till. My brother quit the job within three weeks of starting it. He showed grit and gumption lasting that long.
Many of my friends suffered, too. I saw a close friend in seventh-grade chased and slapped around on a school playfield by a dozen bullies in gym class. Most of them were black. My friend had dared to call a penalty on an offside violation and after being illegally blocked. Our gym teacher eventually stopped the bullies, but not after my friend was reduced to red-faced fury and tears. Within a week he began attending a private school ten miles west of the junior high. We remained friends, although for a while he was angry I had not more forcibly intervened to help him.
The next year, a school acquaintance suffered serious injury when struck in the head by a student desk—yes, a desk—hurled wantonly by two black students playing with each other in class. They likely had not meant to hurt their schoolmate, a gentle, popular Filipino. Yet, the Filipino suffered a head wound requiring stitches, and his parents removed him from the school shortly afterwards. I never saw him again. One of the two offending students was rumored to be seventeen—and still in eighth-grade. I believe the incident caused his suspension, but later that year I saw him again at the school, which was becoming more violent each year.
My mother got a teaching position at the University of Washington, so in 1971 we moved to Seattle, where racial tension festered. I was living in a bungalow my mother rented along the border of Phinney Ridge and Ballard, just on the Lincoln High School side of the line. The Seattle School District was instituting a district-wide program of busing to achieve racial integration. Some white students living near largely black Garfield High School transferred to the whiter Lincoln High School. This inflamed already heating tension—and one afternoon late in 1971 a riot closed Lincoln. That afternoon saw cafeteria fistfights, screaming arguments in hallways, trashed lockers, our principal injured by a projectile, and sundry destruction. For weeks rumors circulated of outsiders having provoked the riot and of imminent, huge brawls in Woodland Park. Eventually, some calm at the school was restored. Tension simmered—but did not quite boil over again. And Seattle in 2015 might not be all that different.
St. Louis, and especially Ferguson, recently boiled over—but now has reverted to “simmer.” When I first learned of the recent riots there, following the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, my first and most lingering thought was of that incident in seventh-grade: “Horowitz. Ssssssss… Horowitz! You see that window on the second floor?”
I am not one to lecture people about the devil of racism. How dare I? I have muttered the “n” word in rage and frustration. I have thought terrible things about black people and those of every color. I had to spend a decade acknowledging and healing from the hatred I’d repressed from times I or a friend was mugged, robbed, and threatened. And there was the weeks-long sadness of learning yet another friend’s parents had decided to move to suburbs farther west or would send the friend to private schools there. Many Americans still experience these challenges, too, despite school administrators’ rhetoric about caring, compassion, and tolerance. Of course, blacks’ suffering as slaves far surpasses anything I experienced—yet my and others’ suffering was significant. No one should use past suffering to justify blatant bullying.
Bullying linked to racial tension taught me wariness about sanctimony. The police can be brutal, corrupt, and mistaken. Inquests and grand juries can seem like shams—and might well be. And yet my job does not entail constant contact with violence and brutality in urban ghettos. I’ve seen and experienced enough of that to know how difficult it is to restrain one’s own hatred. It’s easy to point fingers and call people “racists” and “bigots.” Before doing so, share some of their risks. You might discover the same devil in a policeman’s heart lurks within your own. You might think professing liberalism makes you immune from racial hatred. Think again: such hatred can infect anyone. Let us use that understanding to deepen empathy for both Ferguson’s black residents and the police who ostensibly work to protect them.
For reconciliation begins with empathy, and effort rewards those who cultivate it. Indeed, I remember wonderful breakthroughs despite all the hatred and tension. One day in eighth-grade shop class I and my white friends Ricky and Steve worked on our projects—plastic letter openers and metal boxes—near two black students, Derrick and Darryl. Now, Derrick especially could be nasty to white boys. Yet, this morning we took turns singing: Ricky, Steve, and I singing Motown and Stax hits; Derrick and Darryl singing sunshine pop and Top-40 psychedelic hits. What a great moment, rich in laughter and joyful exchange. And there was Frank, a popular, respected black fellow, deciding in tenth-grade to join our white local-league baseball team rather than play for his black team again. Frank was making a statement: it’s time to focus on baseball and friendship, not racial exclusivity. That was almost forty-five years ago. I’ve never forgotten the leadership implicit in what did. And there was the interracial couple who held hands in the high school hallway: in 1970 and 1971, this was shocking—and necessary and brave. And most people admired them for it. So, it wasn’t all grim. There was more than bullying and hatred—although there was enough of that, to be sure.
Just now, I note I’m humming songs to myself—some Motown and Stax hits from 1967 and ’68.