tPSSTIRE REEL ESTE LETTER TERRY eae eta soen soreness onane PeYeviry ua a +:at, Mich. Little Kayla Rollandby a first grade said, oI don't like you, ? ostanding: in line. Mothers all over America shuddered,4) wondering about their own children Ts safety._. In the weeks since her death, the story of the ey who shot° dite Kayla has emerged. A little boy whose family has failed him. Alittle boy whose school has failed him. A little boy whose police -department has failed him. A little boy whose nation has failedhim, We all failed both that little boy and little Kayla because, in oour haste to end old welfare dependencies, we allowed the safety_ net for the poorest of the poor to be shreded and destroyed.A little boy who lived ina dysfunctional family, in the worst| sense of the phrase "a father already in prison. A mother whom osome say used drugs herself; but even if she did not, who left her_ children in a home where drugs and guns were obviously present, oeven to neighbors who had, on several occasions, reported it to the- police. A family recently evicted from its home. Two children osleeping on a sofa in the living room where drug deals apparentlywere occurring. A little boy filled with anger at the life he had been~ given "so angry, that he had already stabbed another child with a"pencil and had already been suspended three times for fighting.- When his incarcerated father heard about the shooting, he knew it~ was his child who was the shooter because he had asked his son_ why he fought the other children and the reply was, obecause I hate_ them. ?Yet, as far as we know, the only help for this family in 1 deep. trouble was the anger management class for which the little boy_ was scheduled, but never got to attend. No social worker trackedchildren who¢were in essence homeless. No school counselor didindepth referrals for a family in dire need and for achild obviously- deeply troubled. No police officers tried to close down thisgarbage strewn, run-down house which the whole neighborhoodknew was a crack house.Thank you, President Clinton for calling on Congress topass strict gun control laws. We do need osmart guns, ? we do needtrigger locks, we do need even tighter restrictions on gun pur-chases and registration. If they save Teven one child Ts life in thisnation where 12 children die every day by gunfire, then the lawswill be a success.But better gun controls would not be the only solutionneeded for this little boy, Mr. President. We need social serviceswhich work for families in trouble. We need better alarms systemsfor dysfunctional families and for children who have been aban-- doned by their families and by their communities. We need schoolcouncelors in every school in this nation. We need funds for citiesto use to close down crack houses and to fix them up and give themto homeless families.Gov. Engler, your plan to get families off of welfareworked. But in the process of making families independent, youtook away the safety net which might have caught this little boyand saved this little girl. Just as the state failed these families, so,too, did it fail.the little 11-year-old Michigan boy convicted of_ Murder, after a long history of violence. There are many Michigan_ families, and families across this nation, who desperately needhelp. If the states don Tt help them, who will? If the states don Tthelp the schools to cope with these families, who will?Heston, you are the president of the National Rifle Associa-tion, the nation Ts most powerful gun lobby. In the name of thechildren, call off your lobbyists, who are trying to demonizePresident Clinton and anyone else who says enough is enough "12 children a day, 84 children a week, 372 children a month, 4,380children killed a year by gunfire is enough. To say that thepresident of the United States needs violence is over the top anddemeans you and your organization.To pretend that the ready availability of guns in this nationhas nothing to do with these killings, is an insult to every Ameri-can. ;Members of Congress, you, too, have some blame to shoul-der. For you passed the legislation which destroyed the safety netfor this naiton Ts children. So now we have a 6-year-old murdererwhom no one was trying to help. So now we even have wealthyparents of a disabled child abandoning him because they justcould not handle his care without a safety net which would havegiven them respite and counseling and help. So now we havethousands of families walking the tightropes of life without a netto catch them. All during the most prosperous time in our nation Tshistory.We must all shoulder some of the responsibility for littleKayla Ts death. The real tragedy would be if life goes on andnothing changes "until the next incredible death of an Americanchild.BETWEEN THE LINESHollywood Politics and Oscar Protests; How Denzel Got Robbed. By now, who won; the Oscar forjest Male Actor ? is yesterday Ts onews. Everybody now knows Kevinr Spacey benefited from a number of«factors aside from his performance in oAmerican Beauty; ? most nota- bly a $700,000 post nomination-*campaign by the producing studio,;Dreamworks, an anti-Hurricane; campaign mounted by opponentsof the movie Ts accuracy, but di-rected at the movie's only Oscarnominee, a controversial re-votewhen 4,000 ballots were conve-ee ane ee+See March 28 edition, D1), this isnot your onormal ? loss, whereby allthings being equal- "the votes justdidn Tt pan out.Denzel Washington got royallyscrewed by a collaborative processof well-timed, ocoincidental, ? iso-lated incidences that took him frombeing the overwhelming, odds-onfavorite after the Golden Globes tonot being anybody's choice (excéptthe Wall Street Journal's) the daybefore Oscar night. It was almost asifeverybody knew- "even Denzel "5: critics might not see it as |There, Gui boweiie sonethils : ndanother time and place.To many of us who grew up witha Southern lifestyle as a backdrop,it was like revisiting the past. Therewere good moments and bad mo-ments. They were our momentsnonetheless.Last year, there was anothermovie. It was called oDown in theDelta. ? Directed by Maya Angelou,it proved to be the final showcasefor the enormous talents of the lateEsther Rolle.-This was the story of a femaleChicagoan who had been involvedwith drugs and who knows whatelse. She came to the MississippiDelta to get her life in order on theold family home place.She did not want to be there andfought every attempt to make her feelat hdine and welcome. Her Missis-sippi family was not poor. They werehard-working people who had man- aged to get more than just aday-to-daysubsistence. They owned a small busi-ness and they encouraged oMiss-fast-life-in-Chicago ? to become areal partPant 1Dr. Stanley Fish,= Dean of the Col-lege of Liberal Arts and Sciences atthe University of Chicago, offersprovocative commentary on so-called reverse discrimination. Hisarticle in the January/February 2000Crisis magazine contains this semi-nal quote: oIn America, whites onceset themselves apart from blacksand claimed privileges for them-selves while denying them to oth-ers. Now, on the basis of race, blacksare claiming special status andjre- "serving for themselves privileges ° 'they deny to others. Isn't one as badas the other? The answer is no. ?Fish takes his text from Presi-dent George Bush in an address tothe United Nations in 1991. Bushsaid this of the U.N. resolutionequating Zionism with racism: oZi-onism ... is the idea that led to thecreation of a home for the Jewishpeople ... and to equate Zionismwith the intolerable sin of racism 1s.to twist history and to forget theterrible plight of the Jews in WorldWar II and, indeed, throughout his-tory. ?What happened in the SecondWorld War was that 6 million Jewswere exterminated by people whoregarded them as racial'y inferiorand a danger to Aryan purity. Whathappened after the Second WorldWar is that the survivors of thatHolocaust established a Jewish statethat is a state centered on Jewishhistory, Jewish values and Jewishtraditions. What Bush objected towas the logical sleight of hand bywhich these two actions were de-clared equivalent because they wereBeauty ? nominees in all the trades,entertainment talkies and evenSpacey was on 60 Minutes (a newsmagazine). Nobody really has aproblem with that, Oscar marketingis part of the Hollywood politic.What's not part of the Hollywoodpolitic was Denzel Ts vocal criticismof the roles he receives when que-ried about the controversial roleshe plays. While Denzel told thetruth about receiving choice roles,his candor probably wasn Tt wellreceived because race, like in anysociety, isSi, " unsettling about it. Ithad anemo- candelabrtional effect that defied description. . heirloom. The: Tt-was kind of like reaching in to = truyour back pocket and bringing out al_ fully-formed pieces of black life i inlove, a willingness to forgive aswell as the strength and oem ofthe family unit. "Now we go past the surfce andinto the bowels of the structure.Ican remember as a boy, stayingwith my grandmother inElizabethtown, Ky., a nearby fam-.ily. They had a daughter who hadgrown too big for the small town.She moved away to Chicago or someother major city, much to the dis-may of her family.Every few years, she would come.back to oE-Town ? to visit and whenher mother found out she was com-ing, it was a major production.Chickens were killed and maybe agoat. The cooking went on in thathouse for days before she arrived.I could look out in their backyard and see rugs hanging on theclothesline, being beaten to get thedirt and dust out. The mother and °her widowed sister would wash win-.dows, scrub the wooden porch and,if there was time, get one of theneighbors to paint the floor of theporch. It was indeed a aeboth expressions of raeial exclu-siveness. Ignored was the historicaldifference. between them "the dif-ference between a program of geno-cide and the determination of thosewho escaped it to establish a com-munity in which they would be themakers, not the victims, of the laws.Bush was saying to the UnitedNations, oLook, the Nazis T convic-tion of racial superiority generateda policy of systematic genocide;the Jews T experience of centuries ofpersecution in almost every coun-dane ei enerated.adesire for aof their own. If you man*tee ee to convince yourselfthat these are the same, it is you, notthe Zionists, who are morally con-fused and the reason you are mor-ally confused is that you have for-gotten history. ?What Fish says is that a similarforgetting of history has, in recentyears, allowed some people to ar-gue, and argue persuasively, thataffirmative action is reverse rac-ism. He maintains that the veryphrase, oreverse racism, ? containsthe argument in exactly the form towhich Bush objected: In this coun-try, whites once set themselves apartfrom blacks and claimed privilegesfor themselves while denying themto others. Now, on the basis of race,blacks. are claiming special statusand reserving for themselves privi-leges they deny to others. Isn't one as bad as the other? The oanswer isUdno.One can see why the answer isno by imagining that it is 1955 andthat we are in a town in the Southwith two more or less distinctive:communities, one white and onecism was a selfish one, Denzel Tswas a T selfless one; Washingtonspoke of an industry wide problem,which being at the top of his game,he could've remained quiet, likeeverybody else. But he didn't, andhe couldn Tt have anticipated whatcame next. Hard for any of us tobelieve it.Most thought Denzel Ts candorwas cool hr er wealready voted prior toAwards, Then 4,000 of the voted.Serre then said, oHoney, this is family. ? 1°still did not understand, although i it.did start me to thinking. I lookedabiding around the town and I realized thiswas not an isolated case. It wassomething that happened in our -community as a matter of course.People left and came back andthe entire family rallied to the cause.Irecalled my own cousin, who had |left his hometown of Horse Cave,Ky., in the late 1930s. He was notseen again until the middle of WWII,when he appeared in the uniform ofthe Royal Canadian Air Corps.Relatives came from every-where. My uncle, a prosperousfarmer, went to his smoke house and bréught out country ham. Hekilled a young pig and chickens andthe women cooked for days. Georgewas coming home and this was afamily affair.Somewhere along the way, |began to understand that the sup-port of the family is the singleearthly thing we can count on, nomatter how the world treats us orhow we treat ourselves. ~The family, as a unit, exudeslove and compassion. It is the fam-ily that offers strength and under-Standing that cannot be found atURBAN PERSPECTIVE Mi.The Seductiveness of Reverse Discriminationblack. No doubt, each communitywould have a ready store of dis-missive epithets, ridiculing stories,Self-serving folk myths, and expres-sions of plain hatred, all directed atthe other community and all basedin racial hostility.Yet, to regard their respectiveracisms "if that is the word "asequivalent would be bizarre, for thehostility of one group stems notfrom any wrong done to it, but fromits wish to protect its ability to de-prive citizens of their voting rights, to limit-access to educational insti-tutions, to prevent: entry into theeconomy except at the lowest andmeanest levels and to force mem-bers of the stigmatized group toride in the back of the bus. Thehostility of the other group is theresult of these actions, and whereashostility and racial anger are un-happy faces wherever they arefound, a distinction must surely bemade between the ideological hos-tility of the oppressors and the ex-perience-based hostility of thosewho have been oppressed.Not to make that distinction is totwist history and forget the terribleplight of African Americans. in themore than 200 years of thiscountry Ts existence. Moreover, toequate the efforts to remedy thatplight with the actions that pro-duced it is to distort history further.Those efforts designed to redressthe imbalances caused by long-standing discrimination are calledaffirmative action. To argue thataffirmative action, which gives pref-erential treatment to disadvantagedMinorities as part of a plan toachieve social equality is no differ-ever, nominated actress HilarySwank (who Won) was targeted forprotest. Denzel was the actor, notthe writer. True or not, it made hisperformance no less compelling.This is Hollywood, where every-thing is omake believe, ? so what'sthe deal? The deal is a protest group.sought out and successfully lob-bied academy voters, and appar-ently, some voters weren't that in-- accessible...The protest to Hurricane T $ inac-curacy was directed at DenzelWashington. In fact, the protestgroup lobbied Academy. voters (intheir re-vote) not to vote for Wash-ington, and some think the protest,n- combined with targeted marketingto academy members, did changesome votes. Different estimates fig-we anywhere from 25 50, whica 100 vote swing (from Denzel toSpeers 44 ih rowPoder so that it threw. oWtlerenms: ty and lar~ family is the foun :would be impossible to count the opapa because we were on the lam T can be one of most frustrating things-hormal functioning: Strong illness,equal parties, one of whom has been discrimination has produced. Whencountless ways, it is small consola- chances.you knew something not quite right was going to play out, From theseating of Spacey front and center.haviors of thecourse. itdid, just as most predictedhas been: key 10 our pais It -times we have bad to call mama orand there was no other way out. }A few days ago, my son told ofthe pride he felt when he saw his- daughter named to the honor roll ather high school. It was an emotionhe could not describe. But the bot-tom line was and is simple. Thiswas his child. This was his familyor at least a portion of it. Familylove transcends all transgressions.In some cases, we. stand in dan-ger of losing that precious commod-.ity. Life is faster and some of usmay have lost touch with that loveand emotional attachment. We needto look closely at all of the circum-stances and remember that nothingcan take the place of family.Many of us would not enjoywhatever success we have achieved,had it not been for the strength ofthe family behind us, in front of usand beside us. It is one of the great-est things in life and, sometimes, itwe will encounter in our lives. :But beneath it all, there mustbe ° Tthe knowledge that nothing can takethe place of family.ent from the policies that created "the disadvantages in the first place,is a travesty of reasoning. Reverseracism is a cogent description ofaffirmative action only if one con- 4siders the cancer of racism to be 3morally and medically indistin-guishable from the therapy we ap-ply to it.A Cancer is an invasion of thebody Ts equilibrium, and _so is che-motherapy, but we do not decline tofight the disease because the medi-cine we employ is also disruptive tostrong remedy: The formula is asappropriate to the health of the bodypolitic as it is to that of the physicalbody.The objection to blacks nowclaiming privileges previously ac-corded to whites only is just an-other version of the forgetting andrewriting of history. The work isdone by the adverb ounfairly, ?which suggests two more or lessunjustly penalized by an incompe-_tent umpire. But blacks have not Tsimply been treated unfairly; theyhave been subjected first to decadesof slavery, and then to second-classcitizenship, widespread legal de-scription of their experience, andthe belated gift of ofairness ? in theform of a resolution no longer todiscriminate against them legally ishardly an adequate remedy for thedeep disadvantages that the priorthe deck is stacked against you intion to hear that you are now free toenter the game and take yourthe only major publication to pickWashington to win. Most of theindustry trades (ET, TV Guide TimesCalendar, Roger Ebert) ignored theJournal and went with some saw as othe inside tip. ? And the inside tip _won, Nobody has yet to explainwhen Denzel went from the insidepick to the outside chance, as BETcommentator Tavis Smiley noted,At what point does the industry tradehorses? Only the insiders know forsure. But come Oscar night, there _was this strange hum in the air like(youcouldn Tt even see Denzel fromthe stage on television), to the be-presenters, you knewthe shaft was I comin aa of{sic}. :ont thing we now for sure.