I was beaten up (shoved, kicked, punched, and slapped) at Meany Middle School the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin King, Jr. on April 5, 1968. Black students roamed the hallways and bathrooms and school grounds attacking anyone who was not black. Outside the building, they carried umbrellas and were poking non-blacks. At the time, Meany was about 1/3 Asian, 1/3 white, and 1/3 black with probably a sprinkling of Native Americans and Hispanics. I did not defend myself. I didn't know how. They were much bigger and stronger than me. I do not recall any knives (or other sharp objects other than the rather blunt tips of umbrellas). I did not scream or cry. I was too terrified. I will always remember the pea-green color of the tiled bathrooms, the smell of the inside of the school hallways. The leafless trees outside. The forest of black umbrellas outside Meany. The eerie silence--of the blows and the victims. No one cried out in fear or pain. No one resisted or fought back. And no one--teachers or staff--came to our rescue. No one talked about it in the ensuing days, weeks, months...we (most of us?) went back to school the next day as if nothing had happened.
II.
During the following years I was repeatedly beaten up in the Central Area, in particular at least once at Garfield High School. In one instance, across from Ezell's Chicken, while I was waiting at the bus-stop on Jefferson, a bunch of young black Americans suddenly ran up and started punching me, hard enough to knock me down to the sidewalk, my books spilling in all directions. I remember being on all four fours, my whole body being hit in a quick flurry of blows. At the end of it, a black girl who had been watching everything at the bus-stop helped me to pick up my scattered books. Eventually the bus came and I limped on, eyes moistened, shaken. No broken bones, just bruises and small cuts. I went home. At the time I was barely a teen-ager. No one said anything about what happened at school or in the newspapers or anywhere in the community that I know of.
III.
For 45 years I have carried this secret. I still have flashbacks and nightmares, although the worst ones happened over 15 years ago. And now no one in this city, where I was born and raised, will believe me. I was not born with prejudices.
I did not deserve to be beaten up again and again. Nor did any of the many, many others, who have suffered in silence. What lesson did we learn? Don't cry. Don't remember. Don't speak.
IV.
Seattle had roughly the same proportion of African-Americans as it does now: 12% of the entire city population. I don't know what happened at other schools with large numbers of black students but I can guess.
It makes me wonder about what happened in cities with much larger percentages of black students in 1968: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago...
And yet I have never encountered anywhere mention of the fact that nationwide African-American students went on the rampage attacking probably hundreds of thousands of non-black students and leaving deep psychological scars in a whole generation.
For decades I assumed that everyone in my generation knew what, for all intents and purposes, was "an open secret."
As the baby boomers reach in their sixties, as long as they remain silent, what happened to a generation will have vanished from the collective memory, leaving only souped up commemorations to Dr. King.
I have not forgotten, much less forgiven.
Let the whole story be told.
Come out of the shadows.
V.
"If you have any grievances against African-Americans, you must be racist." Those who call others racists are often the most racist of all.
The Declaration of Independence: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The Stranger: Good Sex, Loud Parties, Hip Politics
William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea (1820), tempera on paper. Tate Gallery, London
[As predicted, five days after its appearance, the following review was removed by the zealous staff at Yelp.com, a website not noted for its ethical principles].
Putin couldn't do any better in suppressing all facts and points of view contrary to the conventional line. The fact that The Stranger only reveals the race or ethnicity of violent attackers when they are white or Asian and never when they are African-American was troubling in and of itself. The pattern of concealment and intentional distortion (what they would disingenuously in all likelihood call "reframing the discussion") is as deep as it is broad.
As a member of a racial minority, and a lifelong liberal, I feel compelled to write the following review. Bigotry by any name is still bigotry, even and especially if by hip young people. In the marketplace of ideas, though The Stranger may appear to be free, the real price to readers is steep: bags and bags laden with unearned guilt. In the review of the Anita Hill documentary, The Stranger writes that "the panel [hearing the testimony of Ms. Hill] was full of white men [who] didn't want to touch the issue of race with a 10-foot pole" (April 2-8, 2014). The newspaper would never make a statement about "a bunch of black men" in the same kind of situation. In the past year, similar statements about juries being all-white or other organizations being mostly white have been made in this newspaper. However, it is important not to overlook the fact that it was a Congress of 96% white men who voted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. And it was white men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of this country. If The Stranger is so concerned about white men dominating things (in a city 70% white), why doesn't it take the lead and fire its mostly white male staff and replace them with a bunch of black men and women. And move to Judkins Park. Or Philadelphia, D.C., Detroit, or Atlanta, where blacks are the majority and dominate, and, ergo, social justice reigns. Heaven help us if the younger generation take such cheap semii- tabloid-quality sources such as The Stranger as its barometer of truth and gospel of freedom.
What we do know, in my opinion, is that the belief--I am referencing cognitive and social psychology here--is the belief that white people have dominated things in the United States==has led to disaffected, destructive behavior of more than one generation of young African-Americans. (How could Euro-Americans--up to 90% of the total population at times in our history-- possibly not dominate American culture? What would be possibly unfair is if there were a disproportionate number of white people holding positions in a certain field. No one complains that African-Americans are disproportionately represented in pro sports or in pop music or in Hollywood films. Or the blacks control local politics in Detroit, Philadelphia, D.C., Atlanta, New Orleans, etc. (where they constitute a demographic majority). Or would it be better than African-American men--6% of the population--dominate American culture, hold a majority in Congress?
* * * * *
The service The Stranger provides in reporting on local economic issues is invariably drowned out in the sea of expletives, puerile, grotesque humour, one-sided presentation of and careless disregard for facts, shallow moralizing, and, most of all, racial prejudice. Shock for the sake of shock...the cultural dumbing down despite the ersatz intellectualizing sandwiched inside...the shrill harshness of its attacks, the caricaturing of others' positions... In the sea of advertising (30+ pages of ads for pop music, restaurants, and sex at the back--I'm no prude, either), ubiquitous potshots at the white race thrown in for good, hearty measure. The adulation of African-Americans and all things African-American, the relegation of other minorities, especially Asian-Americans--the largest racial minority in Seattle--to an "afterthought" whole sole importance lies in their being people of color and in offering up some great spicy, cilantro-infused rice noodles and who don't seem to have viewpoints distinct from black people...the same could be said for Hispanics.
There! I've said it: Being neither white nor black sometimes means that one gets it from both sides. Whites that are prejudiced, and blacks that are prejudiced as well. Often from blacks. And sometimes from whites, who may be redirecting frustration towards a "safe" target (you, "your people"). I don't think this is true of the reverse, as blacks don't seem to have any problem directly blaming and expressing their resentment and anger at ("telling off") white people. "Don't personalize it." Try try as I might...
Call me a "chink," it's O.K.
Call someone a "cracker" or "whitey," give me a "High 5,"
Famed for being the home of Boeing, amazon, Microsoft, Starbuck's, etc.
Seattle
and
Only in Seattle
could you have a public figure like Eric Liu actually chose to write for a newspaper (The Stranger) several months after it has used used the racial slur "chink." He must either enjoy being called a chink or maintain that he is-- after all--only an accidental Asian.
I have never heard an Hispanic-American say, or imply, that s/he is having a bad day because (1) Anglo-Americans invaded Mexico in the mid-19th century and (2) s/he and is discriminated against all the time.
If you really believe in equality, don't treat others with respect and as having equal worth as yourself. Don't set yourself up as master and all "others" as slaves.
They are not stupid, bad, puny, pathetic, beneath your contempt, and/or threatening.
Don't use history as a rationalization for making them so.
I am dismayed at out often I hear of how blacks have been denied and/or continue to be denied of freedom when at the same time I witness some African-Americans aggressively precluding others from enjoying the same freedoms that they claim are denied to them by society (white people). As in being treated with respect. Or being allowed to express an opinion different from their own. Or defending their rights.
Whether it's on a bus where a person will take up two seats. I usually sit on the window side of the double seat to allow others to sit down (next to me). I witness many African-Americans, and not as many others, will sit next to me--probably because I am of small physical stature. When and if I get off the bus, I have noticed them then take up both seats, sitting on the outer (aisle) side and putting their belongings on the other (window) side.
Or mercilessly bossing people of a different skin color around.
Or at my health club the other morning I was doing some yoga in a studio when a young black man wearing street clothes decided to lie on the floor on a yoga mat and take a snooze for an hour. While I had gone out to go to the bathroom, he had apparently woken up and decided the studio would be a nice place just to relax and listen to music as well, but not with his mp3 player but through the studio's sound system.
I asked him if he could turn it off as this was a yoga classroom (and a place to work-out). Initially he had said, "O.K. Go turn it down yourself." Minutes later he was accusing me in an angry, confrontational manner of "acting as if I had the right [to have the room quiet/without music." In fact, it seems that many if not most of the African-Americans seem oblivious to the fact people of other colors and backgrounds may be adversely affected by loud behavior and these same people also have the right to voice their need for a quiet environment free of shouting and screaming. In the interests of an equal society, it would be nice if everyone were aware of the needs of other groups and not just their particular group.
I wish I had the right to make a civil request without (fear of) being yelled at. It seemed as if he had first wanted quiet (and he got it) first. And then he wanted music "with a beat." And when he couldn't get it, he got upset, as if his rights were being trampled upon and that I was acting in an imperious fashion.
I have seen this happen to other people, including white women, who usually became very quiet, face ashen, voice trembling, almost pleading or close to tears. Exactly what I felt that day. But I tried hard to cover up my distress. Not let him know I was close to coming unhinged. (He wants that. He wants to let me know he is powerful. As if I doubted it).
Some people don't have an inkling why others might be afraid of them. It may not be racism.
And it is not as if the rank-and-file of the African-American community in this country has been especially supportive of rights for other minorities such as gays. (Their community leaders, whatever the degree to which they have acted out of personal conviction, have in any case made political alliances).
You don't have a right to get angry at me, but I have a right to get angry at you [when you is wrong and you knows i but won't admit it].
So much for equality. No one in chicken Seattle will speak up, though.
Defying West, Putin Formally Claims Crimea for Russia
MOSCOW — A defiant President Vladimir V. Putin claimed Crimea as a part of Russia on Tuesday, reversing what he described as a historic mistake made by the Soviet Union 60 years ago and brushing aside international condemnation that could leave Russia isolated for years to come.
Within minutes of delivering a passionate speech to Russia’s political elite, Mr. Putin cemented his pledge by signing a draft treaty with Crimean leaders to make the strategic Black Sea peninsula part of Russia. The events unfolded two days after Crimeans voted in a disputed referendum to break away from Ukraine. While the treaty signed Tuesday still needs parliamentary approval, that is regarded as a formality.
“Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of people,” Mr. Putin declared in his address, delivered in the chandeliered St. George’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace before hundreds of members of Parliament, governors and others. His remarks, which lasted 47 minutes, were interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and at the end chants of “Russia, Russia.” Some in the audience wiped tears from their eyes.
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People in Simferopol, Ukraine, watched an address by President Vladimir V. Putin on Tuesday.CreditDan Kitwood/Getty Images
Reaching deep into Russian and Soviet history, Mr. Putin said he did not seek to divide Ukraine any further, but vowed that he would protect Russia’s national security from what he described as Western, and particularly American, actions that had left Russia feeling cornered.
He spoke as he has often in the past of the humiliations Russia has suffered in a world with one dominant superpower — from the NATO air war in Kosovo in 1999 against Moscow’s Serbian allies to the one in Libya that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 on what he called the false pretense of a humanitarian intervention.
Mr. Putin dipped into deep wells of emotion, starting with the 10th century baptism of Prince Vladimir, whose conversion to Orthodox Christianity transformed the kingdom then known as Rus, to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left many Russians of his generation feeling that they had been stripped of their nation overnight.
“Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad,” he said. “Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest — if not the biggest — divided nation in the world.”
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Cossacks installed a Russian flag and a Crimean flag on the roof of the City Hall building on Monday in Bakhchysarai, a city in central Crimea.CreditDan Kitwood/Getty Images
Assailing the West for what he has said were its broken promises, he said: “They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts. That’s the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the east, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: ‘Well, this doesn’t involve you.’ ”
In a deepening clash of wills, Western reaction was swift. The White House condemned the move, which it said it would not recognize. Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, told Parliament on Tuesday that the crisis in Ukraine “is the most serious test of European security in the 21st century so far.”
“No amount of sham and perverse democratic process or skewed historical references can make up for the fact that this is an incursion into a sovereign state and a land grab of part of its territory with no respect for the law of that country or for international law,” he said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel firmly rejected Moscow’s absorption of Crimea, a position she said was widely supported by international organizations including the United Nations and the European Council.
In his speech in Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin defended Russia’s actions in Crimea by pointing out past Western ‘interventions,’ including Libya and Afghanistan, at length.
“The so-called referendum breached international law, the declaration of independence which the Russian president accepted yesterday was against international law, and the absorption into the Russian Federation is, in our firm opinion, also against international law,” Ms. Merkel told reporters in Berlin.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in Warsaw on Tuesday in a show of support for countries unnerved by the Russian incursion into Ukraine, rebutted Mr. Putin’s assertions. “Russia has offered a variety of arguments to justify what is nothing more than a land grab,” he said. “But the world has rejected those arguments.”
While Western sanctions in response to Sunday’s referendum on independence in Crimea had been relatively mild, American officials had already made clear they would ratchet up the pressure if Mr. Putin went ahead with annexation. The Obama administration is expected to react quickly with a new round of sanctions targeting three groups: Russian government officials, the Russian arms industry and Russians who work on behalf of government officials, the latter called “Russian government cronies” by a senior American official.
Mr. Putin brushed aside concerns about economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, saying the West had forced Russia’s hand. By supporting the political uprising that toppled Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, the United States and Europe crossed “a red line,” Mr. Putin said, forcing him to act to protect Crimea’s population from what he called “Russophobes and neo-Nazis” that had seized control in an illegal coup abetted by foreigners.
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Vladislav Surkov, one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s most influential advisers, was sanctioned by the United States, in coordination with Europe.CreditPool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev/Ria Novosti/Kremlin
“If you press a spring too hard,” he said, “it will recoil.”
If there had been any doubt before Tuesday, Mr. Putin made clear that within what he considers his sphere of interest he would not be cowed by international pressure. And the speed of his moves in Crimea, redrawing an international border that has been recognized as part of an independent Ukraine since 1991, has been breathtaking.
Just three weeks after Russian special operations troops seized control of strategic locations on the peninsula, the authorities there organized and held a disputed referendum that paved the way for Tuesday’s treaty signing. Mr. Putin called the outcome of the vote — almost 97 percent in favor of secession —- “more than convincing.”
Mr. Putin acted despite the first of a series of threatened sanctions imposed by the United States, Canada and Europe on Monday. He did so using the same arguments that those countries used to justify the independence of Kosovo — which the West generally supported — including a passage from an Obama administration document establishing the legal rationale for recognizing that country.
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Dmitry Rogozin, a deputy prime minister in Russia.CreditSergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Part of the speech also had an ominous tone, suggesting that Russian dissenters would be considered traitors siding with Russia’s adversaries. Mr. Putin has long suspected the United States of trying to stir up a democratic uprising in Russia along the lines of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and the Arab Spring rebellions.
“Some Western politicians already threaten us not only with sanctions but also with the potential for domestic problems,” he said. “I would like to know what they are implying — the actions of a certain fifth column, of various national traitors? Or should we expect that they will worsen the social and economic situation, and therefore provoke people’s discontent?
Mr. Putin also spoke of the radically changed circumstances since 1954, when Russia awarded Crimea to Ukraine. At that time, he said, “nobody could imagine that Russia and Ukraine could one day become different states.” After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia felt it was “robbed” of Crimea, he said.
He was at pains to rebut the central Western argument that events in Crimea had been directed by a conventional military intervention. Mr. Putin said Russia never exceeded its permitted troop strength of 25,000 soldiers in Crimea as part of the longstanding agreement on the stationing of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.
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Valentina I. Matviyenko, a Putin ally and the chairwoman of the upper house of Russia’s Parliament.CreditPool photo by Yana Lapikova
There had been no combat, he said, and he thanked Ukrainian soldiers who avoided bloodshed. “I cannot remember a single act of intervention without one single shot” being fired, he said.
However, within hours of that declaration, a group of soldiers opened fire while storming a modest Ukrainian military installation in Kubanskoye, near Simferopol. At least one Ukrainian soldier was injured and taken to a hospital, according to a Ukrainian officer inside the base and a spokesman for Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, Vladislav Seleznev. The base appeared to be under control of the soldiers, who wore no insignia.
Buoyed by the crisis, Mr. Putin has vaulted past every line the United States and Europe have tried to draw in recent weeks. The White House indicated that it had not gone after some members of Mr. Putin’s inner circle to leave room for its next move, which the Americans and Europeans might now have to consider making sooner than they expected.
President Obama’s initial sanctions froze assets and banned travel for 11 Russian and Ukrainian figures, including Vladislav Y. Surkov, a longtime adviser to Mr. Putin; Dmitri O. Rogozin, a deputy prime minister of Russia; and Valentina I. Matviyenko, a Putin ally and the chairwoman of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s Parliament. The European Union followed with sanctions against 21 Russian and Ukrainian figures.
“We’re making it clear that there are consequences for their actions,” Mr. Obama said as he announced the sanctions. “We’ll continue to make clear to Russia that further provocations will achieve nothing except to further isolate Russia and diminish its place in the world.”
Over all, the Europeans targeted 10 Russian politicians, seven pro-Russian Crimeans, three Russian military officers in Crimea and the former leader of Ukraine’s Black Sea Fleet, who defected to Russia this month. But the Europeans declined to go after elite figures like Mr. Surkov and Mr. Rogozin out of reluctance to poke Mr. Putin too directly.
Asked whether the European Union had failed to match tough words with strong actions, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, told journalists: “The U.S. is from Mars and Europe is from Venus. Get used to it.”
He noted that “Europe is closer and will therefore pay a bigger cost for sanctions against Russia.” He also pointed to Europe’s collective decision-making process.
“In the United States, one man takes a decision on the basis of an executive order,” Mr. Sikorski said, “whereas in Europe, for these measures to be legal, we need a consensus of 28 member states.”
The bravado in Moscow struck some American officials as bluster masking real concern about the potential financial bite of future sanctions, and there is some evidence that Russians are anxiously pulling tens of billions of dollars out of American accounts. Nearly $105 billion was shifted out of Treasury custodial accounts by foreign central banks or other institutions in the week that ended last Wednesday, more than three times that of any other recent week.
