Piecework

I remember talking to you one night last year when you were furious with Benjamin Ward, the black police commissioner of New York City. You were angry with Ward because he had described black-on-black crime as “our dirty little secret” to a Columbia University forum sponsored by the New York Association of Black Journalists.

“We provide the victims and we provide the perpetrators,” Ward said. “We should not be ashamed to say that. We should not try to hide it. We have to speak out about it… Most of the crime in this city is by young blacks under thirty. I think the young black male has always been perceived in this city by whites, and by blacks as well, as being a more dangerous person than a white. And I believe that just as many black women in this room tend to cross the street when they see some of those kinds of people coming down the street as whites do. And I believe blacks are victims. But we’re generally the victims of some other black committing crimes against us.”

By most accounts, the audience of students hissed Ward’s remarks; black nationalists seemed to dismiss him as “a white man’s nigger.” Or as another Oreo cookie. But he was not hissed a few nights later when he continued the dijscussion at a meeting of two hundred black ministers in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where the Underclass rules the street.

“When you go home tonight,” Ward said, “if your place is burglarized, it probably would have been one of your neighbors… If you stay here late tonight and then go outside, it might be a young black man that will hurt you.” Ward was once the city’s corrections commissioner and said, “It broke my heart [to see so many young blacks in jail]. You go to upstate New York, our state prisons, and that’s what you see — the fruit of our community serving time behind those walls.” Then he added: “I’m sending as many there as I possibly can, seventy thousand perhaps this year for peddling drugs. And I don’t regret it one minute. Because they are committing the genocide against the blacks, they are ripping off the neighborhoods. …”

In Brooklyn, before a black audience, Ward’s remarks were punctuated by a chorus of “amens.” Certainly the statistics supported his words. New York City is 24 percent black, but in 1986, 52.8 percent of all those arrested were black. Blacks accounted for 55.4 percent of the murder and manslaughter arrests (a total of 644), 65.2 percent of the forcible rape arrests (966), 69.3 percent of the robbery arrests (15,944), and 55.7 percent of the arrests for aggravated assault (13,079). After Ward’s statement was made public, state director Hazel Dukes of the NAACP said: “What he is saying is real and must be addressed. It makes you think.”

It certainly does. These numbers don’t tell the full story, of course; they are the statistics of arrests, not convictions. But only a fool would insist that life in big cities is better now than it was thirty years ago. You and I are not old men, but it’s hard to explain to our children that in New York when we were young, it was possible on hot summer evenings to sleep in parks or on rooftops or fire escapes. Exhausted by a hard day’s work, we slept unmolested to the end of subway lines. Like you, I grew up in a poor neighborhood; my front door was never locked, and neither was yours.

Most city people don’t talk about their apprehension anymore. They have simply altered their behavior. In the big cities, blacks and whites live behind iron barricades: locks, bars, gates. When we walk down a street at night, we follow the pattern described by Ward, peering over our shoulders, always alert to danger; if a group of the black young is seen, we cross the street or reverse direction.

What all of us have learned is that the fear of the Underclass is about class, not race. This has much precedent in American history; at various times in our big cities, the middle class often felt threatened by the crime and moral disorder of the Irish, Jewish, and Italian poor. But there are three elements of the current catastrophe that were not present among previous generations: drugs, television, and welfare.