N.Y. media depicts victims as criminals
1987Chris Butters 1987-02Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 7 →
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NEW YORK-The lynch-mob attack on three Black men in Howard Beach is but the latest racist incident to rock this scandalladen city.
The big-business New York newspapers have performed their usual division of labor to ease the pains of the crisis. The New York Times takes the "high" road, deploring the killing, but reserving its greatest passion for denouncing both white and Black "extremists."
The Times trots out its usual call for a blue-ribbon commission to leisurely investigate the situation. The paper desperately seeks to isolate the Howard Beach incident from the racist cutbacks, unemployment, and political reaction fostered by the administration of Mayor Edward Koch.
Why should the these issues? It has turn.
The New York Post, on the other hand, does seek to connect the Howard Beach event to the economic problems of its readers-its white readers, that is-by fanning the flames of national chauvinism and race war. Of course, it is not anxious to Times want to connect supported Koch at every reveal the hidden connection between skyrocketing rents, the descent by many into homelessness, and Koch's millions of dollars of handouts to real-estate tycoons like Donald Trump.
How could it, since problem as "reverse discrimination" against white workers due to affirmative action and competition from "illegal aliens."
In the long run, both roads serve the needs of the ruling class. Both accomplish the mission of dividing Black, Latino, and white workers in their struggle against the capitalist class and its agents. The biggest racists are not found in Howard Beach but in the White House and the board rooms of Wall Street.
The same federal administration that sees Howard Beach as an "isolated act" continues African racists. The same banks that redline the Black neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant and grind down the white residents of Howard Beach with crushing mortgages profit handsomely from investing in apartheid.
Thousands of people have demonstrated on the streets of New York to protest the Howard Beach murder. These mass actions point the way for all workers—white or Black—in their search for an effective fightback against cutbacks, layoffs, and givebacks.