Word: bensonhurst
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Stith, a 1979 graduate of the Divinity school who has worked in Boston-area churches for the past 11 years, warned the picnickers of ongoing racial polarization. He cited the 1989 murder of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, N.Y., and the letter bombs recently sent to NAACP offices as examples of a "racist terrorism" which is becoming more and more common...
Like the brutal rape of the Central Park jogger and the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn last year, Watkins' death quickly assumed a larger symbolic meaning. Outside the city it confirmed what most Americans already believed: New York is an exciting but dangerous place. Among New Yorkers it reinforced the spreading conviction that the city has spun out of control. A growing sense of vulnerability has been deepened by the belief that deadly violence, once mostly confined to crime-ridden ghetto neighborhoods that the police wrote off as free-fire zones, is now lashing...
When Shelby Steele heard about the racially motivated murder of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn last August, his first reaction was fear -- the same fear he used to feel as a young black boy growing up in Chicago in the 1950s. There was, he recalled, "a sense that an ugly element of our history had somehow crawled forward into the present and made our belief in racial progress feel like an illusion." But Hawkins' death also evoked in Steele an overwhelming sense of what he calls "racial fatigue," that inescapable burden of color that...
...blacks to drop the crutch of racial victimization and rely on their own efforts to gain access to the American mainstream. The opportunities are there, he says. Blacks have only to stop hiding behind racism and take advantage of them. Last May he focused a PBS television special about Bensonhurst on that recurring theme. And next month a collection of his essays will be published in his first book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (St. Martin's Press), raising him to center stage in America's tortuous debate over race relations...
...year-old San Jose State University history professor receiving so much attention? His boosters say it is because Steele's deft prose has invigorated a stale debate. "There is a freshness to his writing," says producer Thomas Lennon, who persuaded Steele to do the PBS special Seven Days in Bensonhurst after reading one of his essays in Harper's. "By making himself his own laboratory, he cuts at familiar issues in a very unfamiliar way." Says author Stanley Crouch, like Steele a critic of affirmative action: "One of the most important things he is doing is questioning Pavlovian racial responses...