Word: channelled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Regardless, the Harlem rally both highlighted and increased the racial tensions in New York. But the worst was yet to come. Two days later, on Labor Day, a group of volunteer firefighters entered a float in the annual parade through the quiet, isolated Queens neighborhood of Broad Channel. The group had won the award for funniest float nine years in a row, with themes that often mocked minorities including Jews and gays, with titles like "Hasidic Park" (a parody of Jurassic Park) and "Gooks of Hazzard...
Somehow word of those offensive floats failed to make the mainstream. This year, the firefighters decided at the last minute to call their float, a decorated pickup truck, "Black to the Future, Broad Channel, 2098." It was intended, they said, to make the point that nearly all-white Broad Channel will, in the next hundred years, become integrated. To make that "point," such as it is, they wore Afro wigs and blackface, dribbled basketballs and threw pieces of watermelon at the crowd...
...week later, after Giuliani had inveighed against the float and suspended or fired the firefighters involved, the New York Times went back to Broad Channel to assess the community's reaction. "Those guys on the float, I know they play with the colored people," said one Broad Channel resident. "It was all in fun. I wish every kid in the Channel could grow up like that bunch...
...This was a bunch of black guys who were supposed to be drunk coming back from a basketball game," said another 43-year-old man. "Where was that racist?" Obviously President Clinton's now-forgotten national dialogue on race hasn't yet been taken up in Broad Channel...
...Committee has signaled that they may be among the first batch of supporting evidence put in the public domain. Imagine: four to six hours of the leader of the world's last superpower giving slippery answers to questions about breasts and genitalia -- coming soon to an all-day news channel near you! That couldn't do much to boost the President's stature...