Word: smarted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...apartment, and the anonymous voice murmurs daggers. "We're gonna kill you," the caller says. Za'kettha knows the threat comes from a gang of black girls, one that specializes not in drugs or street fights but in terrorizing bright black students. "They think that just because you're smart," says the eighth-grader, "they can go around beating...
...label "acting white" and the dismissal of white values are bound up in questions of black identity. "If you see a black girl," explains Kareema Matthews, a street-smart 14-year-old from Harlem, "and she's black, not mixed or anything, and she wants to act like something she's not, in these days nobody considers that good. She's trying to be white. That's why nobody likes her. That's how it is now." But when asked what it is to be black, Kareema pauses. "I don't have the slightest idea...
...skipping class, talking slang and, as Tachelle says, "being cool, not combing your hair. Carrying yourself like you don't care." Social success depends partly on academic failure; safety and acceptance lie in rejecting the traditional paths to self-improvement. "Instead of trying to come up with the smart kids, they try to bring you down to their level," says eighth-grader Rachel Blates of Oakland. "They don't realize that if you don't have an education, you won't have anything -- no job, no husband, no home...
...family," says Ronald Goldstock, head of the New York task force. "Even though he knew that he was a target of law-enforcement and electronic surveillance, he was unable to avoid ((arrest))." Though the media have often portrayed Gotti as a new-style yuppie don with a penchant for smart suits, he is also a throwback to the gun-crazy gangland bosses of the past at a time when the Mob prefers to keep a lower profile...
Faludi makes an unlikely polemicist. Smart, shy, with a self-deprecating manner, she claims to be more comfortable in front of a terminal than a camera. An alumna of Harvard, the Miami Herald and the Atlanta Constitution, she has left the Wall Street Journal -- where she won a Pulitzer Prize last year for a Journal story tracing the human cost of the $5.65 billion leveraged buyout of Safeway -- in order to handle the flood of speaking requests her book has generated...