Word: white
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fabric of Columbia was twisted and torn by the forces of political and social revolution outside the University. Columbia's geographic situation symbolzes the relation between white and black, affluence and poverty, youthful reform and established order. The University's need for physical expansion in an urban center creates inescapable tensions but its relations with the community had further deteriorated because of its apparent indifference to the needs and aspirations of its poorer neighbors. The handling of the gymnasium controversy thus came, even somewhat unfairly, to epitomize the conflict between the spirit of the civil rights movement and the attack...
What the black kid then replies to the white boy's mea culpa is a striking example of false consciousness. "We're all in the same bag," he says, "We've all been kicked out. Let's face it, this job is the first time we've ever belonged to anything...
SEVERAL other bits are like that. The white kid says a suspect must be rich because he has an eight thousand dollar car, and the black kid (picked up in the Watts riot, you remember), replies, "May-be he's not rich. I know a cat on welfare who has a bigger car." The remark might come from a militant consciousness akin to Malcolm X's when he called welfare emasculating, but considering that the black boy is working for the police, it probably is just as absurd, vicious, and ugly as it seems...
...part that perhaps hits closest to home for most viewers is when the rich white kid tells about his past. He admits in a teary and impassioned speech that he hadn't left home voluntarily at all, but had been thrown out by his parents. "I was obnoxious. I shot down everything they tried to do for me. I wasn't just anti-establishment but anti-everything. I was kicked...
Beyond the improbability that this Watts rioter wouldn't see that the white boy has been kicked out by his family, while he, on the other hand has been kicked out by most of white America, there is the secret continuing message of "Mod Squad": "...this job is the first time we've ever belonged to anything...