Legalized Racism in New York

Letter from New York City
by Nicholas Stix
“Legalized Racism”
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
October, 1993

Wap! Someone just punched me, going down the subway stairs from the elevated. Behind me, I hear girlish, teenaged laughter. No accident here. I turn to my assailant, a 12- or 13-year-old black girl and tell her she’d better keep her hands to herself. “You better keep on walkin,’ I don’t talk to no white people,” she replies.

I want to slap some sense into her, but this is the South Bronx, and I’m the only “white” face for miles. Hitting back would be suicide, and she knows it. She needs only to start screaming and pointing at me, and thugs, er activists, will come out of the woodwork to beat me to a pulp, maybe even to death.

You may ask what on earth I, a white man, am doing in the South Bronx?

Four years ago, when 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins was murdered in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, white “liberals” emphasized that young Hawkins had a right to go anywhere he wanted; he didn’t need a reason. No such rights apply to a white man in the South Bronx in broad daylight. No liberal organizations will take up my cause. Not over a punch, not over a killing.

The ravings of a frustrated racist? A perhaps true but exceptional case? Believe either at your own peril. Despite a virtual news whiteout against publishing stories of black racial attacks, harassment, and discrimination against whites, the stories are increasingly leaking out.

A hypocritical practice shared by media and “civil rights” organizations means they rightly scream bloody murder when blacks are victimized by racist whites, but maintain silence or engage in shameless apologetics when blacks attack whites. Sometimes these apologists conjure up a casuistry that would make a Jesuit blush, showing how, in reality, it was the bruised, bloody white who assaulted the poor blacks.

In New York, the city’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) supposedly exists to protect all citizens against discrimination. Where blacks are the accused malefactors, the rules just don’t apply.

A white man claiming racial harassment on his job as a senior public administrator filed a human rights grievance over five years ago. The HRC never investigated the charges, despite an agency policy (and claimed track record) of investigating all charges within three years.

The man, since retired, recently initiated a lawsuit. Is it a mere coincidence that the HRC just agreed to investigate his case?

In a related case, several white former executives of New York State’s Off-Track Betting Corporation have initiated a multimillion-dollar civil suit against their past employer. The former executives charge that OTB fired them merely for being white.

During cross-examination last spring, a high-ranking current OTB officer acknowledged that the plaintiffs were white and, hence, “had to go.” In the next breath, the officer denied that this constituted racism.

In early 1991, I was attacked on the subway during rush hour by a gang of four young blacks. A transit detective acknowledged that the attack was obviously racially motivated, a “bias crime” as far as New York’s laws are concerned, but “there are some things you can’t say,” due to the political climate. The detective also reported that such racially motivated attacks by blacks against whites occur every single day in New York City.

The routine harassment and humiliation of whites in the workplace and the physical attacks on them on public conveyances are pieces of the same shattered mosaic. The political climate the detective spoke of was produced by an alliance of groups—white “liberals,” black nationalists, and the media—and tolerated or granted victory through default (leaving town or boycotting public conveyances) by their supposed opponents.

The aforementioned alliance has succeeded in making any mention of black racism a virtual taboo and in grossly exaggerating urban white racism. Thus, every ugly racial incident instigated bv urban whites against blacks is emblazoned on the front page of every big-city newspaper. The mere claim by a black, without benefit of evidence, that he was discriminated against gets saturation coverage. On the other hand, stories about black crimes are constantly distorted, by printing that they were merely “assaults” or “robberies,” while omitting that the victims were picked out for being white.

As a result of the toleration and encouragement of this racism, the attacks, the harassment, the prejudice have become brasher. In more and more of New York’s public sector and (publicly financed) nonprofit agencies, black workers may utter racial slurs and degrade and even assault white workers with impunity. The point is to run whites out of the workplace.

The crux of a racist system is that, regardless of the feelings of the majority of (black) office colleagues, one alone or a small group may harass or assault someone merely because of his pigmentation.

The majority of black workers may despise the few who discriminate, but they tolerate the bigots all the same. The silent majority of black workers do nothing against black racism, due to the aggressive nature of the hatemongers and the latter’s insistence that opposition would amount to treason against the race—and be dealt with accordingly.

Perhaps more importantly, the legitimacy enjoyed by black nationalism is due largely to white support. The agencies in which I saw the brashest, most aggressive black racism were run by whites. For the white working in such a setting, the white boss or colleague may at times be one’s worst enemy. Certain whites, from the entry-level positions to the program director’s office, even seek favor with their black colleagues, bosses, and subordinates by setting up white employees for abuse. The devious ones thus protect themselves against landing on the whitelist.

Current journalistic etiquette requires that I balance every example of black racism with ten of white malefactors. This unwritten rule is utterly at odds with my experience. I seem to be in too low a tax bracket to afford the sort of blinders that “liberals” wear. Then, too, unlike those whites who check under their beds every night for racists, I am used to actually living and working with black people, not idealized, abstract victims.

The only people whose opinions matter to me at the moment are the many blacks to whom I owe favors: for the hospitality of a home-cooked meal, counsel, a job, my life. Insisting that the charges don’t apply to them will not impress my benefactors and will not change their feelings of having been betrayed. Many of them truly were victims of white racism. Their displeasure is a bitter price I’m forced to pay in a world in which I find myself increasingly alienated from black people.

All my adult life I have stood for integration. As a 17-year-old token white in a black youth program, I wrote a paper on the need for integration. I remember it well. In the intervening 17 years, philosophically nothing has changed. In practice, everything has changed. I won’t tell you that “some of my best friends are black.” I have no black friends, and do not see any in my immediate future.

A social world in which black people do not exist, or exist only as trouble, may be normal for most white people. It’s not normal for me. Nevertheless, I am not bucking for martyrdom, and I am not in this world to be abused. Hence, I am ceding the playing field to the racists. You’ve won, guys. To the degree possible in New York, I’ll try to avoid work places and social situations where no white males or dogs are welcome.

Nicholas Stix is editor and publisher of A Different Drummer: The Magazine of Literature, Art & Ideas.


Postscript, March 6, 2023: Well, things have sure changed in the intervening 30 years. Long ago, I stopped believing that most blacks were not racist, but only intimidated by the racist, black minority. Not that I now believe that all blacks are racists, just that the good 5% gets a bad reputation from the bad 95%.

I also long ago stopped missing having blacks in my life.

However, it was impossible for me to avoid workplaces “where no white males or dogs are welcome.”

It wasn’t until reading a used copy of Jared Taylor’s 1992 book, Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, in 1998, that I learned that in 1989, during the same week in which White Joey Fama shot and killed black Yusuf Hawkins (August 23, 1989) in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, when a black man saw a White man on East Tremont Avenue, in the Bronx, the black told the White, “You don’t belong here,” and gut-shot him.

Nobody in New York screamed racism about that obviously racially-motivated attack. (The victim survived; apparently, the racist black shooter got a free case of attempted murder and a hate crime.)

Meanwhile, the murder of Yusuf Hawkins was not racially motivated. Hawkins’ killing was caused by a puerto rican or puerto rican/italian girl named Gina Feliciano, who was the neighbor of a young italian man named Keith Mondello. Feliciano and Mondello hated each other’s guts, and that morning, Feliciano had threatened Mondello that her “black boyfriend” and his puerto rican friends were going to come and beat him up. It was Feliciano, not Mondello, who had made it racial.

With the help of a black neighborhood friend, Mondello rounded up some baseball bat-wielding friends, who went looking for Feliciano’s boyfriend. Mondello and his friends had no idea that their mildly retarded neighbor, Joey Fama, had packed a pistol. When the neighborhood group encountered Hawkins and two friends escorting him, Fama suddenly whipped out his pistol and shot Hawkins dead.

The media quickly forgot all about Gina Feliciano’s role in the killing, and law enforcement and prosecutors ignored her, except for using her perjured testimony in the case. The city broke its own judicial rules, in order to appoint a racist, black judge, Thaddeus Owens, to preside over the 1990 murder trial. And while Fama’s conviction and 30-year sentence for Hawkins’ murder was just, Mondello’s was not. Mondello was acquitted of murder, but convicted of a grab-bag of other crimes—riot, menacing, etc.—and sentenced to 5 1/3-16 years in prison. Mondello was convicted of being White.

black propaganda movie-maker Muta’Ali Muhammad has claimed that Gina Feliciano’s daughter told him that Feliciano had died some time ago, but that’s just a rumor.