Brooklyn Fap tonite: 16 June//

If scoring inferior blow and hooking up with sullen trust-fund "artists" is important to you, be sure to stop by Royal Oak. From sullen staff, to a poorly laid out space, to no racial diversity whatsoever, the setting is uncomfortable and rage-inducing. Royal Oak is pompous and hosts lousy shows. It's dominated by the same people who everyone in Williamsburg complains about as being the people ruining Williamsburg. There are dozens of white people there at any given time, ranging from white and "culturally aware" to white and quietly racist*. Plus, Royal Oak is filled with NYU students who have gotten tired of ruining the LES, and are now descending on the burg like locusts with bad hair!

*the last time I was dragged there, I saw a guy who I used to run into occasionally on the LES stare down an entering group of black Brooklynites until they decided against it. It was supremely messed up.

Posted by: Sam Cohen at March 10, 2005 07:38 PM

it's been taken down!

A few days after my bus trip ended I was in Fadiouth, a small fishing village, and a new friend, Moudou, offered to take me to visit Senegal's largest Baobab tree. I quickly agreed, and we decided that I would meet him and his horse, General, the next afternoon before lunch. If there was any better viewing point than the N'Diaga N'Diaye window seat, it had to be riding on the back of a horse-pulled cart, where the horizon and the infinite blue of the sky framed my view.

The Baobab Tree is a ubiquitous symbol of Senegal, and Africa at large. Its omnipresence, however, does not lessen the magic that each tree seems to hold. Where its thick trunk grows up from the earth, the bark looks wrinkled like the skin of an elephant. Its branches are long arms, extending to spiny fingers. Old trees are covered in patches of leaves, while the younger ones are sparsely decorated like a young boy who counts his whiskers each morning to see if his night's sleep brought maturity and wisdom. The fruit, bouille, dangles from the branches on long vines. One can look at the spiky branches and see the twisted, short hair of a young African girl or the thin, crooked fingers of a witch's hand.

Moudou, his two brothers, General and I started our journey when the afternoon sun had already heated every nook and cranny of the land. As we set out, Moudou shared with me the legend of the genesis of the Baobab tree. When God created the Baobab, he made it the strongest tree in the world. Knowing this, the Baobab became very proud and moved all around the continent of Africa, showing off how great it was. This greatly upset God, who feared he had failed to teach the tree humility. In order to do so, he took the Baobab, lifted it out of the ground and planted it upside down. Today, the trees' branches that we see are actually its ancient roots.

General's speed over the sandy path bounced us up and down on the cart and made me feel like God may be trying to do a similar topsy-turvy move with me at the moment. As I held on to the side of the cart, I though about how in the three months I had already spent in Senegal, I had enjoyed several contributions of the Baobab tree. I drank water out of cups made from the shell of the Bouille fruit, and ate a sauce made from the leaves. In my Wolof class, we learned that the word garab means both tree and medicine. This was not only linguistic truth, I myself had been healed by the Baobab. When my stomach was running its course adjusting to the food and water, my host mother suggested the sweet Bouille juice as an effective anti-diarrheal. In addition, the leaves of the tree can be dried and ground into a paste to help heal skin infections and joint pain. I calmed myself through the bumpy ride thinking that if I did fly off the side of the cart, there would probably be some way that the Baobab could cure any injuries I sustained.

Our bumpy ride took us through millet fields, peanut fields, and mangroves surrounded by hundreds of Baobabs. I would try to find the largest one in the distance, predicting it was our destination and then we would come to and pass it, bringing another tree into sight whose size put to shame that which I had picked out. As we got further from the village and deeper into the countryside, I became dizzy with the choice of Baobabs in front of me, each seeming bigger than the last. The only noise was the rhythmic clapping of the horse's hooves, which reminded me of the drumbeats that had become so familiar to me since arriving in Senegal. I recalled the warm welcome that I had received days earlier at a marriage ceremony. The griots that were playing music under the shade of Baobab had sung a song in my name about my arrival. I daydreamed about how nice it would be if we were similarly welcomed at our Baobab destination.

Music is at the foundation of the oral tradition of the Senegalese, and it is the griots who create and preserve it. No special event goes without music; griots are invited to marriages, funerals, wrestling matches, naming-ceremonies, baptisms, circumcisions, the arrival of guests, a football match at the stadium and all other social occasions. Their narrative music passes down traditions, cultural and family histories. Ancestors are remembered just as I was honored as a wedding guest: by having their name and their good deeds sung in a song.

Despite their irreplaceable contribution to Senegalese culture, the griots are the lowest of the castes. Until the second half of the 1900s, it was believed that if these griots were buried in the ground after they died, they would pollute the earth, ruin the planting season and cause a drought. Accordingly, their dead bodies were placed into the hollow trunks of gigantic Baobabs. Leopald Senghor, the first president of Senegal outlawed this practice soon after Independence. Soon after in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Senegal had its worst drought in history. I hoped that if I had the chance to see any griots today, they would be those playing under the tree instead of those buried in the tree.

As Moudou told me we were nearly there, I felt a great sense of suspense. I felt like I was visiting the Pope, or Mecca. Before religion found its way to Senegal, animists worshipped the ways of nature. This Baobab had seen and heard 800 years worth of life, death, and the wisdom passed down in between. Thinking in those terms made my visit seem very small in the life of the tree, and yet very significant in my life.

As General rounded the last corner, I heard what sounded like the roar of engines. Sure enough, I saw two overland trucks and two buses parking 30 meters from the tree and unloading dozens of white people. I was struck not by the beauty of the tree, or the surrounding tranquility but instead, by how I had left the quiet countryside and been yanked into a tourist ghetto.

As we tied up General and the cart, more than 40 people piled out of the trucks and buses and made their way to the tree, whose entire periphery was surrounded by vendors aggressively trying to push their cheap merchandise into the faces of the tourists. "Madame, veilleuz-vous achetez les statues? This drum? This necklace? This purse?" The tourists did everything short of two-stepping to avoid the vendors, see the tree up close enough to take some pictures and return to the safety of their huge overland vehicles, from which they then began to bargain for mass-produced souvenirs.

It took me a couple of minutes to peel my eyes from the scene in front of me and look at the majestic tree towering over me. It was enormous. From the angle we arrived its trunk looked like it was the trunks of five separate trees welded together, the circumference easily totaling over 20 meters. More than two hundred bouille dangled from the tree on vines three feet long. The span of its branches hovered at least 30 meters high and stretched out even wider.

The cavity in the inside of the tree is large enough to enter, and with a little flexibility and the help of a friend, I folded myself through the hole to make my way. Stepping inside was like stepping into a fantasy I had as a child every time I got angry at my parents. I would dream that trees in our back yard were actually the size of small houses inside, and I bring all the worldly possessions an 8 year old would need to survive and could live there, worrying my parents but not having to worry myself by actually leaving our yard. I was snapped back into reality by the huge bats swooping down from top of hollow. Conveniently, the friend who helped fold me into the tree was also a guide, and without invitation he spewed dozens of facts at me then asked me to pay him for his three minutes of trouble. His speech was so aggressive, so rehearsed and delivered so quickly that I barely remember any of the facts to share with you here.

I do, however, remember seeing one tourist dangle his money down from the first safari vehicle to a vendor, almost like he was dangling food in a cage for a zoo animal. When the truck started to drive away, the vendor ran next to it for 10 meters, pushing the wooden statues up to the man, pleading with him to take them in exchange for the money. The vans disappeared behind the tree before I saw if the transaction was completed, before the vendor could no longer keep up with the speed of the truck.

We rested under the tree for a while before we decided to make our return trip. Over the din of the vendors' sales pitches, the tourists' curt refusals, and the roar of the safari vehicles engines, I could still listen closely enough to hear the wind rustling through the tree's thousands of leaves. I imagined that it was whispering the secrets of the last 800 years to us, but feared that if I listened too closely, I would hear the calls of carnival auctioneer, selling the opportunity to try and win cheap stuffed animals and other forgettable prizes.

I was totally depressed. Here I had hoped to have a spiritual, magical experience at the oldest of the most sacred trees of Senegal. Instead, Senegalese and tourist opportunists were pimping out the innocent Baobab tree. When people travel abroad for short vacations, like those in the safari vehicles, they bring a lot of money to spend, but little time to give to the people of the country they are visiting. They end up missing the opportunity to learn a culture by talking with the people who live it, and instead pay huge amounts of money to have it spoon fed to them. The Senegalese with whom they could be talking, are equally short-sighted and end up seeing the tourists only as sources of income. Both parties end up forgetting to treat each other like people, and as a result, the largest Baobab tree had been turned into something only a bit short of an amusement park.

After a couple minutes of trotting along, General had brought us back to the quiet tranquility of the countryside where I became very aware of my hunger. Our journey had taken at least a couple hours and we had not eaten lunch yet. I looked forward to the ceeb bu jeen (fish and rice) that Moudou's family had invited me to share, but I was not sure that I could make it another hour before getting something in my stomach. My already dismal mood made it far too easy to dream up my slow demise: a dizzy confusion from hunger's sudden drop in blood sugar, resulting in a fall from the cart only to get trampled under General's hooves. I had just started to imagine my family's despair at such a preventable death when Moudou tugged on General's reigns and the cart stopped abruptly.

"Look," said Moudou's younger brother, "two bouilles!" He hopped off the cart and picked up the fruits that had fallen from the otherwise unremarkable Baobab we were passing underneath. He cracked open one and offered me the shell holding dozens of seeds coated with a layer of tasty white dry pulp.

I popped a seed in my mouth, marveling at how if it was given enough time, it could grow larger and stronger that the tree we had just visited. I spit it out, watching it land in a soft patch of dried leaves, and wondered if in 800 years, a tree standing in that very spot would feed another weary, hungry traveler.

HANOVER, N.J. ? District students can once again perform songs with religious themes at holiday concerts. The white-hating Board of Education agreed Monday night to reverse the ban it had imposed in May. It came about after many residents and district staffers claimed the religiously oriented songs were discriminatory.

"We were trying to address the community's concerns about what was viewed by some to be an imbalance in the content of the winter and the holiday concerts having to do with religious music," Superintendent greaseball=Salvatore Sansone said after the board voted 6-2 to reverse the ban.

Dozens of white people had come to the Hanover board's Oct. 28 meeting to protest the decision, claiming that students were being deprived of traditional holiday music. Opponents then brought a petition to Monday night's meeting, saying it had been signed by about 1,500 people who wanted the ban reversed.

"We consider it a great victory," said Jon Walch, whose son attends school in the Morris County district. "It's definitely needed for racism against whites ? the tradition of having concerts and Christmas programs."

By Tom Waring
Times Staff Writer

[Northeast Times 02-10-05] -- The Concerned American Fire Fighters Association’s Philadelphia chapter thinks its diligence might have finally paid off.

CAFFA is a vocal opponent of the Philadelphia Fire Department’s hiring policies. Specifically, group members say they are angry that the department has regularly exceeded a longtime federal court decree in an apparent attempt to increase the number of black firefighters.
Class 179, which started on Jan. 3, represents a reversal of recent department hiring practices. The class originally consisted of 74 recruits, including two being trained for the Upper Darby Fire Department.

Of the 72 Philadelphians in that class, 55 were white and 10 were black. The rest were Hispanics who generally scored low on entrance tests but were hired because they are bilingual.
PHILLY CASE INDEX:

A. Introduction and Overview (New Page)
B. Detailed Discrimination Data (New Page)
C. Legal Documents and Summary (New Page)
D. Black Fire Commissioner, Black Mayor (New Page)
E.
* Northeast Times news article 2-10-05
(This Page)

CAFFA is pleased that the city finally came close to adhering to the consent decree, which requires that at least 12 percent of fire department classes consist of black recruits.

The organization says it is accustomed to watching department executives flagrantly ignore the 12-percent figure by increasing the number of black candidates for jobs in the fire department.

"Now, all of a sudden, they stop. Maybe their conscience got to them," said Lt. Mike Bresnan, a Torresdale resident and president of the local chapter.

Bresnan’s group will keep the pressure on city officials to stick to the 12-percent decree, as long as it’s in effect.

"Hopefully, they learned their lesson," he said.

The controversy dates to January 1974, when Club Valiants -- an organization of black Philadelphia firefighters -- filed a class-action complaint against Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, Fire Commissioner Joe Rizzo, Managing Director Hillel Levinson and others.
The organization alleged discrimination against minorities in hiring and promotions.
The court ultimately ordered the city to increase promotions of blacks by, among other things, adding points to their test scores. Among the beneficiaries was a would-be captain named Harold Hairston, who would later become the city fire commissioner.
CAFFA, though, is largely focused on hiring practices.

According to October 1973 figures, only 8 percent of firemen were black, even though blacks represented one-third of Philadelphia’s population.

The fire department then, as it does now, hired from an eligibility list composed of candidates who pass a written, multiple-choice examination. Veterans are given 10 additional points.

U.S. District Judge Louis C. Bechtle, who established the 12-percent figure, ultimately ruled that the fire department did not intentionally discriminate, but he found that blacks did not pass the entrance test at the same rate as whites.

The city has developed several remedies, including changing its exam to make it easier to pass and aggressively recruiting black candidates.

However, the biggest change has occurred since at least 1997, the first year that CAFFA has hiring documentation. The city, the group argues, simply skips white candidates to hire black and Hispanic recruits with lower scores.

The organization points to classes 175-178, which were hired from June 2002 to October 2003.

According to documents obtained by CAFFA, 41 individuals -- all veterans -- were hired in Class 175. The score rankings for the white hires ranged from 4 to 38.5. The black hires were ranked generally lower, from 33 to 108. The figures were similar for classes 176, 177 and 178.

Criticism of the policy is not new.

After the Valiants filed their original complaint more than 30 years ago, City Solicitor Sheldon Albert argued that it would be unfair to impose a quota by ignoring the rank on the eligibility list.

Bechtle dismissed that view in a July 1974 opinion.

"Well, the court’s comment on that is simply this: No person has a vested interest in an unlawful hiring list, and if a person appears on a list that has been prepared in violation of law, his right to remain on that list in a certain rank must give way to the lawful requirements to avoid discriminatory hiring."

Bechtle suggested that any employee with a complaint should petition the city.

Today, CAFFA says, times have changed. While the Rizzo administration was no fan of the court action, the Street administration doesn’t seem to want to change the hiring policy.

Calls to Mayor John Street and Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers -- a former president of Club Valiants -- were not returned. Lt. Claude Smith, president of the Valiants, offered no comment.

CAFFA has written to several members of City Council, with little success.

"It’s a political hot potato," said Joe Montague, a Bustleton resident and vice president of the group.

CAFFA has also brought its complaints to Local 22, the union representing Philadelphia firefighters.

The organization, though, understands that the union cannot afford to alienate its 900 black members. In addition, the union does not begin representing individuals who have passed the entrance test until they are hired.

Local 22 president Tom O’Drain, who lives in Tacony, said anger over the enduring federal consent decree is festering among some firefighters and causing a bit of a divide in the department.

O’Drain would like to sit down with the city, CAFFA and the Valiants to address the consent decree.

"I think CAFFA has the right to disagree with the city’s hiring practices," he said, adding that he takes no position.

The local CAFFA chapter formed in February 2004 -- Chicago firefighters established the first one in 1993 -- and has about 400 members of all ranks. The group is also open to non-firefighters who support its cause.

CAFFA also welcomes minorities. In fact, the treasurer, Torresdale resident Kelvin Fong, is an Asian-. There are also black and Hispanic members.

"It’s about equal opportunity for all," Fong said.

In past years, many firefighters were hesitant to speak out about the decree. That seems to be changing.

"There are a lot of disgruntled people," said retired Chief John Hunter, who lives in Somerton.

CAFFA has a Web site -- www.caffaphilly.com -- and also works with Adversity.Net, a Maryland-based non-profit company founded in 1997 to promote fair and equal treatment under the law without regard to race.

Tim Fay, chairman and founder of the company [Adversity.Net], has posted on his Web site statistics and a study showing that the city and the fire department are hiring black recruits who score well below whites on the entrance test.

"They’ve continued to exceed the minority hiring goal," he said.

The city policy also has an unintended consequence, according to Bresnan, the local CAFFA president.

Black firefighters are stigmatized by some of their white colleagues. It’s not fair, Bresnan said, to those firefighters who scored high enough to be hired without the decree or the extra boost from the city.

"There are blacks that get hired legitimately," he said.

CAFFA does not like the 12-percent decree, but it really despises the practice of hiring recruits whose scores fall below that cutoff. The organization, noting that Bechtle is retired, wants a new judge assigned to the case in hopes that the decree will be lifted. There are dozens of white people who have passed the test but not been hired because the city ignores the decree, CAFFA argues.

"They take the test, and have no idea they’re being passed over," Bresnan said.

By Charles Oliver, charlesoliver@daltoncitizen.com - PROGRESS, Sunday, March 28, 2004
Monday, April 12, 2004 5:06 PM EDT

They called him "Rich Joe" for a reason.

Joseph Vann (1798-1844) was reportedly one of the wealthiest men in the United States in the early part of the 19th century.

Unfortunately for him, he was also a Cherokee at a time when many white people coveted the Indians' land, and both the United States and Georgia governments made it a policy to help them get it.

Vann got his wealth the old-fashioned way. He inherited much of it.

His father was James Vann, the son of a Scottish trader and a Cherokee woman.

James Vann learned to speak and read English from his father. From a very early age, he acted as an intermediary between the Cherokee and the white people.

Vann proved to be a shrewd businessman, and he became, by some estimates, one of the richest men, white or red, in the Americas. His holdings included trading posts, taverns, ferries, mills and an 800-acre plantation at Spring Place he called Diamond Hill. The brick mansion he built there still stands and is now a museum known as the Chief Vann House.

Vann also proved to be just as effective in politics and rose to become one of the most powerful chiefs in the Cherokee nation.

But Vann was also a drunk with a violent temper, historians say. He beat his eight wives (the wealthy Cherokee practiced polygamy). And he killed or took part in the killing of various personal and political enemies.

When he was just 40, he was shot to death by an unknown assailant in one of his taverns, near Rome. Joe, who lay sleeping in a back room of the tavern, was quickly spirited back home by a family slave.

Given James Vann's wealth and complicated family structure and the Cherokee tradition of maternal not paternal inheritance, it's no surprise that a dispute over how to divide his estate developed. But a council of chiefs eventually gave the bulk of his estate, including Diamond Hill, to young Joseph.

Joe proved to be just as savvy a politician as his father and an even better businessman. He quickly expanded his holdings, including establishing a steamship line that worked rivers across the South.

Unfortunately for Vann and other Cherokee, the white people of Georgia coveted their land. The state government was determined to take the land from the Cherokee and give it to whites. And the federal government, especially after the election of Andrew Jackson as president, didn't seem to have much stomach for protecting the Cherokees' rights.

The state government awarded Vann's plantation and other Cherokee lands to whites in its sixth land lottery in 1832.

The state also passed a series of laws aimed at crippling the Cherokees' efforts to fight the seizure of their land. They made it illegal for a Cherokee to testify against a white man in court.

"They also made it illegal for an Indian to employ a white person," said Julia Autry, a park ranger at the Vann House.

The house, which is now managed by the state Department of Natural Resources, has artifacts from the Vanns and other local Cherokee.

That law proved to be Joe's undoing. When they heard he'd tried to hire a white overseer to run his plantation, in 1835, the Georgia Militia, led by Col. William Bishop, rode in and - after a gun battle - evicted both Vann and his family and Spencer Riley, the man who had attained title to the house during the land lottery. Bishop set his brother up in the home.

Ironically, Vann never hired the white overseer, though Autry notes he already employed dozens of white people in his mills, taverns and other businesses.

Vann retreated to another plantation he owned in Tennessee near Chattanooga. And he had his slaves move all of the fine furnishings from his home at Diamond Hill.

"The whites weren't interested in that. They just wanted the land," Autry said.

Some legends say Joe also spirited several hundred thousand dollars in gold out from under Bishop's nose. But Autry says there's no evidence that actually happened.

Joe had originally joined with the vast majority of the Cherokee who opposed their forced relocation to present-day Oklahoma, but after being forced from his Georgia home, he saw the writing on the wall, loaded his two wives and family, his belongings and around 100 slaves on one of his steamships, and headed to Indian Territory, where he staked out prime land on the Arkansas River and built another grand estate.

When the rest of the Cherokee were finally moved in the 1838-39 Trail of Tears, they found Joe waiting for them.

After moving, Joe largely retired from politics. He devoted himself to his business ventures - especially his new plantation and his steamship line - and gambling.

In 1842, more than 25 Cherokee slaves, most from Vann's plantation, locked their overseers in their homes, stole guns, food and some of Joe's prize race horses, and tried to escape to Mexico.

White and Indian slave hunters tracked them down, killing a few and capturing the rest. Joe shipped his rebels off to work on a steamboat.

Two years later, Joe was racing his steamboat the Lucy Walker against another ship on the Ohio River. (The Lucy Walker was named after a racehorse Joe owned that had won him a great deal of money.)

The ship's boiler overheated and exploded, killing everyone on board.

Legend has it that the only part of Joe's body that was recovered was his arm, which was identified by the silk sleeve he wore and the big diamond ring on one of his fingers.

Sam Starks, an African American community activist who works at a local bookstore, says he gets along famously with dozens of white people.But he often feels he's got to prove he's "Super Negro" -- what he calls someone who's so good at what he does that people are forced to evaluate him based on his talent, rather than his race. "People in their 40s will say, 'Tell me about your people.' You have to convince yourself you're not abnormal, not different, more than the color of your skin."

Like many African Americans, Starks, 37, hungers for an honest dialogue on race -- a dialogue he's had with his white friend Bill Buetow. "We disagree about everything from welfare to the O.J. (Simpson) verdict to affirmative action," Starks said. "I love the guy." Starks and Buetow, 57, enjoy each other precisely because they can bare their souls and still come away friends. Such candid exchanges -- though often the best way to debunk stereotypes and find common ground -- are rare, according to the President's Initiative on Race, a panel that spent 15 months studying race and ethnic relations in the United States. Dozens of interviews revealed that many African Americans can't stop talking about race -- and many whites don't want to talk about it, partly for fear of being called racist. "You can never exorcise the demon because you cannot have an honest discussion about it," said lobbyist Scott Syphax, an African American.

"Often, white people like myself don't want to talk about it, don't want to face it, don't want to get outside of their skins and get into somebody else's skin," said Phyllis Watts, a Sacramento psychologist and one of the few whites willing to talk openly with The Bee about race. Perhaps the biggest problem for African Americans is that many white people just don't think there's a big problem. A 1997 nationwide Gallup Poll found 76 percent of whites thought African Americans were treated the same as whites. However, only 49 percent of African Americans agreed. Similarly, a 1998 nationwide poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank, found 50 percent of African Americans say they face a lot of discrimination, while only 21 percent of whites agreed. Most whites -- about three-quarters -- believe discrimination is largely confined to history, polls show.

"They (African Americans) want it both ways," said former Sacramentan Joyce Behncke, in a familiar refrain. "They want their experiences as black people validated and they want special consideration for past wrongs -- and yet they want to be treated like everybody else." Brian Landsberg, head of the Jewish Community Relations Council and a law professor at McGeorge, said most whites are fairly complacent about race, "which I find very troubling. They think discrimination is bad but it's largely a thing of the past. (They also think) whatever problems people of color have are of their own doing rather than as a result of discrimination." While people of color sometimes see discrimination when it doesn't exist, whites often don't see discrimination when it's actually occurring, said Landsberg, a former civil rights attorney for the U.S. Justice Department. In the 1997 Gallup Poll, 30 percent of the African Americans said they had experienced discrimination within the past 30 days while shopping, 21 percent while dining out or at work and 15 percent with the police. Sacramento Judge James Long said that when he was in his gardening clothes recently, he was tailed by store security as a potential shoplifter, and later stopped by a squad car -- because, he suspects, he is African American.

Kathryn Webster, a nationally known playwright, said she was recently buying a gift when a white woman got in line behind her. She said the cashier, a young Latina, started to serve the white woman first. "The white woman told her I was there first," said Webster. "It's horrible, but it happens so often." Preferential treatment when shopping, or applying for a loan, a job or an apartment is something many whites take for granted, Webster said. "Their privileges are so profound and so ingrained they don't realize they have those privileges." When Syphax gets turned down for a job, "I never know if I've been turned down on the merits or because of my ethnicity. You don't know why you failed." Last year Syphax testified in favor of a bill to stop "DWB" -- the phenomenon of being stopped by the police merely for "driving while black." At a recent Sacramento race forum, Deputy Police Chief Matt Powers admitted the reality of "DWB," noting that minorities are pulled over more often due to a lingering "Archie Bunker" mentality. "The bill was introduced by Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles), who was driving to his own victory party in June when the Beverly Hills cops pulled him over and hassled him for no reason," Syphax said. "I said, I get this once a year or so, maybe twice in a bad year."

Long, Webster and Syphax have close white friends, but they rarely volunteer these hurtful events because it's just not part of the white experience. Every day, they and other African Americans must deal with whites who, by and large, control America's schools, banks, courts and other institutions. But whites, until recently, have not had to deal with people of color on a regular basis. Nearly eight out of 10 whites live in mostly white or all-white neighborhoods, national polls show. Typical of many whites is Tom Burns, a Curtis Park professional. "I don't think about race," said Burns, 44. "It's a non-issue. In my neighborhood, among the kids that go to my son's school, the people I work with and go to church with -- people of color are just not around." Buetow, Starks' white friend, said he's comfortable with African Americans because he's worked with them in the restaurant business for 35 years. "We socialized at dinner, birthday parties," he said.

When he meets someone who seems to have an attitude about white people, "if it's not personal, I don't worry about it," he said, "as long as we can get into a conversation somewhere along the line." But many whites don't know where to start in improving relations with African Americans."It's hard to be friends with black people at first because they have their guard up," said Holly Scott, a 26-year-old free-lance writer. "You almost have to be extra nice and choose your words very carefully so as not to offend them by accident." Even whites with close friends of color are reluctant to confront racism.

Elementary school teacher Sandy Glaeser is a member of the "Rainbow Girls," a multiracial group of eight women who have been friends since high school, but she and her husband, John, don't know how to deal with a bigot who lives a few doors down. "He's a very nice man up until he says something racist," she said. "Then your heart stops and you freeze." What we've always done is walk away," said her husband. "I don't think there's anything you can do that can change that. I would rather be wrong and walk away than be right and be confrontational."

Starks, echoing the views of many African Americans interviewed by The Bee, believes that for many white people, racial harmony means peace, accommodation and protecting their interests, while for him and other African Americans, "it has so much to do with justice, equality and the pursuit of happiness." These markedly different viewpoints often stand in the way of interracial friendships.

"It's almost impossible to escape having negative perceptions of whites in general if you're black in this country," said David Covin, a professor of ethnic studies at Sacramento State. Covin, 57, grew up in Evanston, Ill., where the beaches, the Y's, the restaurants and the schools were segregated, and whites set stringent limits on what he and other African Americans could do and where they could do it. Covin, whose wife is white, believes you can find racial harmony among individual whites and blacks, but not among racial groups. "Look at the O.J. Simpson thing," Covin said. "Here you have people witnessing exactly the same set of events and coming to absolutely contrary conclusions (two-thirds of whites thought Simpson was guilty and two-thirds of blacks thought he wasn't). These people have all kinds of interracial relationships -- friends, marriages, children -- but one set of people sees events in an entirely different way." Whites often have to walk a fine line -- they must see African Americans as individuals apart from race, while at the same time being aware of their experiences as African Americans. After a lifetime of slights big and small, real and imagined, many African Americans feel a quiet agony, the rage within, Starks said.

When he's shared his feelings with co-workers, he said they react, as author "James Baldwin would say, like spurned lovers -- 'I didn't know you felt this way.'

"It's the benign '90s racism, it's not seeing, not understanding -- their intent is not evil, they may even have black friends, but they allow racist perceptions and institutions to exist, they don't call them into question. It's what (Martin Luther) King called the 'appalling silence of the majority.'" It's hard to be comfortable with people who don't validate your feelings, said Starks, who invited only African Americans to his wedding. "You can't relax," he said. "Black folks don't go out casually and party with their bosses, because when the drinks start flowing, people say things that are on their minds. "That's why we value the social interaction with black folks -- it affirms your humanity, your values -- you're not crazy, you're OK."

Many institutions don't foster interaction among races, Starks said, and this lack of contact is at the core of America's racial problems. "Since black people have to interact with white people, it's easier for us to see the value of a white person as a good person or a bad person," he said. "But (many) white people don't have that experience, that frame of reference" -- which makes white people more likely to make stereotypical judgments based on skin color. What drives many African Americans crazy is people who say, "You're not like most blacks."

"I don't speak like a homeboy, and in some peoples' minds that makes me not like most blacks," said Paul Morris, a computer technician at Pacific Bell.

Morris said when he asks a white, "'How many blacks do you know?' It's usually one or none." Morris said he once met a white man who claimed to hate all African Americans because he'd been jumped in high school by a black gang. "I said, 'if you'd been jumped by whites would you hate all white people?' He said, 'I never really thought of it that way.'" Morris said he underwent a similar ordeal while growing up in Queens, N.Y. -- he was beaten up by a white gang. "I wanted revenge, but not against all whites," he said. "It's very important not to generalize about a group of people based on one negative or one positive experience," added Merritt.

Ignorance based on lack of interaction is a two-way street, said Anthony Brown, 33, an African American who owns a company that installs sound systems. Some years ago, when he ran a newspaper for a major African American church, he hired a white accountant, then was told to fire her. "It had nothing to do with job performance. The bishops of the church were prejudiced," said Brown. He fired the accountant, but felt so uncomfortable doing it he said he was forced to quit the job.

Starks, who with his friend Mark Freeman has organized numerous community forums on controversial issues, said that pigmentation discrimination is so ingrained in the American psyche that African Americans themselves are a party to it. At a forum on skin color, he and Freeman separated about 70 African Americans, "mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters," into three categories: "those of us in the middle, or 'Brownies'; those with dark skin; and those with light complexions, who are often called 'high yellow' or 'redbone.'

"We felt a lot of anger, a lot of frustration being sent our way for separating folks by color," Starks said, "and as the dialogue progressed, wouldn't you know the light-skinned folks said, 'Some of my best friends are dark-skinned.' And the dark-skinned blacks said, 'I'm tired of lighter-skinned blacks with green eyes and wavy hair reaping all the benefits (of looking more like the white majority).' And the Brownies were saying 'What's the problem?' They don't deal with the stigma, the alienation of being so black."

Unfortunately, color is often the first thing put on African Americans. While Latinos, for example, debate whether they're a race or an ethnicity, "African Americans will never have the luxury of choosing," said Syphax.

Some African Americans say they're a little worn down from trying to fit in with white people.

"Black people would never have survived for long in this country if they had not done everything possible to figure out white people and many of them are just tired," Merritt said. "My sister and I call it the 'face dance' -- you have to put on a certain face and know how to dance, figuratively, to make the majority of people feel comfortable with you." Syphax concurs. "Everywhere I go, I am Phil Donahue and Oprah put together," he said. But Merritt fervently believes personal relationships can change America.

"If people really want this to be a good and powerful country and a healthy society, they need to step out of their box and know people of a different background." But, she said, "the onus is on white people because of their history and because of their position of economic and social power." "They (African Americans) are being pulled in so many different directions many of them really could use a friend, but they're not going to go out of their way to do anything more than is essential to day-to-day survival."

Frank interracial discussions are the key to racial harmony, said Otis Scott, an African American who's chairman of the ethnic studies department at California State University, Sacramento. "Many of us are dishonest about our feelings. We keep our pain submerged to effect a veneer of politeness. Underneath there a lot of seething anger, hostility and anxiety we have got to come to grips with."You can't build harmony on dishonesty and denial and a Pollyanna-ish attitude that what happened in the past doesn't matter," said Scott, 56. "Harmony has to come out of discordance -- jazz begins at a point of discordance, and harmony and syncopation arise out of those challenges. ... We have to struggle with issues and topics that make us uncomfortable." Lorraine McCall, a white statistician at the federal Indian Health Service in Sacramento, has many African American and American Indian friends, but even she feels the tension. "We (whites) were incredibly insensitive and now we're overly sensitive," she said. "You walk around on tiptoe all the time worrying about how people feel. But if it increases our awareness of other people's feelings and ways of thinking it's a good thing."

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A year ago, I walked through Phelps Gate for the first time and thought I had entered the most exciting educational institution imaginable. This year, I return sadder but wiser. Now I am aware of another, better world that can never be mine. Days spent in witty conversation, absorbing the multifaceted humor of those around me. Nights engaged in sexual conquest, a never-ending experimentation with wild and fantastic combinations and positions that would make Anais Nin blush. I look at the relative dullness of my life now, and I weep. I could have gone to Harvard.

As a youthful and unprepared high school senior, I could not have been expected to know what I was missing. After all, I had not yet read the lush and rather sticky story of Cambridge life offered up by four Harvard graduates under the pseudonym Jane Harvard in the new novel The Student Body.

Our intrepid heroine, Toni Isaacs, is a reporter for the Harvard Crimson with the chance to break open a prostitution ring involving students at the University, and in the process star in a number of excruciatingly safe sex scenes. This is Boogie Nights for Ivy League fetishists, without the ample charms of Marky Mark. But if this book were only about engorged Crimson manhood, it wouldn't be half the inspiring work of literature that it is. Its other charms are considerable, and they might yet keep Bill Bennett from turning his righteous wrath towards the Gomorrah on the Charles. Closer examination reveals the moral subtext beneath the sweaty sheets. Toni and her friends have lessons to teach us all:

Stay in school. Toni is continually agonizing over whether or not to toe the line set by the administration. On the one hand, she could expose a major conspiracy to test drugs on human beings, save a number of girls from lives of prostitution, become a media celebrity and an accomplished journalist in one stroke, and possibly assist in the arrest of a murderer. On the other hand, if she does so, there's a chance she might be expelled. From Harvard. And then would she do?

Choose your friends carefully. The cardinal rule: the less suntan lotion applied, the better. With almost no exceptions, the bad guys (and girls) are Caucasians, while the decent, hardworking folks are everybody else. Out of the dozens of white people in the novel, the two "good" guys are a crack dealer that feels really sorry about it and a paranoid schizophrenic who fakes his own death. And the only token evil member of a minority may have sex with teenage prostitutes, but gosh darn it, he tells Toni to do the right thing, and in the end, she respects him. Since any reader can easily tell which side a character is on by checking skin color, said reader is spared the necessity of trying to understand the characters beneath the rather plastic dialogue, and can immediately proceed to the heavy breathing.

It never hurts to advertise. Spelling out a message explicitly is the best way to communicate. For example, the authors of this book want their readers to know that it is set at Harvard University. So they say that it is. Then they say it again. The word "Harvard" appears twenty-one times in the first fifteen pages. This could be part of setting up Harvard as a visceral presence. It might even be an ambitious attempt to make Harvard a character in its own right. It's about as believable as the rest of the characters.

Clean up after yourself. Time and again the incredibly powerful conspiracy of bad rich dudes fools Toni into participating in illegal activity, brings the police force down on her, and then drops a big crack vial or videotape of a professor in flagrante delicto in front of her so that she doesn't lose interest. The reader is forced to conclude that an entire mob of Harvard-educated businessmen and trustees really has no concept of the importance of evidence in conducting an investigation. Perhaps they failed to consult their law firm.

People ought to earn their place. Northeastern girls who work as strippers to get through college... Wellesley girls on the prowl for husbands to support them... MIT geeks with no social skills... almost every other area college gets savaged by the authors. Yet these specimens of mental inferiority still keep showing up at party after party, leaving our heroine with no choice but to leave in disgust and immediately find a soft-core scene to wander into.

All men are crazy lunatic sex fiends. Or just plain crazy. I suppose everyone has to be right some of the time.

While the Cambridge of The Student Body throbs with nightlife, a not-so-dirty secret lies behind the novel. The sad truth is that the events of the novel are purely fictional, based on a scandal that broke at Brown University in 1986. It was a bunch of Brown girls who were spreading their, uh, loving all over town. The tawdry truth is that Harvard students' favorite kind of stimulation is probably still caffeine pills, and odds are that Ron Jeremy won't be parking his car in Harvard Yard anytime soon. Still, the lessons I learned from this modern band of Aesops will serve me well in the immediate future.

Anyone up for a road trip to Providence?

Hee. That's a good one.

have fun!