The Justice Department announced a week ago that it had “entered into a consent decree with New York City and various school district officials, settling allegations of civil rights violations and deprivations of equal educational opportunities at Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School”:
The government’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, alleges that school district officials deliberately ignored severe and pervasive harassment directed at Asian-American students by their classmates. This harassment allegedly included both physical and verbal abuse, including multiple violent assaults. According to the complaint, students regularly threw food, cans and combination locks at Asian-American students, while shouting ethnic slurs. . . .
The New York Times covered this, as did AP, UPI, the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the New York Post.
But none of the stories that I saw reported on the race of the attackers (and neither did the Justice Department press release). Newsday columnist Sheryl McCarthy, however, did reveal at least some attackers’ races:
According to a Department of Justice report, students threw food or cans or combination locks at them in the cafeteria. In June 2001, a Pakistani student was beaten by a group of black and Hispanic students for no apparent reason.
In late 2002 a Chinese student was strangled from behind and nearly asphyxiated in a school shower, reportedly also by a black student. And in December 2002, Siukwo Cheng, an 18-year-old Chinese student whose 96.86 grade point average put him in the running to be senior class valedictorian, was kicked and beaten unconscious just outside the school by a group of black students.
Earlier that day Cheng had confronted some black students who had insulted a teacher, and as he was being beaten his attackers told him they could “do anything they wanted to a Chinaman.” . . .
Before I knew the details about the attacks on Asian students at Lafayette, my first question was whether they were perpetrated by black students. The fact that they were strikes me as especially sad, given that only a few weeks ago we were reading stories about the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools. . . .
[T]o hear about black students harassing and attacking Asian students is sickening. I suspect this antagonism has as much to do with the fact that Asian students do much better academically than blacks as it has to do with race.
After all, the biggest challenge facing public schools today is finding a way to close the achievement gap between white and Asian students on one hand and black and Latino students on the other. The research suggests that Asian students are among the top academic achievers because of a work ethic that’s fueled by the immigrants’ ambition to succeed in this country.
I can imagine black students seeing this kind of drive and responding in one of three ways: acknowledging it but dismissing it as too demanding for themselves; seeing it as a possible path to their own goals and emulating it; or resenting it and lashing out bitterly.
When I heard about the attack on Siukwo Cheng, the A-minus student who was beaten unconscious for demanding respect for his teacher, it confirmed my suspicions about what’s going on at Lafayette. Apart from the racism that was involved, that attack was also about a profound disrespect for education.
Nor are Asian students the only ones at Lafayette High who are oppressed by the violent behavior of the disruptive ones. So are the school’s other black and Hispanic and white students, who’d just like to get an education in peace.
And until the thugs in their midst learn to respect both the Siukwo Chengs of the world and the value of an education, even 100 years after the Brown decision they’ll still be doomed to living inferior lives.
I don’t know whether Ms. McCarthy’s guesses about the attackers’ motivations are correct. I also don’t know whether the examples she gives are representative of the incidents — maybe some of the other attackers were members of other racial groups. (If anyone can point me to a copy of the Justice Department report itself, I’d like to hear it.)
But her column — and its counterpoint to the news stories, which say nothing about the attackers’ races — does raise an important question: When newspapers are covering racial and racist conflicts, should they remain silent about which groups’ members are involved in the conflict (at least on one side)? Or should they reveal them?
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