Black Kids

WASHINGTON -- Thank you, but I don't need a lecture on personal responsibility. Many of you apparently felt otherwise after reading my recent column on the use of the justice system as a cudgel against black children. The column dealt with the mistreatment of more than 100 juveniles, most of them black, who were left in a flooded New Orleans detention center for up to five days without food and water after Hurricane Katrina. It was also about the death of Martin Lee Anderson, an unresisting 14-year-old black kid who was hit, choked and restrained by up to nine guards in a Panama City, Fla., "boot camp."

Warner Lai is a rangy eighth-grader who rips through cinder blocks with his bare hand in gym class. He's almost a black belt. Today, he and three other eighth-graders at Midtown Academy, where two mandatory tae kwon do classes each week fulfill the state's physical education requirement, will take tests needed to graduate from danbo, or black belt-in-training, to full-fledged black belt. "I'm calm, I'm ready for this," Warner, 14, said this week, after his last class before the trials.

DETROIT - The last time Major League Baseball brought its midsummer spectacle to Detroit, various urban pockets pulsated with excitement. Kids were armed with little more than their imaginations enjoying the nuances of a sport now branded as hopelessly out of touch with the modern youthful spirit. The 1971 All-Star Game was an opportunity to take an old white T-shirt, cut off the sleeves, apply a little Magic Marker, place it over a black T-shirt and create a vintage Pittsburgh Pirates' Roberto Clemente "jersey" that you proudly showed off to your masochistic American League friends.

Steele makes no sense regarding black players David Steele's racially inspired column on Thursday ["Diamonds glitter even less in the black community"] was one of the most illogical pieces of sportswriting I have read in a long time. He tallies the number of American-born vs. Hispanic-born black players in baseball and calls any disparity in numbers "bad news." Good grief! Then he lists great black ballplayers from the past and bemoans that fewer are coming up from the youth of the cities.

WHO KNEW? Forty years ago, who knew that the white working-class street-corner bunch Buddy Deane always called "the nicest kids in town" would wind up portrayed in Broadway's Hairspray, with the cast mashed potatoing and handjiving and foot-stomping racial segregation into history's dustbin and getting themselves immortalized on national television as the most honored Tony Award winners in the land? Who could have imagined? Forty years ago, if Buddy Deane Committee members thought about Broadway at all, it wasn't New York's Broadway -- it was a bus ride down to Lee's of Broadway, in Fells Point, where the boys bought their pegged pants and their pointy-toe shoes and then strolled around the corner to get their drape haircuts.

"IF LIFE were everything it should be, it would be more like Hairspray." Thus effuses The New York Times on the opening of what Broadway boosters hope is the next big revenue stream and a measure that the death of musical theater recently proclaimed by some and feared by others in the world of a Ground Zero New York has been greatly exaggerated. Thus hype mixes with hope that an opera buffa of 1962 Baltimore will be a hit and sate the imaginations of audiences. "For Hairspray is, above all, Nice," the Times goes on. "This may be regarded as faint praise in New York, capital of Type A personalities.

The picnic table was covered yesterday with the volunteers' handiwork: slices of chilled watermelon, piles of hot dogs, pans full of kimchi and, of course, the kids' favorite - pulgoki, a Korean dish made of beef, vegetables, sesame seeds and oil, soy sauce and garlic. At this mouthwatering feast at Downs Park in Pasadena, chopsticks and forks remained on the table as campers with the Druid Heights Cultural Exchange Summer Fun Camp paused during the camp's annual Unity Day to thank the camp's unsung heroes - the cooks.

HER NAME was Mrs. Woodard, and she taught third-graders in a little classroom in Jacksonville, Fla., where a kid named Joe Hairston struggled mournfully to write an essay. Mrs. Woodard leaned down and whispered in his ear. Forty-five years later, Hairston can still hear the echo. "You can do this," said Mrs. Woodard. To the future superintendent of Baltimore County's public schools, the words felt like the opening of a future. He could do this, and maybe he could do anything else that had given him doubts: school lessons, and growing-up stuff, and a system of American class and race that is always working itself out at somebody's expense.

NEW YORK -- I have been writing for some time about the problems of public education. I also have been highly critical of the elements in popular culture that encourage young people toward illiteracy, brutishness, hatred of women, whorishness and mindless materialism. Now we find that these troubles are combining in yet another way: as obstacles that prevent black kids from doing well in society. It is often difficult to talk about these things, because those who function on the racist circuits of our nation describe poor academic performance by black kids as proof of inherent inferiority, the intellectual quicksand of bad genes.

HERE'S ANOTHER study that tells us what we already know. Do you suppose we'll pay attention this time? Not a chance. We'd have to change some bad habits and give up some prejudices that, if not exactly comforting, at least enjoy the cache of familiarity. "And Justice for Some," a study commissioned by the Youth Law Center and conducted by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, has found that at every step in the juvenile justice system, minority kids are treated more harshly than white kids.