Blacks And Whites

THE REMARKABLE gathering of black men in Washington yesterday is best seen not as a reprise of the 1963 march on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech. That was a traditional exercise of the constitutional right peaceably to assemble in order to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Yesterday's tens of thousands on the Mall surely have grievances with their government, as many speakers made clear, but the theme that ran through so many of the speakers' addresses was the great need for black men themselves to overcome the grievous problems of so many black communities.

Wesley Hatch, a black teen-ager from Chicago's neglected West Side, graduated from high school with few choices two years ago. He dreamed of going to college to study architecture, but his mother did not have the money. That left dead-end jobs, the streets and the military. He chose the military."He didn't want to go," his mother, Rhoda, said. "But he thought by joining the Army he'd be able to do better, help me out and go to school."Now he is a foot soldier on the Kuwaiti border, on the front lines of war in the Persian Gulf.

BASTROP, La. -- The vote was close and the opposition persistent, but students in this northern Louisiana mill town have finally done away with one of the last vestiges of segregation in their high school.They voted for an integrated school prom, 240-229.But that has not prevented some students from seeking other ways to keep the tradition going.The narrow decision Dec. 11 for an integrated dance comes 21 years after desegregation brought blacks and whites together in the classrooms of Bastrop High School.

David Brudnoy and I were off to a flying start. The witty, erudite and conservative talk show host for Boston's WBZ radio agreed with me on the need for those black students who still feel learning is a white thing to drop that attitude and get on the ball.Then he brought up the IQ thing.Well, actually, a woman caller brought it up, citing "The Bell Curve" as having a distinctly anti-black tone. Brudnoy retorted that only 10 percent of the 2-year-old book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray dealt with the vexing issue of differences in the IQs of blacks and whites.

I've got a few beefs that have really got me burned lately.They are: continuing racism in the county, intolerance under the guise of religion and legislators who don't know how to legislate.It seems like almost every week, there is one reported case of racism here in the county. I wonder how many are not reported out of fear of reprisal. We've got the skinheads still distributing hate newspapers in Columbia because they don't like the fact that Columbia is integrated.There are also a growing number of racial incidents occurring predominantly in the western part of the county.

When it comes to cardiovascular diseases, the news is almost all bad for African-Americans.Blacks are at least twice as likely as whites to suffer from high blood pressure. They also typically get it younger and have it treated less.Compounding the problem, hypertension typically follows a far deadlier course in blacks than other people. In blacks, it is more likely to lead to kidney failure, strokes and deadly heart attacks."Hypertension is the No. 1 risk factor that precedes a whole series of problems that come cascading down the hill until we become Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall," says Dr. Arthur Beau White.

MIAMI -- My daughter didn't understand black. She insisted that she was tan. Patiently and with a child's faultless logic, she repeated it, even holding up her arm so I could see for myself.Hampered by the imperfect logic of adults, I fumbled to correct her. No, I explained, you're black.It was a conversation that could only happen in America, but I knew it had to be done. She had to be prepared for the day one of her friends, in a fit of pique, said some awful word picked up from the grown-ups at the dinner table.

WASHINGTON -- I can't wait to hear how President Clinton plans to patch up differences between the races. He has a hard enough time trying to patch up his own differences with Congress.Mr. Clinton is expected to offer a blueprint for racial reconciliation when he delivers the commencement address at the University of California at San Diego tomorrow. He is looking for a legacy and quite properly thinks he can make a valuable contribution in the area of race, America's perennial problem.He may be right.

WASHINGTON -- Blacks and whites strongly disagree about the government's role in helping minorities, a new Gallup Poll shows, but a majority of both races agree on one thing: Race relations will always be a problem in the United States.While 59 percent of blacks polled said the federal government should make special efforts to improve the position of nonwhites, 59 percent of whites said members of minority groups should help themselves. And while a majority of blacks said affirmative action programs should be increased, only about a fifth of whites agreed.

Race relations have never been better in this country and blacks and whites have never been closer.Obvious but it needed to be said.The bitter gubernatorial election in Louisiana last weekend between Democrat Edwin W. Edwards and Republican David E. Duke has sparked national concern over the state of race relations in this country and almost everyone's prognosis is bad.Duke, the former high muckety-muck of the Ku Klux Klan and a founder of the National Association...