White Men

After dozens of old people were robbed, beaten, raped and murdered at the Sunset Homes, the large public housing complex on Chicago's North Side, a new security company was hired.The new guards are big, strong, stern and tough. With their thick necks and shaved heads, they have a menacing appearance.And in a very brief time, criminal thugs decided that it was risky to prey on the residents of the housing for the elderly.Because of the presence of the new guards from the Quick Hurt Agency, there has been a sharp decline in the crime rate at Sunset Homes.

WASHINGTON -- And so we come again to the place where race and sex intersect. It's an intersection we never seem to quite escape, one ever present in our news and our history, whether it be Kobe Bryant accused of rape or O. J. Simpson accused of murder or back through antiquity to a black woman in a slave cabin, knees pressed together at the sound of her door opening at midnight and the white man who owns her stepping through, unwelcome. This time, it's Duke University, where members of the lacrosse team are accused of raping a stripper hired to perform at a team party.

FOR THE LOVE of heaven, won't somebody just call this thing what it is? It's racism, pure and simple. And it comes from those folks at the Justice Policy Institute, who apparently believe that more than half of the black men in Baltimore between the ages of 20 and 30 have no control over their actions and shouldn't be held accountable for them. That was, for decades that stretched into centuries, the justification for slavery and Jim Crow, wasn't it? Black folks were simple-minded, childlike creatures who were unable to control their emotions and needed only the civilizing influences of slavery and segregation to bring them to heel.

There is a scholarship for students who wear outfits made of duct tape to their proms. David Letterman offers a scholarship for kids with average grades. There are scholarships for students who vote Democratic (or Republican), scholarships for students who have cancer, diabetes, sickle cell, autism or Tourette's, students named Zolp, students who are blind, deaf, vegan, Arizonan, left handed, low income, African-, Hispanic-, Native-, Asian- or woman-American. So it's hard to get worked up over a new scholarship for students who are white men. It is offered by the Texas-based Former Majority Association for Equality, which would want you to know that it is not motivated by racism.

Yesterday, the first Saturday of this new year, Gov. William Donald Schaefer stood in a downtown Baltimore church basement, surrounded by a few dozen parolees, and listened to them talk about new beginnings.The men and women were graduates of the state's Herman Toulson Correctional Boot Camp, a program that involves six months of strict discipline, strenuous physical labor, as well as academic studies.Those 16-hour work days at Jessup were grueling, the graduates remembered. But what is just as tough to endure, some told Mr. Schaefer, is their freedom.

Media references to the Baltimore trial of Avi and Eliyahu Werdesheim now come with a made-for-Google-Trends phrase: "A case with similarities to the Trayvon Martin shooting. " Here are some of them: Avi and Eliyahu Werdesheim are white and 21 and 24 years old, respectively; the Park Heights teenager they are accused of assaulting, 16-year-old Corey Ausby, is black. In the Florida case, Trayvon Martin was 17 and black; the man accused of shooting him, George Zimmerman, is 28, and he's been described elsewhere in the press as a "white Hispanic.

Despite inroads made by Barbra Streisand, Martha Coolidge, Penelope Spheeris, John Singleton, Ernest Dickerson and Edward James Olmos, a new study by the Directors Guild of America confirms what many women and minority filmmakers have been saying for years: Movie-directing is a white man's game.The report finds that while the total days female directors were employed increased from 3 percent of all the work done by guild members in 1983 to 8 percent in 1991, employment of DGA minority directors fell from 5 percent in 1983 to 3 percent last year.

In the days leading up to Pennsylvania's primary, white males - those knuckle-dragging, chaw-chompin', beer-swillin' bitter troglodytes - were suddenly the debutante's delight. How were the Democrats to woo these crucial swing voters, known in other circles as the Republican Party base? Political commentators' brains grew new crevices as they pondered the imponderable: Would white males go for the woman or the black man? Or as Nora Ephron more pointedly posed the question: Whom do white men hate more, women or blacks?

The writer who wishes to smear another writer and proponent of the Tubman statue with the noxious taint of "political correctness" couldn't be more wrong ("Tubman statue: political correctness run amok," March 15). He believes John Hanson will be unfairly relegated because he was a white male and Tubman unreasonably elevated because she was not. My academic experience, albeit a long time ago, was decidedly to the contrary. Although I excelled in history and got a academic prize for it along with a degree cum laude from Western Maryland College, I was somehow unaware of who Harriet Tubman was. The full importance of her accomplishments was not brought home to me until I read a chapter of "Black Profiles In Courage" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a Cumberland bookstore in the 1990s.

The recent, alarming report by the National Academies of Science on the health of our innovation economy, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future," did the nation a major service by decrying the dismal state of science and math education in the U.S. and the gradual erosion of our world primacy in science and technology. But the report fell short in one crucial area: It failed to address the persistent shortage of women and minorities in science and engineering.