Racial tensions redirected?
<font color="blue">Sept. 11 Attack Narrows the Racial Divide
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
n Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a crew of black and Latino teenage boys say they can no longer think of the police as enemies. Since Sept. 11, the boys say, the officers who patrol their neighborhoods, most of whom are white, no longer eye them with suspicion.
Several Haitian-American groups, which had angrily protested police abuse in recent years, have sent a letter to a local police chief in Crown Heights expressing admiration for the officers.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has been embraced by black leaders. On the national stage, with few exceptions, black members of Congress, seething all year long about the election of George W. Bush, have rallied to his side.
Black New Yorkers joke among themselves about their own reprieve from racial profiling. Even the language of racial grievance has shifted: Overnight, the cries about driving while black have become flying while brown ? a phrase referring to reports of Muslim-Americans being asked to get off planes.
Ever so slightly, the attacks on the trade center have tweaked the city's traditional racial divisions.
This is not unheard of in wartime, historians say. Nor do most people believe it will last long. The black-white racial pattern has too deep a history.
But the signs of change have revealed themselves in dozens of interviews across the city in recent weeks. Some of it is evident in how police and civilians see each other. Some of it is how ordinary men and women react to each other on the streets, on subways, in bodegas. Some people attribute it to the solemnity that hangs over the city, others to fear, still others to a newfound unity as Americans. Whatever it is, the way that New Yorkers perceive one another across color lines ? however accurate those perceptions were to begin with ? has changed.
If old racial antagonisms have dissolved, new anxieties have surfaced.
Keith Wright, an assemblyman from Harlem, said that before Sept. 11, "people were looking at young black men like they were all suspected of some kind of crime."
"Now people are looking at people of Middle Eastern descent as suspects of terrorism," said Mr. Wright, who is black. "Now we have to be careful not to do that."
The New York Police Department has seen a rash of possible hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs ? in short, anyone perceived by untrained eyes to be suspect in the terrorist attack. Yemeni-owned delis have been vandalized, shopkeepers and newsstand workers have been punched, a Sikh cabdriver has been shot at, Arabs and Pakistanis have been attacked on subways and on the street. Of the 120 alleged bias incidents reported to the police since Sept. 11, 80 have been against Arabs and South Asians; the suspects are whites, blacks and Hispanics.
Late last month, a Star-Ledger/Eagleton- Rutgers poll taken in New Jersey asked whether airport officials should regard Middle Eastern travelers with "more suspicion" than others. Blacks and whites differed only slightly in their responses: 38 percent of blacks and 42 percent of whites said those travelers should be treated with more suspicion. On the question of whether immigration from the Middle East should be "more restrictive than it is now," the differences were similarly small: 29 percent of blacks and 23 percent of whites said such immigration should be halted, while 55 percent of blacks and 56 percent of whites said it should be limited.
At the center of the shift in attitude is the group of boys playing football on a balmy afternoon last week at Fort Greene Park. Some of them are African-Americans, others have roots in the Caribbean; the family of one fled war in El Salvador. "The police would probably racially profile everyone that's here," said Louis Johnson, 18, pointing to his friends with a jut of his chin.
The child of Trinidadian immigrants, Mr. Johnson said he had all but grown accustomed to being trailed by the police. "They used to watch me from the time they see me, they watch me till I leave," he said. "But now they don't really bother us. They, like, stop everyone that has Middle Eastern features. They stop them. They ask them questions like that."
The boys see themselves transformed. "I just thought of myself as black," Mr. Johnson said. "But now I feel like I'm an American, more than ever."
Miqueo Rawell-Peterson, 17, notes gravely that the police were among the first to rush into the burning towers. "We've become a little more at ease with the policemen," he said. "We realize what they've done. Now we look at them more as heroes, instead of ? I guess, what you'd say, enemies."
Police on the street call this going "from zero to hero" as people smile and say thank you and call in with tips. "Everyone's taken a second look at how they conduct themselves," said Lt. James Woods, a community relations officer at the Brooklyn South patrol office. "There's a lot more public display of affection, of support, of kindness."
Sgt. Thomas Seyfarth was stationed at a subway platform in central Brooklyn recently when a call came over the police radio about a man, apparently of Middle Eastern descent, sitting on a bench on a subway platform, but not taking a train. "Nobody ever would have called that in before," Sergeant Seyfarth said. (As it turned out, the man was on the wrong platform, waiting for a train going in the opposite direction.)
"I guess it's in fashion now," Sergeant Seyfarth said, referring to the new spirit of cooperation. "It's different. It's something you're not used to."
"Can't get too used to it, though," he added quickly. "The people who don't like you will be vocal again."
The examples offered as evidence of change are mundane encounters ? the way someone talks to you, a look on a stranger's face. Always, they are matters of perception.
Richard Greene, director of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, recalled an open-air memorial held in front of the home of a victim of the attack on the trade center. At the sight of some police officers, one young black man, Mr. Greene recalled, groused: "What are they doing here?" A second man, whom Mr. Greene overheard, explained that the police were there to keep traffic off the block. "It neutralized it right away," Mr. Greene said.
It may not have happened the same way before Sept. 11. "Absolutely, it has altered human relations," Mr. Greene surmised. "Race has a piece in that. Everyone in New York has had a sobering wake-up call as to our frailty as human beings."
To Joyce Hata, an Asian-American living in largely African-American Fort Greene, that call has given people permission to talk across the usual racial divides. Ms. Hata said she is used to being on the receiving end of cold stares from some of her neighbors. But the other day, she found herself in an unusually candid conversation with a middle-aged black woman on the street; the woman, Ms. Hata learned, she had just lost three of her neighbors.
"She's someone who would have been less accessible," Ms. Hata, 38, observed last Sunday after services at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. "It's easier to break through now. People are so desperate to have someone hear them."
If people are talking, what they are talking about has changed, too, the pastor of that church, the Rev. David Dyson, noted. Mr. Dyson, who is white, said that people at the bodega down the street now ask each other: "How are you? How's the church? How's the family?"
"I haven't heard the word gentrification uttered since this happened," Mr. Dyson said. "There's not nearly as much us against them ? the old us against them."
In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Victor Lavalle, a writer, paints two pictures. The first is of his local pizzeria. Before Sept. 11, it was the usual New York jostling: the mostly black and Latino boys from the neighborhood high school would come in, loud and rambunctious, prompting dirty looks from the elderly Polish women. After Sept. 11, the boys come in quietly. They ask the women if they've ordered. The women look at them, step aside and say, "Go ahead."
The second picture he paints is of an Indian-American friend. Last week, the friend started to park his car on a residential street in New Jersey, only to be greeted by a volley of threats and insults from a white man who stepped out of his house. Mr. Lavalle said his friend got back in his car and drove away, chilled to the bone.</font>
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