Once again America has witnessed an event that shows how divided we are along cultural and racial lines. This revelation was delivered to us courtesy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who is either (depending on which side of the chasm you are watching the circus from) the peacemaker or self-promoter par excellence.
I'm talking about last week's brouhaha over the expulsion of a half-dozen hoodlums (my word) from a Decatur, Ill., high school because they caused a riot after a football game.At first, the Rev. Jackson pushed his way to the front of the crowd to demand that the rioters' sentences be reduced from two-year expulsions to immediate reinstatement and psychological counseling. While he didn't exactly get what he wanted, Jackson did succeed in cowing local school board officials (many of whom are black) into reducing the punishment from two years to one.
At first, he claimed victory. Then America witnessed a videotape of the incident, which took place in mid-September.
If you haven't seen it, the camera looms as students punch, kick, step on top of and otherwise brutalize peaceful onlookers in the stadium stands. For the life of me, I could not understand why even Jesse Jackson would want to stand up for such gratuitously violent behavior. If I were a parent of one of the students injured in or witness to that melee, I would want the perpetrators not just thrown out of school but jailed.
Then I appeared as the only white on a mostly African American talk show on one of our local public TV stations in Washington, D.C. I was on a panel with three other middle-class journalists like myself. But I was the only one to call the violence indefensible. They agreed that while some form of punishment was called for, and the violence was not to be condoned, it is usual and normal for kids to riot after a football game..
Never having been in a fistfight or riot myself, I find any form of violence repulsive, reprehensible and worthy of immediate and severe punishment. My African American friends considered me more than a bit naive and clearly out of touch with the real world.
Obviously there are African Americans who are raised without violence in their homes or in their schools. And there are plenty of whites who brutalize each other in private and in public. But the impression I came away with was that violence was acceptable, even expected in the culture of the other three journalists, and it was shocking, unexpected and unacceptable in mine.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has repeatedly embarrassed the U.S. government, making peace with and freeing prisoners held by foreign dictators. Most recently, he freed three U.S. servicemen held by Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic.
This one man has bridged gaps that not even the muscle and might of the world's greatest power could close. But Jackson's got an even bigger chasm to traverse if he holds among his goals helping blacks and whites understand each other.
Bonnie Erbe, host of the PBS program "To the Contrary," writes this column weekly for Scripps Howard News Service. Her E-mail address is bonnieerbe@CompuServe.com