COLUMN: Asking the right questions

From Yoni Slonim's, "Taking My Turn At Bat," Fall '97 From Yoni Slonim's, "Taking My Turn At Bat," Fall '97 Typical. The white liberal got up and asked a loaded question expecting his answer. We were running through the paces once again. "It seems that in our times people are turning to violence to solve their problems. Has Martin Luther King, Jr.'s non-violent message finished its run? Is violence the answer? What do you think he would say about?" On and on. Expected answer: There are problems in the inner city because people are turning to guns and violence. This is not the solution. We must all come together? But for once, this answer was not heard. There was a disguised fault being assigned to the question. He wanted to hear that if only people would stop killing each other the situation would improve. That by moving away from King's message, people are bringing problems upon themselves. Felix Justice did not disappoint. He said people misinterpret Martin Luther King, adding King's message was very violent but that non-violence did not make him the first outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. Justice said, the only life worth living is one in which one has something worth dying for. The actor's message was essentially that the problem now is not that people are dying, it is that they are dying for no reason. Justice cried out that there are battles still to be fought and we should "storm the barricades!" But, this didn't seem to sit well with the audience. Is our generation lazy? Do we just not care about these things? Or maybe,the problems are already solved? The problem lies in the fact that the barricades are very hard to find. It is not so easy to pinpoint an issue we would be "willing to die for." Racism and unfair treatment are for the most part not overt. People have learned to cover themselves. There are also minorities in almost every decision-making body in society, leading many to believe problems of the inner city are taken care of. However these problems are not being solved. Many have created a questionable deduction: since traditional causes can't be found, the fault must lie with the people directly involved. Therefore, the responsibility to set things straight is also the fault of the people involved. There are still structural and inherent biases within our country which need correcting. We have the hard task of finding these real issues. This is where the responsibility of our generation lies. Drugs and guns are not the problem of the inner city but only results of a larger one. Our legislators skew our perceptions by addressing these issues instead of the real ones. They pick these topics because they are easily quantifiable. Police can make X number of drug and gun busts. But, that never seems to solve much of anything. If we would look into our society, we would find the real issues are much harder to solve than those proposed. Real questions such as why is unemployment so high in the inner city? Why is there such a high rate of birth out-of-wedlock in these areas? I am not the first to raise these questions by any means. Historians, including William Jules Wilson from Harvard and Thomas Sugrue from Penn's History Department, present considerable arguments that these are the questions that deserve to be asked. Moreover, why aren't these types of questions being asked by the people we choose to represent us? Simply stated, if we fail to raise the questions, the answers given by legislators will never be adequate. As a country we have come to the point where saying "just let things be and they will work themselves out," is the norm. This would work in an ideal society but the laissez faire attitude can't work in a situation where people have been held back economically for so long. For example, it is easy to see many inner cities are suffering. Many say those living there should have the ability to pick themselves up and contribute to society. However, government policies of the forties and fifties are responsible for much of the inner city's plight. Flight of businesses and jobs -- which has effected the unemployment rate -- can be directly traced to discriminatory lending and housing practices. To come now and say "fair game" is preposterous! It's similar to throwing a weight on someone in the water and screaming swim! Finding where our "barricade" lies is the first step in attempting to solve current racial problems. It will not be through the generally accepted view of non-violence that these questions will be raised into the national consciousness. But rather, through active confrontation of opinion. In the State of the Union address President Clinton declared that "the enemy of our time is inaction." Let us not make it easy for him to make this true.