We move to June of 1987. Jesus Rangel is writing an article called “School Relieves a Violent Past to Keep Peace,” and there is the beginning of a formal dialogue discussing racially charged “stabbings and beatings.” Rangel writes that “in many ways, the problems at John Dewey were a microcosm of the climate in the surrounding neighborhoods.” He writes about the spring of 1975, on a day when “the owners of a luncheonette across the street from John Dewey High School put a sign on their jukebox saying that no music could be played during the day.” When “black and Puerto Rican students interpreted the sign as an attempt by the owners to exclude them from the luncheonette,” a fight ensued. Reading this article felt like reading the screenplay to Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing, which came during summer of 1989. In an article discussing it, by Lawrence van Gelder, Spike Lee says, “I know I wouldn’t walk through Bensonhurst, day or night. It doesn’t matter that I’m Spike Lee. They’ll crack my head just like anybody else.” If you are unfamiliar with Spike Lee’s work, 1) you should familiarize yourself, and 2) he has a lot of meaningful discussions and observations of the complexity of racial tensions in these ethnic neighborhoods of New York, which holds merit for our present discussion. Another film, Jungle Fever, features the murder of Yusuf Hawkins, which is a totally critical point of discussion in our examination of Bensonhurst during this time. The main plot of the film is interracial relationships and the stereotypes that come with them. However, we simultaneously see the familiar story of “a black teenager” who “walked round a corner in Bensonhurst, a largely Italian neighborhood in New York” at that time, and found himself “lying dead on the pavement” a few minutes later.
With the murder of Yusuf Hawkins, an entirely new brand of Italian showed up in the media. Let me first summarize the murder: Yusuf Hawkins was a teenager who wandered into Bensonhurst looking for a car. A group of Italian teenagers made the assumption that he was the black guy dating so-and-so’s sister, and they shot him dead. Alan Weislin wrote a really nice article about knowing these kids firsthand, and knowing the necessary discussions that never unfolded and knowing that it so easily could have been him. He admits that “he has a pretty good idea of what” the kids responsible for the murder of Yusuf Hawkins “heard and did not hear in their homes, their schools, their churches.” Another article by Michael Freitag explicates a play by Frank Pugliese, another Italian man born and raised in Bensonhurst. The plot of Pugliese’s play goes like this: “the fatal beating of a black man who, in search of a sandwich, crosses into a white neighborhood.” Sounds awfully familiar, which is why it is so revolting that a week into rehearsals is when Yusuf Hawkins was murdered. What this essentially says is that things like this happened so often that Pugliese actually wrote the precise story before it even happened. Pugliese sums up Bensonhurst as simultaneously “a tightly knit community of hard-working Italian-Americans” and “a neighborhood where some frustrated young men are so full of racial hatred that they are capable of murder.”
In September of 1989, another article was published in the New York Times, this one titled “Brooklyn Neighborhood Not a Cradle of Racists; Italy’s True Heritage.” Thomas Belmonte writes to the editor that “As an Italian-American,” he feels “deep shame that an Italian neighborhood should again be the site of a brutal racist murder and that the Italian flag should be waved at protesting black marchers as an emblem of bigotry and cultural insularity.”
These racially charged crimes were so standard that the Onion wrote an article about it. Titled “NYPD Apologizes for Accidental Shooting-Clubbing-Stabbing-Firebombing Death,” the article discusses “the accidental shooting-clubbing-stabbing-firebombing-choking-impaling-electrocution-lethal-injection death of a 38 year-old Jamaican immigrant in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.” The article is an uncomfortable funny but still a solid read. The Italian-Americans of Bensonhurst had successfully earned themselves the title of intrinsic racists. I don’t know about you guys, but intrinsically racist certainly isn’t on my list of desirable attributes.
