Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Read Online Free PDF

Queens who said he grabbed and propositioned her in a nightclub, the ex-wife who said he beat her, and the lawyer who was reportedly told during a deposition exactly what he wanted to do to her, complete with hand gestures.
    At the Miss Black America event at which Mr. Tyson met the alleged victim, one contestant said Mr. Tyson was like “an octopus,” and the organizer, J. Morris Anderson, became famous overnight for characterizing Mr. Tyson as “a serial buttocks fondler.” But Mr. Anderson did not pursue a lawsuit against the fighter, saying he had “second thoughts about participating in the crucifixion of a black role model.”
    Why in the world should Mike Tyson, a man who apparently can’t pass a ladies’ room without grabbing the doorknob, be a role model? Whether he raped anybody or not, it’s clear he has disrespected black women from one end of this country to the other, as though they were hamburger and he were hungry. Thecheerleader-cum-Sunday-school-teacher who says he raped her, so young that she refers to the way she felt afterward as “yucky,” said she pleaded with him that she had a real future, that she was going to college. She says Mr. Tyson replied, “So, we have a baby,” and then raped her without using a condom.
    In that alleged exchange you have the choices in the lives of thousands of poor kids in this country. College. Baby. Condom. Future. The role model is supposed to be the person who points you toward the right one.
    Every day those kids can watch Mike Tyson stride into the courtroom on the evening news, and they can see the middleaged white women touch his hand, as though he were Wayne Newton or Elvis come back from the dead. And the message of Magic, the message that you have to make something of yourself, be responsible, face your mistakes, be a gentleman, will fade. The kids in poor neighborhoods, like the one in Brooklyn where Mike Tyson was once a street punk, have already learned from the drug dealer on the corner what Mr. Tyson has to teach: that if you’re rich and dress well, you can do what you want. At least until you go to jail. Or until you’re washed up. Here is the difference: Magic will never be washed up. In all the ways that truly matter, Mike Tyson already is.

TO DEFRAY EXPENSES
March 1, 1992
    They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses.
    The Lost Boys made news. The television crews and the newspaper reporters went to that Neverland called East New York to take note of the fact that one of them, aged fifteen, had allegedly shot and killed two others in a high school hallway in what classmates called a “beef.” This means a disagreement.
    It could have been Bushwick or the South Bronx or any of the other New York neighborhoods that are shorthand for going nowhere. It could have been Chicago or L.A. or any one of dozens of other cities. The Lost Boys are everywhere. Most especially in prison. By then, unlike the children Peter Pan described, they have grown up.
    We reporters won’t stay long. The Lost Boys claim public attentionfor only a short time, and many of us are loath to walk in their neighborhoods, which makes us no different from the people who live in them. The mayor was at the high school the day of the killings. He came to tell the students that they, too, could build a future. For many of them, the future is that short period of time between today and the moment when they shoot or get shot.
    Homicide is the leading cause of death for black teenagers in America.
    There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger. Kids, particularly kids who live amid crack houses and abandoned buildings, have a right to think of their school as a safe haven. But it’s important to remember