Race And The City: A Report From The Rockaways
11/08/2013
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At 7:38 a.m., my son and I bust it down our long block to the city bus stop.

We can’t risk missing the early bus, because the driver is a nice white guy who charges all school kids the same price (nothing), regardless of the color of their skin. The next driver is a black guy, who charges white and Asian kids (mine is both) half-fare, while letting black and Hispanic kids ride for free.

The first time we boarded and the black guy calls me back to make me pay for my son (I’d already paid full fare for me), I let him get away with it. Then I observed his peculiar practice.

The next time, I pay only for me. When the driver demands I pay for my son I respond: “When you charge black and Hispanic kids, I’ll pay.” He loudly retorts: “You know you’re breaking the law, sir!” I shout back: “No more than you’re breaking the law!”

Since I know he would be delighted to have a white father handcuffed in front of his son, I never get on his bus again. Sometimes, my son and I walk the 1.3 miles in the rain.

Later, the driver is replaced by a black lady, with the same peculiar practice. I get tired of fighting City Hall, and so, when we miss the early bus, I pay the racist surcharge.

Lately, the drivers have been so unreliable that I again started walking my son all the way to school and getting him there on time, instead of paying to be 10-20 minutes late.

But I’m not supposed to have to walk him, or put him on a city bus. According to New York State law, the Department of Education must provide him with a “free” yellow bus to and from school. But DOE, run by black chancellor Dennis Walcott, is a dysfunctional public agency—and a race racket.

Blacks have been waging a race war on white schoolchildren and educators since at least the 1960s, with the compliance of the city’s Main Stream Media and ruling elites. Hispanics began their own, less violent campaign shortly thereafter. New York City has gone from 90 percent white in 1960, to 33.3 percent non-Hispanic white today. The victims, as always: the white working class.

When my son was in the sixth grade, the first year of middle school, he did have yellow bus service. And a law extending it through the eighth grade was enacted that year. The DOE’s response to the new law: break it, on a daily basis.

That cost me over $500 last year. That’s just one of the many “black taxes” whites and Asians have to pay in Jim Snow New York.

I repeatedly contacted every local politician, including the law’s sponsors, but they refused to do anything.

This is not the first time the DOE has robbed my son of a seat on the school bus. And it’s always about race.

When he was in pre-K, I had to get him to and from school every day. Beginning in kindergarten, he got “yellow bus” service. Because his stop was first, the bus would arrive empty each morning. About halfway through the second grade, however, the bus started arriving half full of black kids from miles away. If you were white or Asian, however, school officials would illegally rule you ineligible to attend this school, if you lived literally on the wrong side of the street.

One morning in spring 2008, after putting our kids on the bus, a neighbor mom and I waited to cross the street. A bus full of black kids pulled up, heading to our kids’ school. Upon seeing white faces, black children ran to the open windows, giving us the finger and screaming, “F—k you!”

The mom told me of strange black kids sucker punching her son and a girlfriend’s son on different days on the school playground, and standing in the street, blocking a white woman’s car.

I sent a pseudonymous letter to Rockaway’s The Wave newspaper [Email them] about the incidents. The editor e-mailed back that the letter was “too racist,” adding, “I think I know who you are”—I’m sure he sure did!—and demanded that, in addition to providing a censored version, I visit him and prove my identity.

At the end of that year, the elementary school changed the rules for yellow bus service, and notified us that we did not qualify beyond the second grade. (This same school claimed that the neighborhood was besieged by child molesters—but still wanted our eight-year-old to travel to and from school alone.

According to No Child Left Behind, if your child attends a bad school, you have a right to a transfer. But the DOE has simply ignored that law, too, where white and Asian children were concerned.

Parents were desperate to get their kids in my son’s elementary school. Despite the busing scheme, it was still some 90 percent white, and staffed and run mostly by decent whites. The nearest alternative elementary school, P.S. 225, was about 87 percent black and Hispanic, and run by blacks—a typical Jim Snow school.

I know families with white, Chinese, and light-skinned (Christian) Arab children, who pulled their kids out of P.S. 225. They all told horror stories of ultraviolent black kids in the first and second grades. The Chinese lady said a black eight-year-old boy had broken her seven-year-old second-grader daughter’s nose on a monthly basis for three consecutive months. Let’s hope she was exaggerating. My Puerto Rican landlady let her use our address to send her daughter to our school, where she thrived.

The working-class parents with the white and Arab kids were already scuffling, yet paid $6,000 per child, to switch their kids to Catholic school. (The Chinese lady owned a restaurant.)

A South Asian lady who worked in our neighborhood, but lived in P.S. 225’s area, likewise told me she was spending $6,000 per year on Catholic school tuition. She answered my unspoken question, “No choice!”

Having to pay for private school is yet another black tax.

I have a hero: Michael Hennessey. At P.S. 225, black kids were using his 11-year-old as a punching bag, while calling him “Casper” and “Whitey.” The Hennesseys kept demanding he be transferred, but the school refused. On October 19, 2007, as they drove up to the school, they saw four black kids beating their boy to a pulp on the playground. The father naturally sprang from the car, to save their son.

A school security officer, Shimequa Goodman, who had done nothing to protect the son suddenly materialized, to grab from behind and handcuff the father. The NYPD fabricated multiple phony charges against the devoted dad: trespassing on school property, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct on the playground, good for up to one year in jail.

Hennessey had to spend a day and night in jail, and sweat out a six-month “adjournment, in contemplation of dismissal” (ACD), in which he had to avoid so much as spitting on the sidewalk.

The local newspaper editor twisted himself into a pretzel, in his support of Goodman. [Father Busted in ‘Attempt to Help Assaulted Son’ by Howard Schwach, The Wave, October 26, 2007.]

The DOE finally transferred the boy.

After the story appeared in The Wave, a white male (not me!) left copies of a flyer recounting how violently racist the school had been when he’d attended it 20 years earlier, outside the school.

But instead of the city investigating the school, “Hate Crimes Task Force” boss, Deputy Inspector Michael Osgood—since promoted to deputy chief—sought (unsuccessfully) to arrest the flyer’s author for a “hate crime”! [Cops Investigating PS 225 'Hate Crime', by Howard Schwach, The Wave, November 9, 2007.]

Poster

The poster whose author the NYPD sought to arrest

The New York media and politicians were silent.

But one year after DOE flack Dina Paul Parks asserted that the school was trouble-free (idem), the DOE announced that it was “closing” it. [PS 225 to close in June over poor performance by Howard Koplowitz, Jamaica Times, December 17, 2008.]

In fact, the DOE never really “closes” bad schools—it merely changes the school’s name, and installs a new black or Hispanic principal.

I nearly became a Michael Hennessy myself. My misadventures with the black female security guard whom I’ll call “Sgt. Smith” began on our son’s first day in pre-K.

Parents were permitted to attend class with their kids. However, The Boss didn’t have photo ID handy. Sgt. Smith used that as a pretext to forbid her from sitting with our son. I had photo ID, so she let me stay.

While the white pre-K moms and I would wait for our kids to be dismissed, we swapped tales of Sgt. Smith’s harassment. Sometimes, she would demand we get late passes, when we’d brought our kids on time. One mom told of opening the heavy, wooden internal door from behind, pushing her little one inside, and beating a hasty retreat. When I tried that, Sgt. Smith chased me halfway down the street, yelling “Sir! You have to get a late pass!”

One day I caught myself “casing” the school as we approached, like a bank robber, looking for escape routes.

My Puerto Rican landlady bribed Sgt. Smith, and the other black ladies who worked there, with food and other goodies, and got privileged treatment.

That spring, parents from a different class signed a letter to the principal, complaining about Smith. She behaved herself for a while, but then the principal transferred to a new school and the new principal gave Smith free rein. She was worse than ever, with a special hatred for white fathers.

I used to attend parent workshops at the school. Once, as I stood at Sgt. Smith’s desk waiting to sign in, my photo ID in hand, the white parent coordinator, standing three feet away, said: “Oh, Mr. Stix, the workshop is being held on the third floor in the library.”

Sgt. Smith then played dumb, and asked me where I was going. I answered, “Third floor.”

Smith immediately started pointing her finger in my face, shouting,

“You should know where you’re going!

“You should know where you’re going!

“You should know where you’re going!”

I shouted back: “The location was switched, and you knew it! You are out of line! Besides, I’m going to the same place as all the other parents you just signed in!”

The coordinator apologized to me, but didn’t dare say “boo” to Smith.

I concluded that Smith planned to provoke an incident, have me arrested and publicly humiliated, and barred from my own son’s school. The next morning, I sent a letter chronicling her misconduct via certified mail to the principal, the “regional coordinator,” and then-schools Chancellor Joel Klein, emphasizing that Smith was motivated by racism. I warned that if this continued, I would sue.

Smith was transferred, and replaced with an older black woman, with whom I got on famously. Unfortunately, after one year, she hit 30 years of service and retired, to be replaced by another 300-pound “Shimequa,” who has an attitude to match.

The War on Whites continues.

Archie Bunker doesn’t live here anymore.

Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.

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