Death in Bensonhurst

The recent murder of a black teen-ager in Brooklyn was more than a crime of passion. It was more than a case of mistaken identity. It was a racial murder. The painful lesson of history is that such tragedies are compounded if the authorities--or, for that matter, any of us--look away from that repellent fact. This country has come a long way since those terrible days when Southern trees bore strange fruit, but not far enough to forget.

The victim, Yusef Hawkins, 16, went last week to the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn to check out an ad for a used car. It is the kind of thing teen-agers do all the time. In this case, Hawkins and three friends were in hostile territory. They were confronted by as many as 30 white youths wielding baseball bats, according to police accounts.

The subtext to this tragic confrontation reads like a primer of racial stereotypes and white anxiety: The white youngsters mistakenly thought Hawkins or someone in his group was the new black boyfriend of a white girl who had rejected a young white man from the neighborhood.

The black teen-agers were singled out because they were black and only because of their race. Hawkins was killed because he was black. The racial hostility became clear when an elderly white woman who lives in Bensonhurst told Times reporter David Treadwell that black people were not wanted in that neighborhood. “Chase them, beat them up a bit, give them a black eye but don’t kill them. They’re human beings.” It became even clearer when black marchers mourning the young man’s death were met by white youths hurlingracial epithets and insults during a weekend protest in Bensonhurst.

As racial tensions worsen, there can be no shrinking from the truth. New York’s political, civic and religious leaders must make it perfectly clear that racial attacks will not be tolerated. New York Mayor Ed Koch can make that point most emphatically by rallying the entire city to the necessity of racial harmony.

Mayor Koch has condemned the racial assault but not without adding somewhat defensively that he cannot mold the attitude of every teen-ager and that his city has no monopoly on racism or murder. That may be true, but across America confrontational politicians, like Koch, have been all too ready to further their own careers by playing to the passionate animosities engendered by racial and ethnic differences.

The Bensonhurst murder is the most recent indication of New York’s racial tensions. It is being compared to Howard Beach, where a white mob chased a black man to his death in 1986. It is also being compared to Central Park, where a white woman was brutally assaulted while jogging earlier this year; six black and Hispanic teen-agers have been charged.

The mugging in Central Park evoked a national outpouring of public anguish. In contrast, the Bensonhurst murder has prompted mere murmurs of condemnation. Coming to terms with the meaning of that disparity will not bring Yusef Hawkins back to life, but it will erase the fiction that his death was just another of those inexplicable, unavoidable urban tragedies.