TV REVIEW : ‘Bensonhurst’: Chronicle of Politics of Racism Today

There was one inherent problem with the great documentary epic “Eyes on the Prize.” Because it was the story of American race relations and the civil rights movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s, it couldn’t tell the story of today.

Now, it has been told. “Seven Days in Bensonhurst,” on “Frontline” tonight (at 9 on Channels 28 and 15; at 10 on Channel 50), is more than a study of the racial conflict that swallowed up New York City after the tragic August, 1989, death of young Yusuf Hawkins. It is an important chronicle of the politics of racism in this country today.

Essayist Shelby Steele, the author and narrator of “Seven Days,” puts the Hawkins episode up to the light of a writer’s power of observation and away from the heat of emotional rhetoric. Because Steele is not a New Yorker (originally from the rural South, he teaches at San Jose State University) and is an African-American with no observable partisan slant, he proves to be the perfect voice of reason in a sea of hate.

Within hours of the killing of Hawkins, a black youth, by white men on the streets of the Italian-American neighborhood of Bensonhurst, politicians of all colors and persuasions were visiting the Hawkins family. Marches led by the inflammatory Rev. Al Sharpton down Bensonhurst avenues produced a surreal cycle of living theater, with local whites screaming gutter language at the peaceful marchers, and Sharpton taunting them by blowing kisses. After the Bernard Goetz and Howard Beach episodes, the Hawkins slaying threatened to push anger toward mass bloodshed.

Steele, in his own superb words and interviews with Hawkins’ father, members of the press and Rev. Charles Fermeglia, among others, shows that the 16-year-old’s death was exploited for political advantage by everyone from Morton Downey Jr. to Jesse Jackson, who plugged African-American mayoral candidate David Dinkins while offering his condolences to Hawkins’ parents.

“Race,” Steele observes early on, “is a mask through which other human needs manifest themselves. . . . We often make race an issue as a way of not knowing other things about ourselves.” The fight for economic development, he concludes, isn’t the same as playing victim in a racial tug-of-war.

Tough words from a man who knows what it is to be a victim. But it is only the kind of honesty that courses through “Seven Days in Bensonhurst” that can usher in a national examination of our country’s worst disease.