What's race got to do with it?

Some men behaved badly in Central Park, but others tried to help the women under attack -- and they were black and Latino, too.

By Kathy Dobie

Jun 27, 2000 | "Who knows what I would've done?" young men say, their faces clouding over.

By now, everyone knows the story: Right after the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York, dozens of men attacked dozens of women, corralling them one at a time and throwing water on them, pulling their shirts and sometimes their bras and pants off and pushing some onto the ground. Some of the men filmed the attacks, providing all the evidence needed for their own arrests.

The men had come from Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and New Jersey. They were Latino and African-American. They had come with their video cameras to film some girl flesh. They had come to have a good time.

"I'm glad I wasn't there," says a Palestinian-American in my neighborhood, a twentysomething guy who works hard but likes to party, who could've been there if he hadn't had to work.

He seemed anxious about how he would have behaved and even more afraid that he would've done nothing wrong but gotten swept up in the arrests anyway, melding fear of the police and fear of his own nature.

Some observers saw the Central Park attack as abuse directed against women. But for others it was also about being a young, nonwhite male in this city, always judged guilty in some profound way. Thus the question "Who knows what I would've done if I was there?" contains a deep anxiety: Am I a good man? Can I be?

In an editorial in the New York Daily News, Anne Roiphe wrote that the young men who attacked the women were not on "their own familiar turf but in the heart of a cold stranger, America the successful."

She went on: "They roved across midtown Manhattan past exclusive clubs and fancy restaurants and co-op apartments that are not within their budget, and somewhere anger joined the mix of emotions that fueled the terrible hour."

Roiphe is not alone in arguing that the men were moved by deprivation, men on the bottom trying to feel like they were on top of somebody. But that argument assumes we are one, very white world and these young, mostly Puerto Rican and black men from the boroughs are enraged by their inability to enter that world.

Well, it's not one world, and the white monied class might bore many of these young men to death.

You can only be envious of what you desire. And 20-year-olds look up to glamour -- hip-hop artists and basketball stars, record execs, actors, comedians and all those who have made big money and won adulation by seemingly having fun or doing something it seems we could all do if we only tried hard enough, like making music or throwing a ball. Above all else, the young want recognition and a chance for self-expression: Money without those things, quiet money, has no shine.

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