BEYOND KENTUCKY'S verdant hills, horse farms and bourbon mills lies another world of cracked asphalt and unfulfilled dreams. There, in Lexington's Bluegrass-Aspendale housing projects, a police shooting last week spurred an angry response that gave Kentucky gentility a taste of that harsher reality. The incident seems forgotten already, but it gave us a glimpse of the problems our nation has yet to solve.
The turmoil began when Antonio Orlando Sullivan, a suspect in a gang shooting, was killed by one of four officers who'd gone to the projects to arrest him. The police called the death accidental; one witness alleges Sullivan was shot while his hands were in the air.
As news of the incident spread, some 100 youths from the project -- most of them African American -- went on a rampage in downtown Lexington, overturning police cruisers and news vehicles. A smaller group met with Police Chief Lawrence Walsh to demand justice, but were not satisfied with his explanation.
Mr. Walsh later called in the FBI and the state's attorney to conduct an independent investigation into the shooting. It was a wise decision -- too often police are hesitant to invite outside scrutiny. This was the second disturbance in two years. In June of 1993 a rumor that a black youth was hit by a police car led to another disturbance.
It is important not to romanticize this chaos among the young in Lexington. Throwing bricks and bottles at people, beating innocent white drivers and tearing up property should not be ignored or excused -- there has to be law and respect for the law.
But these are not just acts of wanton destruction by lawless ghetto residents; they are responses to perceived and actual police brutality. As long as these outbursts of frustration and violence are used to justify the call for more cops and more jails, the acts of fury will merely escalate.
Disenfranchised youths of color must be acknowledged and addressed -- the law can't continue to disrespect them. For example, while New Orleans has the highest crime rate per capita in the country, its police force is repeatedly cited by the Justice Department as the nation's most brutal. These facts are interrelated; cops busting heads and bruising kidneys will not break the cycle of violence.
Remarkably, there are still people who believe that issues such as police abuse and institutionalized racism are not part of the problem. "The Bell Curve," the best-selling bombshell of a book by American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Charles Murray and the late Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, argues essentially that the poor are meant to be poor and that they are incapable of raising themselves out of poverty.
"The Bell Curve" is a racist political tract wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon. It is just the latest rationalization for policy makers retreating from the disenfranchised. Lexington, Ky., becomes another example for conservatives and neo-liberals who decry the failure of social welfare programs that were intended to help blacks and other poor folk pull themselves up.
This reading of history is fatal at a time when government support has never been more needed. The inequalities that plagued America 30 years ago are not only still present, but they also are manifest.
Instead of competing to raise educational standards and build a better future, California and Texas are racing pell-mell to be first in prison construction and incarceration.
The youths in Lexington may not have correctly articulated their anger at the system, but their rage shows how far we have to go to establish equal access and fairness for all.
The only way to reduce the rage of the youth in Lexington is to invest in a better society. There must be private and public support for community empowerment programs, rebuilding public education, providing access to health care, enforcing the community reinvestment act and imaginative long-range job training. If there's little political will for this approach from above, then the pressure must come from the grass roots.
This is the task set for us by a generation of angry young Americans raised on a diet of hip-hop and Reaganomics: Not to put a lid on their energy, but to give them the skills to redirect it positively and help move their community forward.
Gary Phillips writes from Los Angeles.