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to see that. But I guess one of the things that these interviews are doing for me, and things that I'm reading and writing, they're also making me see how deep American racism is, and that even in the context of progress there are fundamental problems of justice and injustice that are being obscured by progress. That's the irony. Yes, there are blacks in professional sports today, and there weren't blacks thirty, forty years ago. That's the fact. There are blacks in managerial and executive positions in American corporations today, and there were few, if any, thirty or forty years ago. There are blacks in academic positions in traditionally white colleges. There is Cliff Wharton who is Chancellor of State University of New York. There is Bernard Harrelston who is President of City College of the City University of New York. There are many examples of blacks in positions from which they had been excluded three, four decades ago. So what the hell is bothering me? Well, to name one of the things that's bothering me is that we still have a majority of black youth unemployed, alienated. My son and I in coming from this day care center graduation of six and seven year olds drove through Harlem. There we saw abandoned buildings, half or abandoned buildings and where I said to him, “You know these abandoned buildings are concrete examples of abandoned human beings.” He said, “Yes dad, I know.” There are more abandoned buildings in our inner cities, how many? I should just talk about New York. The irony is that there are more abandoned buildings in our ghettos today than there were before our progress. Now, how the hell does one make sense of this? I don't know. That's what's bothering me, among the things that's bothering me, or exactly what is bothering me. I don't want to talk about it
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