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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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isn't black, he's just a genius. He's everything. We didn't create a training program for minorities in any literal sense, even though we made stabs at it. The day I realized how difficult the situation was for minorities was when I was talking with some black and he tried to explain to me how difficult it was to cross the frontier everyday. He lived in Harlem. He had to literally cross the frontier, and in those days. On Sixth Avenue you didn't even see blacks on the streets. [laughs] This may be difficult for you to believe, but I had a friend who lived abroad and he would come back every five years and he would tell me how New York was different. And the thing that he observed most was the fact that Sixth Avenue had gone from pure to slight speckle to sort of thirty/ seventy to fifty/ fifty as he came periodically over twenty years. And if you have to cross the frontier everyday it's very difficult to do your job. You spend most of your time trying to adapt to living with all those white people. So when I look back I realize the impediment to doing a good job if you were a minority. The impediments were so great that the odds were that you weren't going to do a good job. The struggle was just too much. This a parallel but I think it applies. When I got involved in Urban Affairs I thought the problem was city planning, decent housing, public housing, transportation, all the obvious things. After I'd been involved in this for fifteen years I realize that the issue was race; not transportation, not any of these things. And indeed, that we were making the issue worse with public housing rather than better because we were locking the ghetto into itself, and separating it from the white community rather than integrating it. So that's why I got involved in some of my





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