People moving out, people moving in.

Why? Because of the color of the skin.

Run, run, run, but you sure can't hide. --The Temptations

FROM THE OUTSIDE, Brooklyn doesn't look like much. Of course, some people would say it doesn't look like much from the inside either. Cross the East River from Manhattan into Brooklyn on the D train and all you'll see will be run-down houses, grimy and depressing factories, litter-lined streets and people. Three million people. Italian, Black, Jewish, Hispanic, Irish people. And not one of them ever said dese, dem, dose in his life.

There are a lot of false stereotypes about Brooklyn, the result of decades of Brooklyn jokes and Brooklyn put-downs. People think Brooklyn is just like "Welcome Back Kotter" portrays it on television. Others take the title of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn too seriously and believe a single tree grows somewhere among the wall-to-wall tenements. Hordes of Jewish comedians from Brooklyn have helped perpetuate these stereotypes--everyone from Woody Allen to Mel Brooks to Gabe Kaplan to Alan King is guilty. But the myth that Brooklyn is a teeming mass of poverty, illiteracy, downright stupidity and silly accents whose only redeeming quality is its proximity to Manhattan is totally baseless.

For years, peace and prosperity reigned over the vast borough. Middle class values pursued in middle class ways provided a standard ethos uniting people of different ethnic origins, income levels and political persuasions. Brooklyn has absorbed masses of immigrants through the years, starting with the Russian and Polish Jews who fled the poverty and anti-Semitism of their homelands. This group in turn absorbed the immigrants who followed them from Europe and Asia with nary an intolerant word. But to this group--by tradition overwhelmingly liberal, Democratic, tolerant--the most recent population influx is a horse of a different color.

The borough's complexion is clearly changing. As poorer people, mostly black and hispanic, move in, the middle class retreats southward or leaves entirely. Racial tensions, long dormant or mild, rise to the surface. To the Jews, this influx of 'schvartzes' (Yiddish for dark-skinned people) represents a clear threat to their middle class lives. Worse still, this "invasion" threatens their basic values. People who played by the rules of the game are apt to react defensively when the rules are changed in midgame. The Jewish middle class sees itself under attack for succeeding, and becoming wealthy, by the economic rules that were handed down to them from the ruling groups. The meritocracy, rewarding talent and ignoring ethnic background allowed the sons and daughters of these immigrants to become doctors, lawyers and teachers through hard work and educational success. This system is being challenged by the advocates of affirmative action and racial quotas, and the middle class is upset.

For Jewish people, children are the focus of life. Whatever the Jew has or doesn't have, as long as things will be better for the children all is well. But now these children, who have grown up and are applying to college and med school and law school, are finding that many of the places in these schools are going to minority students who may have gotten lower grades and test scores than they have.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION advocates rightly claim that such preferential treatment is needed to help correct long years of discrimination, abuse and neglect, to help black kids compete on even terms with the white majority. But these minority students are not taking places away only from long-established, well-off white groups--they're also taking them away from the people just above them on the societal ladder, people who have only recently "made it" and are still struggling to move up in society. These groups--Italians, Jews, Germans, Irish, others--have not tyrannized blacks for centuries or profited from the tyranny. They didn't climb to wealth on the backs of exploited black workers, they didn't rise by making others sink. They arrived on American shores long after the blacks and the first whites did, and they faced discrimination and hardship of their own, albeit much less severe than that faced by blacks. And they cannot understand why they should have to pay for the sins of the people who oppressed them too. Their ethos--that success should be the reward of merit alone, an ethos that allowed them to compete with the rest of America by stressing hard work and education--is being threatened, and they react with fear and anger. Some examples are in order.

Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School are the three 'special schools' in the New York City public school system. To be admitted to any one of the three, a student has to take an entrance exam, but if he gets in he will probably receive one of the finest high school educations in the country. Myriads of intelligent talented New Yorkers have become successful and famous by working hard in these elite schools and going on to top-rated colleges around the country. As the New York City public school system declined--as the result of poverty, incompetence, apathy and bureaucratic ineptness on a huge scale--these schools more and more became the focus of middle class hopes for the future of the children and their education.

The schools select their students solely on the basis of scores on the entrance exams, but also admit qualified minority students with slightly lower test scores than their white counterparts. Overall, the three schools are 60 per cent white, 40 per cent black and hispanic. Since these figures do not reflect the racial make-up of the city's public school population (55 per cent black and hispanic and 45 per cent white) the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has filed suit against the schools on charges of discrimination against minority students. OCR wants the entrance exams changed, and wants the percentage of whites in the school lowered to 45 per cent.

As soon as OCR filed suit the outcry from students, teachers, faculty and alumni of the elite schools and the city's middle class in general reached the rooftops, How can an entrance exam consisting mostly of math and vocabulary be biased? they ask. Don't the schools already have an affirmative action program for minorities? If a student can't pass the entrance exam how is he going to handle the school's tough curriculum? If these schools--bastions of academic excellence in a school system of declining funds, declining quality, declining interest--are undermined by considering race over merit, where does the middle class have left to go?

If OCR wins the suit, the flight of the middle class from the city will be significantly accelerated. New York is already well on its way to becoming a dark island in a lighter suburban sea, and the flight of the middle class has already cut into the city tax base with disastrous effect. Overzealous pursuit of numerical racial equity by federal bureaucrats will greatly speed this process, with unfortunate results for everyone concerned--black and white.

In recent years other tremors have shaken the city's school system. After high school, the upwardly mobile but poor New Yorker went on to the City University of New York (CUNY), which sported free tuition upon admission. It wasn't the Ivy League, but a CUNY education was a good one, and it took grades to get into one of the CUNY schools, like Brooklyn College or City College. In the 1970s, the pressures of an egalitarian society brought on the policy of open admissions, which guaranteed a place in one of the CUNY colleges to anyone graduating from a New York City public high school. Since an eighth grade reading level and little else was required to graduate from most city high schools, this policy brought on a rapid and large-scale decline in the quality of students in CUNY and in the quality of a CUNY education itself. Professors who could have been spending their time communicating the wonders of literature to their students now had to teach kids the alphabet and basic spelling.

And then came the fiscal crisis, which among other nice things ended free tuition at CUNY. Not only would you get a mediocre education, but you'd have to pay for it too. To convince big banks and federal officials of New York's sincerity and determination to help itself out of its crisis, city officials threw out a decades-old steppingstone to success, one that served millions of poor but hardworking kids. Free tuition was more than an isolated policy, it was a symbol of opportunity. And now it's gone.

THESE CHANGES AFFECT the whole city, all five boroughs. But Brooklyn alone reeled under further blows. Southern Brooklyn has through the years become predominantly white, northern Brooklyn predominately black. Brooklyn public schools reflected this state of affairs, with the southern schools mostly white, better funded and academically superior. Two years ago the State Commissioner of Education decided to bus white kids north and black kids south to increase racial integration. To white parents this meant sending their kids into dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods and inferior schools simply to please the state government far off in Albany. To principals and staff of the whiter schools, the plan meant a decline in academic excellence, an increase in disciplinary problems, and probable racial strife. The plan quietly died under the pressure from middle class whites and the state Governor, who is himself a white, middle class South Brooklyner. The busing never took place, but the plan remains etched on the collective memory of the Brooklyn middle class.