While the media is focused on the alleged threat of a few rural white supremacists holed up somewhere in Idaho, black racism in the inner cities is on the rise. “Viet family flees bomb threat at project,” blared the headline in the San Francisco Examiner on June 16. Although political correctness forbids even its victims from naming it, black racism, an organized and violent movement growing in numbers and virulence, has bubbled to the surface in San Francisco, where black gangs have targeted Vietnamese residents of public housing projects in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Six Vietnamese families who had the temerity to move into the overwhelmingly black Alice Griffith public housing unit (known as “Double Rock”) in San Francisco’s Bayview district were subjected to beatings, harassment, and racial taunts, until they were finally forced to run for their lives. One family returned home to a bomb threat recorded on their answering machine. The caller demanded that the family move out and threatened to bomb their apartment and kill the wife. Police say this is part of a pattern of hate crimes against Asians in the area: the bomb threat occurred in the context of another incident in which two Asian children were beaten and spray-painted near their home in the Bayview area.

Police say that “an adult approached them and called them a racial name and spray-painted the front of the boy’s T-shirt.” Their black assailant “roughed up” both children, according to the Examiner, and “punched the girl in the face.”

What is the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the federal agency that runs the projects, doing about it? IIUD’s reaction to this threatened lynching by a mob of black racists, incredibly enough, was to give in to the thugs’ demands.

A few years ago, HUD bureaucrats decided that housing projects were to be “integrated”—and called in federal law enforcement agencies to implant a few black families in an all-white Arizona housing project. HUD civil rights enforcer Roberta Achtenberg dispatched a veritable army of federal agents to “desegregate” the place, à la Little Rock. In the case of Double Rock, however, instead of calling in the troops, HUD officials ran up the white flag, pulled the Vietnamese out, and put them up in a hotel.

The black gangs that control the neighborhood drug trade have been carrying out a systematic terror campaign against Asians in San Francisco public housing for years—this is not the first time Asians have been driven out of the projects by militant black racists—but the Clinton administration has just deigned to notice. HUD has promised to beef up security, install better lighting, and hire bilingual personnel. HUD undersecretary Andrew Cuomo promised an “investigation.” Let him start by probing the pernicious and inflammatory role of his own agency, which has so far not only whitewashed the ethnic cleansing of Double Rock but has been complicit in the victimization of the Vietnamese.

Local HUD officials have, for example, launched a smear campaign against the victims. Acting Housing Authority director Ronnie Davis, echoing the opinions of some black residents of Double Rock, accused the Vietnamese families of concocting the stories about assaults in order to obtain coveted Section 8 housing. (Public housing residents can transfer out of the prison-like crime-ridden projects and be given vouchers accepted by some private landlords.) Another Housing Authority official chimed in: “I have learned that there are people who will do anything for a Section 8 certificate.” These government apologists for black racism and terrorism have taken up the cry of the largely black residents of Double Rock, who are up in arms over the fact that the Vietnamese have been put to the front of a long waiting list for the certificates. The legitimacy of the complaint that native-born American blacks are being pushed to the back of the line by immigrants is vitiated by the fact that public housing in San Francisco’s Chinatown is orderly, clean, and relatively crime-free. It is not Asians who have turned Double Rock into an urban battleground.

While Cuomo II conducts his leisurely “investigation,” and Mayor Willie Brown convenes a “task force,” an organized network of criminal gangs with an explicitly racist political agenda is on the attack in the streets of San Francisco. If this were a gang of white supremacists, the armed fist of the federal government would have come crashing down on them without delay or mercy. Black racists, however, are immune to such treatment; not only do they enjoy special exemption from condemnation, but they are actively protected and defended by sympathetic government officials.

And lest anyone think these thugs are not practicing equal opportunity terrorism, two Iraqi families at Double Rock faced the same violently hostile reception and were driven out. These Gulf War refugees, who had risen up against Saddam Hussein, fled to the United States when the rebellion was crushed—only to face a different kind of war. It started the night they moved into the housing project; BB gun pellets shot through windows, firecrackers hurled into the house, and a perpetual pounding on the door by thugs camped out on their doorstep. For months they endured robberies, attacks on their children, and nightly assaults on their home, until HUD, in the words of one bureaucrat, finally decided that “it’s become real clear to us that their lives are in danger.” The Iraqis were moved out, and put up at the Holiday Inn. Asked why he thought he and his fellow Iraqis had been singled out for harassment, Hussan Al-Barakat spoke hesitantly, in his broken English, as if bewildered by the stark contrast of America as he imagined it and the reality of Double Rock; “Maybe I mistaken, but I think they want black family here.”

Liberals of all races will one day regret conciliating or even tolerating black racism, for this is a movement with national scope—and growing power. Sonny Carson has made a career out of his crusade to drive all Koreans out of New York City, and the Rodney King uprising in Los Angeles saw Koreans once again bear the brunt. In his infamous Houston speech, Pat Buchanan paid tribute to them for valiantly (and hopelessly) defending their community from rampaging looters during the Los Angeles riots. The media lambasted Buchanan for his “racism,” but the real story is that Pat was speaking out against racism—black racism. (The irony is that he was holding up these immigrant Koreans as models of Americanism, against the thuggish example of their native-born tormentors.)

Black hatred of whites, and of Asians of all denominations, is the grisly and frightening secret at the heart of American race relations, the Hate That Dares Not Speak Its Name. Black racism has been relegated to the fringe by liberal elites in government and the media, supposedly confined to the likes of Carson, Louis Farrakhan, and the black fringe. But the O. J. Simpson trial forced us to confront it as a mass phenomenon—still without naming it.

The left’s riposte to conservatives who condemn affirmative action as racism in action is to deny that blacks (or other “powerless” oppressed minorities) are even capable of racism, since they lack economic and political clout. But in the case of Double Rock, blacks do have the power: to intimidate and physically assault Asians and others with the wrong skin color. They are so powerful, in fact, that an armed gang of black racists faced down a federal agency and won without firing a shot—which is more than Randy Weaver or the Branch Davidians can say.