November 30, 1991

The Christmas lights were twinkling, the doors were open for early-bird specials, the store clerks seemed unusually helpful and the Santas had their laps ready. But despite shopkeepers' intensified efforts to create holiday cheer, many shoppers in and around New York City seemed determined to keep a tight grip on their pocketbooks yesterday, on what is normally one of the busiest shopping days of the Christmas and Hanukkah season. People were still buying, of course. But interviews with three dozen shoppers and sales clerks in stores and malls throughout the region found that many customers were sharply reducing the number of people they were buying for, spending less on each gift and substituting homemade presents for purchases that they would normally make.

President Bush's move to recognize Ukrainian independence is the first step toward shifting Washington's diplomacy away from President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's effort to preserve the Soviet Union and concentrating instead on the new relations among its splintering parts, Administration officials said. The focus will shift from trying to influence the relationship between Mr. Gorbachev and the republic leaders to trying to influence the relationship between officials like President Leonid M. Kravchuk of the Ukraine and President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, which Washington sees as crucial to keeping some kind of peace in the Soviet Union.

The United Nations unanimously rebuked the military Government of Myanmar, formerly Burma, today for its persistent refusal to surrender political power to a democratically elected Parliament. The impetus for the rare criticism of a third world country was Myanmar's continued detention of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Talaya Goblish, 19 years old, born when her mother was 17, gets off the school bus on the parklike grounds of Honeywell Inc., with her own daughters Tashina, 2, and Takisha, 1. Then comes Tammy Stofferahn, 17. She says she got in fights in school, dropped out at 15, ran away, got involved with drugs, tried suicide, met a boy and in June had a baby, Shawn.

The ever-changing black experience in America is being assessed with a new intensity. Skin color, how you talk, more specifically what you say and how you live your life are examples of the tests being used to determine what it means to be black in the 1990's. Not since the tumultuous 1960's has there been such an intense focus on blackness. In past years, such highly sensitive issues were seldom discussed outside some black circles. But they are increasingly being aired in national forums, news articles and books. The topics range from "What's Black, Who's Black, What's Not" to "Black Like Who?" Films like "School Daze," "Livin' Large" and "Strictly Business" have used satire to explore racial conflict and contradiction among blacks. Outlooks, Values, Beliefs "These are valid questions in that there are some distinctions in the ethnic sense as to what it means to be black culturally and psychologically," said Dr. Roderick J. Watts of DePaul University, Chicago, a consultant on human diversity and assistant professor of psychology. "Aside from skin color, there is something to being ethnically black in terms of outlook on life, values and beliefs."