London Calling: 2nd International Day Against Hate Crime

An important rally will take place in London, England on Saturday night on October 23, 2010. The second International Day Against Hate Crime is scheduled at 7:00pm GMT until 9:00pm with a two minute period of silence to occur at 8:00pm to remember and reflect on those killed by hate crime pertpetrators. The anti-hate crime event will take place at Trafalgar Square.

Trafalgar Square was the location of the September 25, 2009 gay hate-crime homicide of Ian Baynham, 62, of Beckenham, Kent—a crime that spurred the launching of the International Day Against Hate Crime. Mr. Baynham was walking through the historic square with his partner, Phillip Brown, 30, on a busy Friday evening when the unprovoked homophobic attack on him occurred. The civil servant was knocked unconscious by a single blow to the head allegedly Joel Alexander after another person, Ruby Thomas, is said to have shouted anti-slurs at Mr. Baynham and Mr. Brown. After falling to the ground and suffering a severe brain injury, Mr. Baynham was then stomped on allegedly by two intoxicated teenaged females. They are said to have stomped on his chest and head repeatedly and then left him for dead. Subsequently, Mr. Baynham was pronounced brain dead and 18 days after the attack on him, on Tuesday October 13, 2009, doctors turned off his life-support machines. Joel Alexander, 19, of Thornton Heath in South London, Rachel Burke, 18, of Three Oaks in East Sussex, and Ruby Thomas, 18, of Lichfield in Staffordshire, were charged with manslaughter. The trial for the three began in April, 2010, and no verdict in the case has been revealed.

Whether because of a person's sexuality, homelessness status, disability status, race, religion, ethnicity, national origin or gender, a hate crime is an attack on the entire community. Therefore, it is up to the community to speak out against hate crimes. So, if you are in London on Occtober 23, 2010, please spend two hours standing with others against hate crime.

A Movie Review for National Bullying Prevention Month

Bullying is pervasive in schools and it has horrible consequences [pdf], some of them life-ending. October is National Bullying Prevention Month. Timed to coincide with it, the Southern Poverty Law Center has released its seventh educational film, available free to schools. Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History, the documentary film by the Montgomery, Alabama-based nonprofit civil rights organization—which is known for its successful lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups—has many lessons for many people.

The movie tells the story of Jamie Nabozny who was bullied relentlessly by classmates when he attended junior high and high school in Ashland, Wisconsin, a "probable" Sundown town that sits on the shores of Lake Superior.

In the film Jamie’s ordeal is recounted by his mother, by eyewitnesses and by Mr. Nabozny himself (as an adult) as he speaks to a group of teenagers in a school gymnasium. Narrated by Emmy Award-winning actress Jane Lynch, the 38-minute film is a must-see for middle and high school students. Bullied is also required viewing for teachers, for school counselors and for school administrators. Moving back and forth from interviews to re-enactments of actual events, Bullied tells the horrifying "education" of verbal and physical abuse Jamie endured, survived, and ultimately conquered.

If you are an American school student and you're gay or lesbian or transgendered (or perceived to be), or if you're comparatively very short or tall, or comparatively overweight; or, if you’re black in a nearly all-white school in a nearly all-white town; or, if you speak with an accent because you are the only foreign-born student at your school; or, if you're artistically or academically gifted in a school that worships its athletics program; or, if you choose to wear your clothes and your hair differently than most of your peers at school, or if you are in some way disabled, then chances are you know all too well about the endless, psychologically tortuous days at school that Jamie Nabozny had. You’re not alone. And I beg you: don't give up. In addition to teaching that bullying is the opposite of tolerance, not giving up is one of the messages to students Bullied provides (the film is in memory of 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover who, God bless him, could no longer live in the same world as his tormentors). If you are a parent of a school aged child, now is the time to have a disucssion with her or him about bullying; and, now is the time to learn what you can do to make sure your child's school is a place for education, and not a place for her or his victimization.

The first half of Bullied is a heart-wrenching downward spiral account of a young midwestern kid with lots of psychological resiliance who is stripped of much of his fortitude by his classmates: those who bullied him with homophobic slurs and repeated assaults, for sure, but also those who bore witness to his suffering and did nothing. In his attempt to deal with the hell that was his public school education—complete with invalidating, and willfully impotent school administrators—Jamie goes from isolating himself (at school and at his loving home) to taking more drastic measures after school officials failed to stop the escalating attacks on him, and after desperate pleas from Jamie and his parents were callously ignored.

The second half of the film deals with the federal lawsuit that Jamie Nabozny filed against his schools and their administrators, after he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Going on the offensive—and winning his civil suit against the school administrators—must have been empowering and healing for Mr. Nabozny, because the film showing him as an adult reveals an empathic, seemingly well-functioning, psychologically mature and happily-out-of-the-closet man. He won $900,000 in the lawsuit, and the jury took just minutes to decide the case. That is the sobering lesson the film gives to teachers, school counselors, and school administrators who might be tempted to—as Mr. Nabozny's school administrators did—blame the victim and allow known bullying to continue on their watch.

As an aside, it doesn't take much delving to discover that those who are opposed to hate crime statutes also fight vigorously to stop anti-bullying measures in schools. That's probably because these people want to pass their hatred on to future generations. Bullying, you see, when committed by young adults and adults is often considered a hate crime. But even when tormenting someone to death because of their sexuality—or for some other reason—might not be considered a hate crime by the legal system, as in the criminal case against Rutgers University students Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, the "sport" of tormenting someone because of some physical or sociopolitical characteristic that they possess, seems to me, is a form of bullying and must be stopped. As the lyrics to a song by Everything But The Girl go, "Little Hitlers, Little Hitlers grow up into big Hitlers, look what they do."

If you are a junior high school teacher or high school teacher, or a school administrator, and if you are serious about preventing bullying, then please get your school a free copy of Bullied and make sure it is shown throughout your school. The film is the perfect primer for a classroom discussion about not only bullying, but also about diveristy and tolerance and the benefits of both. If you are an elementary school teacher, and you are serious about preventing bullying, then please visit this site and also this site for useful online tools to help teach your class this important message: bullying is never OK.

Cross-posted at: DailyKos

The Summer of Hating Latinos

Tweaking a recently coined phrase by Tim Wise, this diary's title describes an American phenomenon that few, if any, in the national mainstream media are saying much about this summer, even though it's a problem that seems to be spreading: hate crimes targeting Hispanics, most often immigrants, that are rarely called race-based attacks by the powers that be. Although I could have chosen any of a number of communities in the United States to describe the phenomenon, I've chosen Summit, New Jersey.


If you've never been there, Summit, New Jersey, seems at first blush like a pretty nice place, and I suppose for most of its residents it is. According to its Wikipedia page, the Union County city is an affluent Big Apple burb ("affluent" as in a good percentage of its approximately 20,000 residents are Wall Street stockbrokers). With a median family income of $141,659, a family poverty rate of only 2.5%, Summit, New Jersey boasted of a median home price of $655,500 as of October 2009, a point in time well after the national and international economic meltdown and after the onset of America's subprime mortgage housing collapse. Not bad considering. Nope, not bad at all considering that just before the beginning of the bottom falling out of financial industry's greed-fest, Business Week magazine ranked Summit, New Jersey #6 on its list of "American communities likely to be pummeled by the economic crisis," a September 2008 prediction that did not come to fruition. While Main Street U.S.A.'s financial status went down the proverbial toilet, no doubt thanks to some of the free-wheeling Wall Street investment bankers who call Summit home, Summit itself was spared (in no small part because of the government's white-collar welfare program, er, because of the Wall Street bailout). Three thousand dollar per month condo rentals aside, no place on earth is perfect (again from its wiki page):

A New York Times reporter and Summit resident criticized the city for being an "economically, racially and ideologically homogenized populace" with "a growing divide between Summit's haves and have-nots." He elaborated in 2006: "there's an ever-diminishing corner of the city akin to the so-called slums of Beverly Hills, where middle-income homeowners like me can take advantage of the schools and services of Summit without the million-dollar price tags so ubiquitous on the other side of the Midtown Direct tracks."

By my standards a city that defines its "slum" as the spot where its middle-income homeowners live is fairing pretty well, economically-speaking. That's Summit: the 16th wealthiest place in New Jersey, a state teeming with millionaires. In addition to being pretty rich, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Summit is also pretty White. As of the 2000 census, Summit was 87.77% White which is significantly less racially diverse when compared to the nation (75.1% White) or to the rest of the Garden State (72.6% White), including Union County (65.51% White). Is Summit, New Jersey this white on purpose? Well, it's not a Sundown Town, but measures have been taken to make certain Summit residents are of a certain type, nudge-nudge-wink-wink (again from the Summit wikipage with the emphases being mine):

Summit...adopted a policy of zoning ordinances requiring a single family house on a large lot and could thereby "exclude any undesirable influences that might erode property values." The requirement excluded apartment buildings and multi-family dwellings, and tended to raise the price of houses. One study found that since 1945, the single family house on a large lot zoning mechanism "has been increasingly used in suburban and rural areas to safeguard particular vested interests."

But that's not coded language for anything, I'm sure.

Unlike most of the rest of the nation, in the fall of 2008 when local Democrats fared much better at the polls than their GOP opponents because the country yearned for political change, Summit elected a Republican town councilmember in its second ward which I think says something about the place. But, like most of the rest of the nation, Summit, New Jersey has seen a rise in its Hispanic population over the past decade; and, in a place that reeks of wealthy white privilege those changing sociodemographics can be fatal.

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By all accounts Mr. Abelino Mazariego-Torres, a 47-year-old married Salvadoran immigrant and father of two sons and two daughters, was a hard-working man. A good man who came to the United States from a poor country—a country with its share of war wounds—he immigrated to America 13 years ago for the same reason most of our white, Asian, Caribbean, and Hispanic family members/ancestors immigrated to the United States: for a better life. A dishwasher and occasional assistant cook at an Indian restaurant in downtown Summit, New Jersey, for the past several years, Mr. Mazariego set out on foot on July 17, 2010, from the Dabbawalla Restaurant after completing his day's work and after filling his pockets with his earnings: $640 in cash. It was while he was relaxing on a park bench in the Summit Promenade shortly before 9:30PM, possibly tipsy from alcohol he had purchased, that he would be taken from his wife and his four children, taken from a country he had fled to in order to avoid violence in his war-torn country of birth, in order to create a happier life for himself and his family. Taken in a most gruesome and callous manner.

Mr. Mazariego's funeral was touchingly described by columnist Mark Di Ionno, but let me not get ahead of myself.

These are the undisputed facts surrounding Mr. Mazariego's death. While sitting alone on a park bench in downtown Summit after he left work on July 17th, Mr. Mazariego was approached by a group of teenagers. Most of their identities have not been revealed by the police, so it cannot be verified whether the teenagers were primarily from Summit or from various towns. The police have reported that some of the teens were Summit residents, and that some were not. Five were females and nine were males. Only the identities of two teenagers have thus far been released. R&B singer Robby Guarantee, 19, of Morristown, New Jersey, whose real name is Nigel Dumas, and Khayri Williams-Clark, 18, of Summit, both African-Americans, were each charged with felony murder on July 21st, as was an unidentified 17-year-old male. (He is to be tried as an adult prosecutors said, so it is a matter of time before the public learns his identity). Then on July 30th two more unidentified Summit teenagers, one 15 years old and the other 17 years old, were charged with conspiracy, aggravated assault, and robbery. At first it was thought that no crime had occurred until evidence surfaced days later that pointed to a violent, unprovoked attack.

The allegations go like this: Nigel Dumas, Khayri Williams-Clark, and the other three teenagers charged with Mr. Mazariego's attack, along with nine other teenagers, approached Mr. Mazariego as he sat on a park bench. One of them is said to have sat down next to him, while the other is said to have covered Mr. Mazariego's head with his own t-shirt (one ABC television affiliate said his head was covered with a sheet). Then the police said Mr. Mazariego was punched several times about the head and body by Dumas, Williams-Clark, and the unnamed teens. The mob of teens then immediately fled. A 17-year-old video-taped the entire pre-meditated beating on a video-phone. The video then circulated among Summit teenagers for days just like old lynching postcards used to circulate among white townsfolk in the 19th and 20th centuries.

While the video of Mr. Mazariego's attack was making the rounds in Summit, Mr. Mazariego, who was found unconscious at the scene of the crime immediately after the attack, lay in a coma at Overlook Hospital in Summit. He died there on July 20, 2010, without ever regaining consciousness.
Understanding the current anti-Latino sociopolitical climate in the United States these days, one commenter at the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center made these insightful remarks about Mr. Mazariego's slaying:

Blame the hatred spewed out on Fox and Rush for terrible things like this. To think this guy escaped the madness in El Salvador only to be painfully killed by children here. Is there a chance to get this more publicity? Maybe a statue of this guy in a city park? Not that these kids listened to Rush and Beck but they’re smart enough to pick up the idea that this guy doesn’t matter so they can do snything [sic] to him.

This last statement—that the alleged perpetrators are smart enough to absorb the anti-Latino sentiment swirling around this country, perceptive enough to grasp the repeated notion that the lives of Latinos in the United States are somehow worth less (or worthless)—has deep historical roots in this country: racism.

For example, this quote by Brent Staples summarizing the lynching of blacks in America and the response by the larger community has eerie similarity, I think, to the attack on Mr. Mazariego:

Black American lives were viewed as expendable in the pre-civil rights South. The murderers who hanged, dismembered or burned black victims alive — before crowds of cheering onlookers — knew well that the law would not act against them. These savage rituals were meant to keep the black community on its knees.

Ironic how we keep repeating our past. Today's racism is, to quote David Bowie, the same old thing in brand new drag. Oh sure, African-Americans continue to be the victims of race-based hate crimes more than any other group; however, it should be clear that in communities across America, from Summit, New Jersey, to Staten Island to Phoenix and Los Angeles, Latinos are increasingly the people who are lashed to today's whipping posts. This despite the findings that the higher Latino immigration is, the lower the crime rate is.

It's racism, and just like the days of old, you can't always count on law enforcement to do the right thing. As Peggy MacIntosh began her essay on white privilege: "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." Or, the flip side, conferring submission on another group.

Illuminated here is the "invisible system" that seems to be working hard to confer submission onto Latinos with respect to Mr. Mazariego's death. On July 30th came these bold-faced lies from Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow who seems almost Lady MacBeth-like in his compulsive attempt to deny that Mr. Mazariego's death was a race-based public spectacle slaying:

It was a crime of opportunity. The defendants saw he [Abelino Mazariego] had $640 in on cash on him and intended to rob him.

At the same news conference, attorney Romankow goes on to repeat (because when you want people to believe your lie, you have to say it over and over again):

It was a crime of opportunity, they saw he was intoxicated, that he had money and a watch and decided they were going to take it.

And Romankow said this too at the press conference which is, of course, a permutation on the we're-not-racist-in-our-racially-skewed-town meme heard so often in covered-up race-based hate crimes, and now heard in everyday civic affairs:

This isn’t about him [Mr. Mazariego] being Latino.

Oh yes it was Mr. Romankow which is why you doth protest too much. The beating death of Mr. Mazariego was an anti-Latino sport-slaying; like the lynching of blacks, it was a spectator-attended, race-based hate-crime homicide. Period. Like many black lynchings, Mr. Mazareigo's lynching was recorded by the crowd who came to watch. Like the lynching of so many blacks in America, Mr. Mazreigo's lynching took place in the center of town with plenty of people around. Yes, the victim had hundreds of dollars on him at the time he was attacked. However, not one of the persons who beat Abelino Mazariego robbed him, not one of the persons who watched his beating robbed him (there were a total of 14 teenagers present), and the teenager who filmed the beating on a mobile phone also did not rob Mr. Mazariego. In nearby Suffolk County, New York on Long Island, the racist youth have an accurately racist term for this kind of targeted hate-crime attack. They call it beaner jumping. (Other targeted groups have long-known terms for hate crime attacks aimed at them; for gay men it's known as gay-bashing, and then, of course, there is the term lynching which was coined to describe the oodles of hate-crime slayings of blacks long before the term hate-crime was created).

Romankow—the prosecutor in this case—has chosen to take the public lead in white-washing this hate crime homicide by saying that those arrested had intended to rob their victim, but then (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) forgot to! Seriously, think about how mind-screwingly absurd that statement is. This is what Romankow wants the world to believe: that a bunch of upper-middle class/rich kids were so hard up for cash and a wristwatch that they selected, not one of the city's rich stockbrokers coming out of any of the nearby posh eateries wearing Rolex watches, but a Latino dishwasher, and that, oooops, they actually forgot to rob their so-called robbery victim while beating him up (and outnumbering their victim 14 to 1, you have to ask, couldn't they have robbed almost anyone without laying a finger on them?).

What about the videographer? Well, at his press conference Romankow likened the teenager who recorded the attack on Mr. Mazareigo to a—stay seated for this—photojournalist! Romankow said that this individual would not be charged with any crime.

Let me add this: Mr. Mazareigo was robbed. When he was brought via ambulance to the Overlook Hospital shortly after the attack on him, unconscious and clinging to life, someone stole the $640 he had in his pockets. Charged with third-degree theft was emergency room nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, New Jersey. Rolling a comatose patient: that, Mr. Romankow, is a crime of opportunity.

Mr. Mazariego's anti-Latino beating death on a downtown Summit park bench, the prosecutor's public, pre-trial denial of the obvious motive of those charged with Mr. Mazariego's death, along with the economy-maiming default-swaps and other investment bank schenanigans masterminded by Summit's financial barons makes you wonder if there isn't something in the drinking water in Summit, New Jersey that makes the powerful people there lie and deceive and cause harm to others. Ohio-born artist Jenny Holzer's phrase comes to mind: The Abuse of Power Should Come as No Surprise. But, sadly, anti-Latino sentiment and violence are not unique to Summit, New Jersey; and, as the hateful rhetoric against the largest growing ethnic group in America continues, as it has this summer, expect to see more hate crimes directed at Latinos...and expect to hear denial that that is what they are.

This blog was posted originally at DailyKos on August 5, 2010.

University of North Carolina Issues Pathetic Hate Crime Conduct Code

Having staunchly protected a group of its racist students at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in late 2008, the UNC educational system is back at it: protecting the status quo while making itself seem like it's taking progressive, thoughtful measures. Specifically, on February 12, 2010, The University of North Carolina Board of Governors approved a uniform code of conduct to address hate crimes on the 16 campuses in the UNC school system. It's a pathetic, meaningless code of conduct, and it comes as no surprise to us. In our February, 2009, blog we predicted a white-wash job by the UNC administration, and earlier this month, they delivered. No, we're not psychic; we just saw the writing on the wall.

On election night in 2008 four North Carolina State University students spray-painted violent, racist messages about Barack Obama in the campus' Free Expression Tunnel. Although these messages would not be considered constitutionally protected free speech by anyone other than dyed-in-the-wool racists because they called for the assassination of an elected president—one statement read, "Let's shoot that N----r in the head" and another said, "Hang Obama by a noose"—the NC State's administration refused to classify the grafitti as a hate crime, refused to expel those responsible for writing the death-threat directives aimed at President Obama, and refused to release the names of the students. The message from the school was clear; threatening, racist language by its students is acceptable at North Carolina State University.

Phase One of UNC's political white-wash of the graffiti incident came when UNC President Erskine Bowles created a "panel" of people to look at campus hate crimes and the issue of what constitutes free speech. Phase Two came on February 12th when the UNC Board of Governors approved a uniform code of conduct that (clutch your pearls ladies) prohibits on-campus actions defined by federal and state laws as hate crimes while expressing support for free speech on campus. Wow, it took a panel of higher education experts and a large public school system's board of directors to lower itself to state it will now recognize state and federal hate crime laws. They threw in support for the First Amendment as a patriotic bonus. What next from Erskine Bowles and the UNC Board of Governors? A position statement about the Declaration of Independence? Pathetic.

We're still left wondering who those four racist NC State students are who spray-painted the threats on President Obama's life in 2008 and who these students are connected to. Either white privilege hit a new low in the state of North Carolina or the four NC State students who got a free-pass to threaten the president without being charged with a hate crime and without being expelled from school are somehow well-connected. Since white privilege and well-connectedness often go hand-in-hand, perhaps both were at work.