Covering Hate Vandals: It’s Not a Black-and-White Case

You get newspaper space three times a week to express an opinion if you want to, but what do you do when you’re not sure what your opinion is?

The latest conundrum involves the spate of anti-black or anti-ethnic group scrawlings and graffiti that have shown up around Orange County.

By now, you know the routine. The hate vandals scribble a bigoted message--in the most recent cases, on walls at a Mission Viejo high school, a Lake Forest nursery school and at UC Irvine--and then wait for the reaction.

That reaction also has become predictable. Rusty Kennedy of the county Human Relations Commission deplores the incidents, the Sheriff’s Department begins a hate-crime investigation and various organizations condemn the action. The Times gives prominent display to the incidents.

The whole thing has become almost like a long-running play on Broadway; people know their parts and act accordingly.

So I find myself asking: Does it make any difference?

I find myself toying with the notion that maybe we shouldn’t give the hate vandals any attention. Or maybe not as much. What if it’s just three punks with some spray paint who have a temporary Nazi hang-up? Maybe they think the swastika is a cool insignia but don’t really know what it represents. Maybe they think the Ku Klux Klan has a catchy alliteration to it but they’ll grow out of their racist sloganeering. Maybe by giving them such prominence we’re feeding the egos of a few anonymous misfits and not really chronicling a significantly dangerous local trend.

Thus, the conundrum: If we ignore them or publicize them less prominently, will they go away? Or do we have a moral obligation, all of us, to aggressively attack any semblance of racism or bigotry whenever it rears its ugly heads, no matter how rote the response begins to sound?

I handed off the baton to four friends, two blacks and two Jews. How should we handle stories like that, I asked them. They eased my conscience somewhat by offering slightly differing opinions--that is, their lack of unanimity validated my own wavering.

None of the four said the incidents should be ignored. But three of the four said the sameness of the incidents might not warrant continuing front-page treatment.

I asked a Jewish friend if we should keep responding. “It depends on who ‘we’ are,” he said. “The Anti-Defamation League, the B’nai B’rith and the NAACP do have to. Whether you or Columnist X, Y or Z has to, I don’t think so. If someone is hurt or killed or if someone makes a movie or record about (a hate message), maybe it should be responded to, but not every isolated incident has to be responded to.”

Another Jewish friend disagreed. “Ignore it and all of a sudden, you’ve got Nazi Germany again,” he said, adding that “some of the darkest moments in our history” occurred when people didn’t address wrongdoing.

He acknowledged my lament about the near-scripted nature of the crime-and-response cycle but said the subject has to be confronted, even if not necessarily as front-page news.

“If you ignore it and say ‘it’s not my problem,’ it is your problem,” he said. “You can’t ever turn a cheek to hate. You don’t know the motive of the people who did it, but even if it was three kids who did it (as a lark), maybe that’s even more disturbing.”

He said anti-Semitism still lurks. He said his wife, who isn’t Jewish, was recently collecting donations for a school benefit when one of the other parents said: “Those Jews over at such-and-such are so cheap.”

Giving hate-incident stories either minimal or no coverage would seem like condoning them or deeming them unimportant, a black friend said. The next thing you know, he said, you’ve got people in three-piece suits and with a little cosmetic surgery making themselves look more presentable but giving the same hate message (a la former KKK leader David Duke).

His theory is that ignoring any manifestation of a hate crime is “like ignoring a lump on your breast.”

Another black friend is somewhat less insistent about displaying such stories so prominently. “It has to be covered, but I don’t think it has to be splattered on the front page,” especially, she said, if it was the latest in an ongoing series of similar events.

“If it were the 10th time, I’d still cover it, but maybe not the front page. But it has to be covered. If it happens so many times, you can’t keep running it on the front page. It’s like regular news. It gets old. That doesn’t mean it’s right, but it can give a charge to the people to continue to do it.”

I asked if she’s still upset reading about incidents like that or if she dismisses them as the work of isolated vandals.

“I’m still upset because they’re increasing,” she said. “It’s not like they’re going away. Things are not getting better.”