Racism Is Out There, and Attack Should Open Our Eyes

Amber Jefferson, a high school cheerleader, was nearly killed when at least one stranger beat her with a baseball bat and then, indications are, split her head with a sheet of glass from a broken mirror.

This happened nearly two weeks ago. Amber, her jaw wired shut, is now recuperating at home in Garden Grove. The surgery that saved her life took 10 hours. Her face is severely scarred. It could be two years before she regains muscle control on the left side of her face.

She is 15 years old.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the attack, has yet to make any arrests directly related to the crime. Lt. Richard Olson, the department spokesman, calls the savagery “an assault with a deadly weapon, and vandalism.” That is all.

Usually, he says, there would be one investigator on a case such as this, but with all the “media hype and the allegations that have been made” the department recently added two more.

The allegations, and the “hype,” have to do with race. Black and white.

Amber’s mother, Cody Donnelly, is white, her father, William Jefferson, black. Amber’s alleged assailants, perhaps as many as four, are white males.

Amber’s mother says her daughter told authorities that before she was hit, one of her attackers taunted a girlfriend she was with, who is white.

“What are you doing with these niggers?” is what he reportedly said. Other racial epithets were supposedly volleyed about as well.

Aside from her girlfriend, Amber was with three male teen-agers, a Latino and two blacks.

So the taint of racism appears to make this attack even uglier than it already is. And it also makes many people even more uncomfortable, and defensive, and downright hostile, about the implications of this crime.

For starters, it doesn’t make Orange County look too good. Racism, even to talk about it, sets many on edge. It is not thought to be polite.

It may be out there, one line of reasoning goes, but why go looking for it where it may not exist? The media, many are already saying, are fanning the flames, making a delicate situation even worse.

“We have nothing at this point to substantiate that it was caused by a racial incident,” Olson says. “And we are not getting a lot of cooperation from the people who were at the scene.”

The Sheriff’s Department says the melee was sparked by an argument between two of the girls, not including Amber, over a boyfriend they appeared to have in common. It’s the media, and Amber’s friends and relatives, Olson points out, who are stressing race.

Which is true.

But that’s because it appears that racism, whether it catalyzed this assault or not, nearly finished Amber Jefferson off.

A hate crime, according to California and federal law, is one motivated, in whole or in part, by a person’s race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

Nationwide, such crimes are on the rise. Earlier this year, President Bush signed legislation that for the first time would require the federal government to keep statistics on such incidents, which, in turn, could help law enforcement agencies deal with them more effectively.

Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, says that most hate crimes, apparently including the attack on Amber, begin for some other reason besides bigotry. Soon, however, rage fueled by prejudice comes to the fore.

Single mother Rosemary Johnson, 24 years old, says she has experienced this firsthand. Like Amber’s, her daughter’s father is black. Rosemary is white.

We talked about this the other night at the Johnson home in Lomita, after Rosemary returned from her job at American Airlines.

“I don’t care what an argument is about, in the end it always comes down to race,” Rosemary says. “If they have nothing else to grasp at, they will go for racism. . . . ‘At least I didn’t sleep with a nigger’ is what they say.”

Rosemary’s daughter, Ashley, is only 5 years old. Yet, already, she is learning what racial hatred is all about.

A few months ago at a nearby coin laundry, Rosemary says Ashley wandered near a woman who suddenly began swatting at her with a newspaper. “Get that nigger away from me!” the woman began to yell, again and again. Rosemary called the police.

Later, Ashley told her aunt, UC Irvine student Donna Johnson-DeViso, “A lady called me a nigger. That wasn’t very nice.”

There have been other incidents--among them a man spitting at Ashley and Rosemary in a toy store, others loudly complaining about “niggers and nigger-lovers,” and another yelling about a “coon baby”--that have led Rosemary Johnson to always keep up her guard.

“You can tell if someone has that look of hatred in their eyes,” she says. “We’ve learned to distinguish the look.”

I don’t know if the men who attacked Amber Jefferson had that same look in their eyes. And maybe I wouldn’t recognize it, even if I were there, because I have never seen it directed at me because of my race.

Hatred, however, must surely have played a starring role. What else could have motivated such a vicious crime?

“Amber has been exposed to a few racial things before, but certainly nothing like this,” her father said shortly after the attack.

And her mother added this: “I have been so cloistered, I didn’t know people like that were out there.”

Which is why, now especially, we should all open our eyes.