ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Hate in All the Wrong Places

If Rusty Kennedy, director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, has it right, the thinly veiled racist campaign just run--and lost--by former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke in Louisiana stirred up more than the voters in a distant governor’s race. Surveying a spate of “White Power” racial slogans in recent weeks, he attributed these fresh signs of old hatreds to “heightened awareness in the county’s white supremacist community.” That’s cause for reflection on any future campaigns either Duke or his ilk might run.

The racial slogans that have been turning up in Orange County in recent weeks are also approaching a trend. Hate crimes locally were up even as the Duke campaign was gaining steam. So far this year, each instance of hateful speech or harassment drew the appropriate ire of the commission. It triggered the resolve of police gang units and sheriff’s investigators to pursue leads.

Those and other efforts begin to address the problem. But the very repetition of these incidents is upsetting, and the reflexive nature of the responses is inevitably unsatisfying. Society won’t convert every skinhead, or prevent the transmission of prejudices across the generations, but it can best attack the problem through education.

How bitterly ironic then that the recent flurry of incidents in Orange County was a direct assault on the schools, our best hope long term against crimes of hate. At a preschool in the soon-to-be-incorporated Lake Forest on Nov. 6, Ku Klux Klan initials were spray-painted on the outside walls of a day-care center owned by a black woman. Last week, the dorm room of a Latino freshman at UC Irvine was defaced with racial slogans. Later, swastikas were found on walls of the Trabuco High School campus.

There you have it--every level of our education system from preschool to university targeted. The challenge of finding an appropriate response has been taken to democracy’s own fighting trenches. Let us resolve not to shrink from educating our youngsters in their responsibilities as future custodians of our most cherished ideals.