Valley Perspective : Hate Crimes Against Anyone Hurt Everyone : 2 Schools Show Commendable Response to Acts of Prejudice

Here’s a different way to view the victims of hate crimes in our region. Our source: the most recent set of statistics available from the Los Angeles County’s Human Relations Commission.

They show African Americans as hate crime victims, along with homosexual men. Jews have also suffered from hate crimes here, as have Arabs, Latinos, Anglos, Asians, lesbians, Protestants, females. And if you’re feeling a little left out at this point, there was an “other” category for hate crime victims in the region that included other religions, other nationalities, other ethnic groups, other shades of skin color.

Anyone can be a victim of a hate crime. We point this out because some folks find it easy to be cavalier about such matters, or utterly uninterested. As long as the hatred is directed against some other and supposedly very different group and not your own, there is no reason to be concerned, right? Wrong.

Each new discovery of heinously racist literature, ethnically derogatory leaflets and religiously based vandalism ought to send a chill up your spine regardless of whether you are one of its intended targets. The moment we begin to countenance such ignorance and hatred through silence and indifference is the moment in which we allow hatred and ignorance to spread, perhaps far enough to ultimately include you.

If that sounds silly, then remember the following quote: “In Germany, they first came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me. By that time, no one was left to speak up.”

The quote is from Martin Neimoller, a German Protestant minister who was a leader of the church’s opposition to Adolph Hitler. Neimoller was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. A poster with those words can be found in the office of Kay Shafer, the deputy district attorney assigned to track hate crimes in the county.

Folks like Shafer deal mainly with the criminality involved in such incidents, but there is more to do than that. An example can be found at Placerita Junior High School in Santa Clarita, which was recently the target of the largest distribution of hate literature in memory in northern Los Angeles County.

After more than 1,000 flyers containing derogatory remarks about Latinos and Jews were stuffed into student lockers during the week of March 20, school officials decided to use the incident to launch discussions about racism, cultural diversity and tolerance. That week, Placerita teachers also began their lessons by using a program that shows students how to confront prejudice.

“Like anything else, you ask if you’re going to give more attention to it by discussing the leaflets in class,” said Placerita Principal Jim Tanner, who decided it was better to confront the matter. “We felt there was going to be more good coming out of it.”

Mayall Elementary School felt the same way--and with good reason--last October after vandals had twice defaced it with satanic symbols, swastikas and other images of gross religious intolerance. Rather than removing the vandalism before her students could see it, Principal Barbara Fuller had teachers escort their students past the messages of hate before holding discussions on racial and religious bias. Later, Fuller invited Shafer from the district attorney’s office and Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker from the Los Angeles Police Department to discuss the vandalism.

If every such incident was met with similar resolve, education, and discussion, it would do much to keep the scurrilous hate-mongers at bay.