Hate by Rumors, Color by Numbers

If the rumors are wrong, we pay a terrible price; we already are.

If the rumors are right--and there is nothing to indicate that they are--we pay another and even dearer one.

Since the morning that elementary school Principal Norman Bernstein passed out in his car from a beating at the hands of men who warned the “white principal” to get out of Dodge, there have wafted in, from unknown quarters, whispers that all is not as it appears--that Burton Elementary School Principal Bernstein, under siege by Latino parents for not speaking Spanish, opportunely turned a run-of-the-mill mugging into a hate crime.

The fact that police have no reason to believe this has not stopped the rumors.

The fact that the rumors can find purchase says far more about us than about Norman Bernstein.

It says we have become schooled to cynicism, led case by case and lie by lie to expect not only depravity but duplicity.

* Charles Stuart, a proper Bostonian, gasps into his car phone that a black man has gunned down his eight-months-pregnant wife--and then we learn that Stuart did it himself, for the insurance money.

* A Compton teacher tells a national talk show that students dumped human waste over her, reinforcing images of predatory urban teens--and then it turns out she had soiled herself.

* Tawana Brawley, in for a peck of trouble for breaking curfew, insists that white men, white lawmen, raped her and wrote KKK on her naked body. And a court finds that she too had lied.

The hoax rumors about Norman Bernstein’s case fall on fertile soil because what happened to him cuts against the grain of simplistic victimology and simplistic criminology.

Everybody knows what hate crime victims look like, right? They’re poor and powerless and usually of darker skin than their victimizers. They don’t wear ties or sit at desks.

And everybody knows what criminals look like, right? Or we wouldn’t have lapped up Charles Stuart’s tearful lies. (Similarly, black Americans know what men with badges have done to them for decades or they wouldn’t have believed Tawana Brawley’s sad fable.)

There’s an old joke among feminists that women will achieve equality when there are just as many mediocre women in the work force as there are mediocre men. In place of “women,” fill in your beleaguered group of choice, and you have the fairness formula in action.

Joe Hicks, who heads L.A.’s Human Relations Commission and is leading a mediation mission to Burton Street Elementary, worries that we are on our way to becoming a city divvied up by the numbers, Latino principals at Latino schools, white principals at white schools and so on. Down that path, he says, lies Bosnia.

How far do we want to parse this? Is L.A.’s leadership suddenly top-heavy with African Americans because its black population is 12% and its council membership stands at 20%? Are Christians ill-served because six of nine white council members are Jewish?

In addition to a $25,000 reward from the school board, county supervisors put up another $25,000 for whoever finds the men who didn’t like the color of Norman Bernstein’s face and told him so before they banged it up.

This followed standard remarks in which, from their own corners, Gloria Molina pleaded that the parents not be blamed, Zev Yaroslavsky protested that they had not been, and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke allowed as how these problems exist across the county, even if people don’t get beaten up for them every day.

There is no reward for finding the makers of rumor, who, like the inventors of hoaxes, are as guilty of a kind of violence upon us all as any lout who sees fit to pound fists on flesh.

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It’s unsettling to find a morsel of hope in a murder, but there it is.

Two mornings after Norman Bernstein was attacked, a Korean grocer in South-Central was killed for the bag of cash she carried. I was braced for something--or nothing, a so-what shrug from a part of town where “Korean grocer” carries all the freight of an army of occupation.

Instead, her customers mourned her and laid flowers and set out candles. When they were sick, she had given them medicine and food on credit. When their kids came in, she was all smiles. When she was killed, they helped the cops track the getaway car. And when Chung Hong was alive, it was not by her surname or her ethnicity or her job title that they knew her; they had called her only “mama.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.