Hate crime (in Buffalo) demands justice - Leonard Pitts

[pampango]

http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/1229849.html

"Your blues, author BeBe Moore Campbell famously wrote, ain't like mine." I've occasionally borrowed that phrase to explain how bigotry as experienced by majority and minority is not the same: the one has access to levers of power enabling it to express its hatred in public policy, the other has access only to fists and words. But there are times that observation is simultaneously true, and irrelevant. This is one of them."

That's reportedly what happened to Milligan the night of Aug. 18, after he walked his girlfriend to her home in their gritty Buffalo, NY., neighborhood. Milligan had headphones on, so he didn't even hear it coming. A mob of 10 to 12 black males then stomped and kicked him and hit him with more concrete -- all in the head and face, says his father, Brian, Sr., 41. As they struck him, they taunted him. ``You white motherf-----, we told you stay away from here. These are our streets. We told you stay away from our women.''

Brian, you see, is white. His girlfriend Nicola Fletcher, 18, is African-American. That difference in melanin has, they say, been a source of daily friction with a gang of black men in their neighborhood for months. She's been shot with paintballs, they've both been repeatedly cursed and taunted. ``They would hit on her right in front of me,'' says Milligan. ``They would call her baby and all that.''"

"I loathe bigotry in all its forms, but I have a special problem with bigotry as practiced by those who, by dint of their own history, should know better. When Jews hate Muslims for their religion, when gays scorn straights for their sexual orientation, when blacks beat a white teenager for the color of his skin, it suggests people too dense to understand the moral of their own story, the meaning of their own passages. The minority is no more righteous in its hate than the majority is."
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In my younger days I often encountered whites who would make racist comments about interracial couples. And these whites weren't the KKK, N-word using type of people. It was just so much a part of the culture they grew up in that they didn't think twice about saying that kind of thing. I haven't heard that comment in years now, though that may be due to hanging around with a more liberal crowd than was thrust upon me in school. :)

What is interesting, though, is that my wife still hear this kind of comment in conversations with people she works with and she's Filipino and we are an interracial couple. She's not sure which makes her madder: that people are still racist enough to feel the need to express their disapproval when they see a Black-White couple or that they are so clueless that they can make such a comment to someone who is part of an interracial marriage. (I've tried to tell her that many whites, depending on their exposure to the rest of the world or at least multi-ethnic areas in the US, think of there being two "real" races that matter. They know there are other races out there somewhere, but they don't have much to do with everyday life so they don't affect how people think.)