I now not get upset after I see racial epithets graffitied into public house. I acknowledge it as a type of coming of age train for disgruntled white teenagers. It’s frequency now not surprises me. However the response to it nonetheless does.
Final month, a person of diminished character took an aerosol paint can and spray-painted the “N-word” onto the athletic area at Ridgefield Excessive Faculty. This was a really unhealthy factor and I, together with many, many others, had been very sad about it. However that’s not the explanation for my writing. If I selected to jot down each time some miscreant wrote or uttered hate speech, I might have a each day column.
No. I’m profoundly disenchanted by the misguided and unhelpful approach that Ridgefield faculty officers responded to the N-word being spray-painted onto the athletic area at the highschool. I feel you have to be, too.
Eventually, there may be going to be a racist incident in your city or at your faculty. It’s as predictable because the climate. And when that occurs, you’re going to wish to know what to say. And what NOT to say.
I may also help with that. I’ve been talking and writing and preventing for variety, fairness and inclusion in Connecticut for 30 years.
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The incident occurred within the night hours after a pick-up sport between Ridgefield college students and college students from one other faculty. The perpetrator apparently didn’t notice that athletic fields have safety cameras, which caught the act and recognized the suspect, who was apprehended shortly thereafter. The subsequent day, the principal of Ridgefield Excessive Faculty despatched a letter to the varsity neighborhood. The primary two sentences of the letter defined the details of what occurred, just like my account above.
The third sentence of the letter reassured everybody that the perpetrator was not anybody from Ridgefield. It wasn’t one in all us. And the fourth sentence reassured everybody that the racist graffiti was eliminated in order that nobody else would see it.
So, what’s the downside?
Easy, in our panicked urgency to reassure the city and ourselves that our palms (and consciences) had been clear, we missed the chance to know what occurred and misplaced our energy to be a optimistic power for change.
Nobody is bothering to ask the essential questions. How did this occur in our home? Our home. What did we do – or fail to do – that made this racist incident potential? What ought to we be doing in a different way to forestall this from taking place once more?
When faculty or neighborhood officers declare proudly that there is no such thing as a place for that form of hate right here, we’re selling a lie. There’s a place for it right here, simply so long as it doesn’t embarrass us publicly.
Officers are all too fast to say, “Nothing to see right here. Everybody go on dwelling now. All the pieces’s high quality.” I feel we must always stick round and work out what occurred, and why. If we actually don’t need these incidents to maintain taking place, we have to start proper now planning for the longer term, for the following time somebody needs to do one thing silly and hateful.
Go forward and clear up (or cowl up) the racist graffiti. We don’t must see the phrases painted into the grass with a view to know that racism and hatred are current right here, that they’re throughout us. We don’t must see the phrases painted within the grass to know that racism and hatred can manifest themselves visually, verbally and bodily at any random second and make some amongst us their goal.
So, how ought to it have been dealt with?
My very own bias is that I consider educators must be completely obsessive about creating and leveraging “teachable moments” from occasions and circumstances on this planet round us. The racist vandalism on the RHS area was one of many extra essential teachable moments that we merely can’t afford to let move unexamined. And the lesson of this second isn’t “It wasn’t one in all us, as a result of we’re good individuals who don’t do this form of.”
Has anybody thought to ask who’s harmed by incidents like this? How are they harmed? How can we assist them to heal? How can we heal ourselves?
The principal’s letter would have been so significantly better if it had mentioned, “It doesn’t matter who spray painted the phrase on the sphere. We’re all complicit until we every commit ourselves to preventing racism and hatred – daily. We’re all complicit until we share the duty of being the change and forcing the change that we wish to see in our colleges and our neighborhood – daily.”
You and I can go about our lives not being racist and assume that’s sufficient. It’s not.
It’s not, as a result of it’s an phantasm that anybody will be passively non-racist. The one various to “racist” is “anti-racist.” The one various to the way in which issues are is to be proactively, deliberately, persistently and earnestly anti-racist, and to decide to altering the ways in which we understand and interact with others on this planet.
Let’s cease saying, “It wasn’t us,” and do one thing about it.
Mark Robinson is a member of the Connecticut Mirror’s Neighborhood Editorial Board.
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