Add me to the list of skeptics. The “UPI” article smacks of outright fakery, and I have heard of nothing even remotely similar to this happening down here in Texas. I am positive that such an incident would have received widespread attention in the Texas press, even if it was only the kid and his lawyer screaming bloody murder.
Sorta reminds me of the “Social workers aren’t subject to the Fourth Amendment!” hysteria of a month ago.
As for the “hate crime” question, MGibson had it exactly right. It is not a “hate crime” to assault someone because of their beliefs. Legally speaking, hate crimes are those crimes in which the victim is targeted because of race, gender, religion, national origin, etc. Some jurisdictions toss in disability and sexual orientation as additional protected categories.
Incidentally, “hate crime” is a bit of a misnomer anyway. The crime is independent of the hate. The elements required for a criminal conviction (in this case, for assault) are the same no matter what the perpetrator’s motive. “Hate crime” laws act as enhancements to punishment for the underlying crime.
Wring, thank you for finding the UPI source. I must admit I’m relieved that NewsMax didn’t just make it up.
Manhattan seems to have questioned whether this was a real UPI story. Although wring says manhattan was right to be skeptical, ironically it’s wring’s link that demonstrates that manhattan was wrong to doubt the UPI genesis.
In my OP I asked if it was OK to simply ignore this incident. Wring’s answer appears to be “Yes.”
Wrong. A careful reading of the link shows that UPI repeated a press release (which we still have not found, and frankly, since this is yours, you should do the leg work), attempted to verify the truth of the story and was unable to. Re-read, please, pldennison’s post about press releases and news sources.
(by the way pldennison, I found it by using the name of the school involved, got two hits, one was this article)
as another aside, I did a UPI search on the author of the story, he seems to only have a few stories out there and only recent ones - so perhaps, he’s new to the biz.
So, again, december if you have some source data that gives both sides of this story (since the ‘press release’ as I pointed out in my other posts related only the mom and her attorney’s point of view), then we can begin a discussion
OK, so several google searches later I can’t find any reference to this incident. The Newsmax article hasn’t even come up yet. I did find several incidences of students being harassed or suspended for wearing the flag so the premise isn’t that far off base. So I guess the qustion now is why haven’t we heard more about it? It’s either a complete fabrication on the part of the hysterical right wing or yet another example of the liberal bias in the media.
For the record, I’m not buying it off Virtual New York’s website, either.
pldennison, a professional in these matters, has searched the Dow Jones database. I checked the UPI database as stored by Bloomberg. It appeared neither place. There is no record of other media carrying the story, even in Houston where it would reasonably be expected to kick up a storm (sorry, Houstoners!).
I’ve seen UPI re-run press releases, but not generally from political groups – they tend to run to corporate earnings releases and that sort of thing or to announcements of coming events. They have pretty strict standards for the language they’ll retransmit, and this release doesn’t “feel” even like a retransmitted press release.
I was thinking of dropping UPI an email and asking them about it, especially since the occurence of the “article” that wring found has a pruported author and date.
But pl is a semi-competitor of those guys, so I decided to let them hang!
For now, any debate should center on whether this story is for real. From my vantage point in the Houston area, I highly doubt that it is.
The Houston media covered the story of a kid who ran into a problem with school authorities for wearing Confederate flag clothing. If the same kid (or anyone else) had subsequently been severely beaten by fellow students over a related issue, the local media, not to mention our useless radio talk shows, would have run hogwild. I haven’t heard a peep about it.
I don’t trust an SLRC news release, nor a purported UPI story that doesn’t come up with a single official confirmation of the incident, just a rehash of the press release (if UPI really did put out this stuff, it should be ashamed for going with the story without any official or even witness confirmation. Quotes from the parents? fellow students?).
Probably this story will never be dislodged from “Southern heritage” folklore, even if the alleged victim subsequently denies it. Look for it to be prominently displayed on websites and in mailings from pressure groups ("Don’t let this happen in your community! Send $50 now to…).
Whether or not the story actually happened, I can see this happening. Black kids frequently terrorized white kids in my high school, basically anyone who seemed the least bit intimidated by them would be mercilessly harrassed by the same bullys. A lot of times false accusations of racism would be provided as the motivation for the attacks, some black kids (and I’m not denying troublemakers come in all colors, I’m just giving an example of what can lead to that kind of violence) would pick up on anything that could possibly be interpreted as offensive or insulting, make it into a race thing, and start trying to make things worse and provoke a fight. When I was a sophomore I sat at the back of my geometry class and most of the kids sitting next to me were black. There was a big Shaka Zulu miniseries that had been running on one of the networks and one of the obnoxious kids asked me if I watched it, and I said no. He then said I was prejudiced, and I said I wasn’t, it’s just that my mother was watching the Peter the Great miniseries that was running at the same time, and he started saying my Mom was prejudiced, and asking if my family ever owned slaves and stuff like that, and some of the other kids that were usually pretty cool with me started jumping in. If I was as outspoken then as I am now I probably would have got my ass kicked or worse, as it is I backed down and simply got picked on continuously until I managed to get a desk closer to the front of the class. That kind of shit happened all the time back in the mid '80s in a medium-sized Texas town, I saw this one mildly retarded kid get the shit beat out of him by four guys because he referred to them as “y’all” (it takes some circuitous grammar to address a group of black guys without potentially offending someone in those parts) and they accused him of being racist. Mostly I believe it was just typical bullying since most of the kids were the types who were picked on by everybody (it wasn’t as big a problem for the tough REAL redneck kids) and the racism accusations were just an excuse in most situations (unless there are really people that mentally unstable to go off like that over nothing) but the thing was, if some kid was falsely accused of anything else as an excuse for bullying (even being gay) most people saw the accusations for what they were, and the only people who acted like they believed it were the bullys anyway. If some kid was accused of being a racist as an excuse for bullying the rumors would spread like crazy and soon nearly every black kid and a lot of white ones would treat the accused like shit or worse.
It’s enough of a problem that a school definitely should have considered the consequences of putting this kid in front of the school as an example of racism, though I have doubts about the veracity of the article quoted too. This racism, or rather use of race as an excuse for typical school bullying (because in most cases it was obvious the ‘offender’ wasn’t trying to start trouble) was pretty widespread back then, I can’t imagine things have gotten much better since. It’s sad because years of being accused of being a racist and being harrassed by a group of kids can plant the seeds of hate in a kids mind, and there are enough sympathetic ears out there who are all too willing to listen sympathetically to their stories and encourage those seeds to grow into something more dangerous.
These kinds of threads always generate a certain feeling in me, and I think I can now express it in two sentences. I have very conflicted views on race, so any attempt to read an ideology into the following statement is probably wrong:
Government policies on race should not be based on the actions of a few idiots, because any group of socially significant size will contain a few idiots. Attempts to legally proscribe such incidents can only lead to a chaos of contradictory laws.
Badtz that probably mostly depends on the school. For example the only thing close to that at my school happening is one black kid always said “its because I am black”(he was joking) and what not for about a year.
At my school getting punched is enough to get you expelled.
