You've got to be taught

For all the progress we make in America, hate crimes never seem to go away. Here's a column I wrote about one such incident in a quasi-rural area called Loxahatchee.






HATE CANNOT DIE IF PARENTS KEEP PASSING IT ALONG
Date: Sunday, March 5, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

There's a swastika in red paint and a swastika in blue on Marva Moodie's garage and two more swastikas on her driveway.

There are two wobbly "KKK" marks. And a scrawled "WP" shorthand, probably, for "white power."

Defacing the home of a black woman and her two sons, their ugly message is unmistakable.

You can't say much for their craftmanship. They look like the hurried work of illiterates. Or kids. Maybe both.

It feels like the country out here, with big lots, piney trees all around, a road that's more dirt than blacktop.

People move out here to Loxahatchee for a little elbow room, a little privacy, the chance to express themselves with more freedom than is available in the city or burbs.

Some of Moodie's neighbors have horses in their back yards. One man, a few doors down, flies four NASCAR flags along his front fence.

Moodie's house looks all-American: big yard, basketball hoop, screened-in swimming pool in the back, bicycles and sneakers casually left outside the front door. Not bad for a Jamaican immigrant, a former U.S. Army sergeant who makes her living as a psychiatric nurse.

You wish the hate symbols smeared on Moodie's house early Thursday were an isolated thing, an aberration.

But only a couple miles away on Friday I saw a white Ford truck with a 4-by-5-foot Confederate flag snapping proudly overhead.

I listened to neighborhood teens tell me about "redneck" white kids who fling the n-word at dark-skinned people and tell Hispanics to "get back on the banana boat."

Gleb Barabanov, 14, who lives two houses away from Moodie, said, "The redneck people sometimes get on me because I'm from Ukraine."

This stuff is everyday reality, kids told me. But the kind of vandalism at Moodie's house is new.
It's drawn investigations from the Sheriff's Office and State Attorney's Office as a possible hate crime. A county anti-graffiti crew got rid of it on Saturday.

Detectives suspect teenagers. You know, our hope for tomorrow.

The vandalism followed a fight Wednesday afternoon, when about 10 white teens gathered at Moodie's house and fought with her 14-year-old son, Marcus Rainford, and another black kid. One 15-year-old was charged with battery for punching Rainford.

Marcus told me that kids in the mob yelled that his family didn't have the right to live there because blacks shouldn't own property.

He said they yelled things like, "I'll kill you, n-----!"

Words turned to punches. After about five minutes, Sheriff's deputies arrived and the attackers drove off, Marcus said.

The next morning, his brother Brandon, 16, discovered the swastikas and KKK signs when he got up for school.

Upon first seeing those symbols of hatred, Marcus said, "I just felt really upset. I felt powerless."

Why had he been a target?

"Because of the color of my skin," he said. "And because I skateboard" -- a stereotypically "white" pastime -- "and I'm better than them."

Marcus was born in Richmond, Va. Lived in Texas. He said he never encountered racism before the family moved to Loxahatchee 2 1/2 years ago. He said he tries to get along with all types of people. His girlfriend is white. Jewish, in fact. He said the vandals know that. "That's why they put the Nazi symbol on there."

I asked Marcus if he thinks the perpetrators will grow out of their attitudes as they get older.

"No," he said quickly. "They're going to keep doing it because they learned it from their parents."

He knows this, he said, because he got into a fight two years ago with one of the white boys who was involved in the Wednesday scuffle. Marcus' mother complained, and the boy's father had to come to school.

Marcus said that he and others overheard the man scold his son: "You should have beat that n----- senseless."

You'd like to think that bigotry like this couldn't find a home in the America of 2006. But the swastikas on Marva Moodie's house are sorry proof that hatred doesn't go out of date so long as there are people to pass it along.

The lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II described it almost 60 years ago. He was writing about the South Pacific, but the words ring true in Loxahatchee:

You've got to be taught before it's too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate.

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be carefully taught.