Reading the article in the Huffington Post about the two girls who made the racist YouTube video, I was appalled; not by the comments that the girls made – the sadness there would be merely that the girls believed them and found them funny – a rather common symptom of youth, rather that others showed far greater ignorance and intolerance by threatening to kill them, thus forcing them into hiding. The dismissal from school was puzzling too. As a veteran of school boards and courtrooms, I’m not quite clear what the grounds for expulsion were, nor how these could possibly meet with constitutional scrutiny, unless the girls attend a private school – something I think unlikely by the substance of their comments. But these are teenagers for God’s sake and teenagers say stupid things, most of which they learn from adults.
Speaking of learning from adults, adults say a lot of stupid things too. The same day I read the article about the comments about Nicks player Jeremy Lin and the corresponding article about the ESPN apology. Although there were a lot of upset groups, I got the strong impression that most of the trouble came from the drop-jawed WASPs who just couldn’t believe that anyone would make a joke that clearly appeared to utilize Lin’s race. I didn’t see anyone calling for the death of the sports writers at fault nor the president of ESPN or the NY Times. They were all too busy laughing at Saturday Night Live’s parody on the whole thing.
The NY Times and ESPN quickly apologized, of course they did, there’s money at stake, but ESPN’s done the very same thing before (even used an identical headline), I question their sincerity and most importantly whether anyone at ESPN really is concerned that they’ve hurt Lin’s feelings or they had actually implied that Asian superstars are really failures waiting to happen.
The girls also apologized almost immediately, they had to, they were probably forced to by adults around them. I’m also suspicious of their sincerity, but not in the same way. I think the girls are actually scared and they ought to be – though I don’t think they ought to have to be.
My friend and fellow attorney, D.C. lawyer Salsassin commented insightfully on the Huff and notably these girls say in their video (yes, I listened to the whole thing), that they have black friends. I agree completely with Salsassin that these girls were salvageable minds. Now they will likely learn to fear blacks and hate liberalism (by this I mean classical liberalism, traditionally characterized by a love for open mindedness); because clearly they should think of themselves as white trash who don’t deserve to live.
In high school I remember meeting a girl who’d moved to the area who was a real racist. She didn’t know what she was talking about anymore than these girls but she was a darn sight more serious about it. She made it clear to me that she felt sorry for me that in the National Guard I had to take showers in the same places that black people did, let alone maybe even at the same time. That was a new idea to me at the time and I asked her a lot of questions to try to figure out what the hell she was on but I could tell that she was afraid of getting the cooties I’d probably caught and I think her family soon left the area, either that or they took her out of school when they realized we thought the right side won the war. We also had a commissioner in our county who was a serious racist and made it obvious at public meetings. The girls in this video are different. They aren’t even real racists. They just need to learn some stats and history and meet some more decent folks of all races. Hell, they just need to learn to pay attention to their audiences and media and they could be decent Republicans – and I say that as one who has been one, Republican that is.
Unfortunately, the response to hate has been hate. Like the paradox of completely open minded thinking, “should we allow closed mindedness in our midst” apparently we have rejoined “Don’t be a H8er” with “H8 a H8er” at least if the H8ers are a couple of teenage girls.