Well, I knew immediately that this would be prosecuted as a crime I just didn't know what the crime would be. Well now I know. It's "intimidation."
Of course the charge doesn't make sense. Real intimation would be something that caused a customer fear, like telling them if they didn't leave they'd be arrested, shot or investigated by the IRS for income tax fraud. But just to announce that blacks had to leave was not intimidation. It was an insult, except there is no criminal statue for insults, so the cops charged the kid with intimidation instead.
I'm not defending the kid. What he did was dumb, annoying and thoroughly juvenile. But there is no need for the authorities to go over-board here. What he did was no different than what hundreds of kids do every day at junior high schools across the country. We don't consider these kids criminals. We rather see them as unusually immature and stupid. But for this kid's immaturity, for which he should have been grounded for a week or made to remove graffiti, he's now looking at a year in jail.
Even more annoying is the likelihood that there are now probably half a dozen lawyers putting together a class-action suit of any blacks who were in the store at the time, who'd ever shopped at the store, or who were residents of New Jersey at the time this crime occurred. Within the next week or so we will see on the news a plaintiff who claims he or she was so hurt, insulted and traumatized that he couldn't go to work, wrecked his car, over-self-medicated or held up a liquor store.
Stupid and cynical as all this is, this isn't the thing that will drive me crazy. That will happen when a judge rules, oh yes, it appears that the plaintiff has a legitimate cause of action.
In the grand scheme of things the racial hurt caused by this kid's announcement this has got to be the most the most trivial kind of matter, equivalent to a bird flying into a convenience story or a dog doing his business inside a church. It certainly doesn't compare in any way to the pain caused by the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or to that of our current recession/depression, to the problem of people without jobs, to the millions Americans without hope, food or a warm place to sleep at night. But to the editors of the New York Times this is gigantic, a cosmically searing racial insult that warrants a front-page story above the fold, not unlike the placement given to the attack on Pearl Harbor or the terrorist attacks of 9-11.
I know why too. To the people that make these editorial decisions racial insults are a horror beyond belief. I remember the case of the lacrosse team at Duke University where two strippers were hired for a night's entertainment and one later claimed that she had been raped, whereupon the university president unilaterally suspended the lacrosse players. When evidence came out that the rape accusation might have been fabricated, the president didn't back off a whit. Well, if if they didn't rape her, he said, "what they did was bad enough."
This is an interesting question. If they didn't rape her, what else could they have done that was so bad? She wasn't beaten, stabbed, or burned with cigarettes. No one tried to pull her hair out or scratch a swastika on her chest. She wasn't even stripped of her clothes. She took those off all by herself. So what was the thing that was " bad enough?"
Well I'll tell you. There were a couple of things that happened that night that did have the ring of authenticity--these were the two insults that were hurled on that occasion. The first one came when the lacrosse team players complained about the lackluster five minute strip show they paid so much money for. In response, of the strippers called the players "short-dicked white boys," a no doubt accurate but still irrelevant accusation.
The second insult came as the strippers were leaving in a cab and one of the lacrosse players called out after her, "By the way, thank your grandfather for my nice cotton shirt."
Well, there you have it. No rape but two cutting insults, hurled with intent to hurt, one sexual, one racial. But it was the racially tinged insult, the cotton shirt comment, that sent the president of Duke University flying through the roof. To him a racial insult was far worse than a mere beating or rape. Those things only hurt the body. But a racial insult was a soul searing experience, a lifelong wound, self-esteem destroying cancer whose pain never died. At least as a liberal college president it it felt that way to him.
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