Hate Crimes And Double Standards In Charlottesville

Earlier this week Daisy Lundy, a 19 year old biracial second year student — described in the Charlottesville Daily Progress yesterday as “of black and Korean background” — was assaulted in Poe Alley, just off the University’s historic Lawn, after leaving a friend’s room at 2:00AM, by someone she described as an 18-20 year old white male. Ms. Lundy, a candidate for president of the Student Council, told police that her assailant said “no one wants a nigger to be president.” According to the Vice President of Student Affairs, Patricia Lampkin, Ms. Lundy was sent to the emergency room and was released with “what were diagnosed as minor injuries.” The Washington Post reported this event today.

The University’s response was swift, massive, and impressive. In less than a day a “Voices of Diversity” web page had been added just off the main page, with links to powerful and heart-felt statements by University President John Casteen, offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction; the Vice President of Student Affairs; the Law School; the Arts and Sciences chairmen; and the Alumni Board of Managers. Less than a day later the reward was doubled, to $2,000. By the second day after the attack the Council on African American Affairs, a Washington research institute in which many UVa alumni are active and that is closely affiliated with the Ron Brown Scholar program in Charlottesville, announced that it is offering a $20,000 reward.

Inevitably, I suppose, some of the University’s response was somewhat less charitable and more institutionally self-interested.

An attack on a biracial student early Wednesday could cost the University of Virginia both donations and potential minority applicants, the dean of UVa’s Office of African-American Affairs warned Thursday.

The dean, M. Rick Turner, said he has received many phone calls from worried black parents this year. Hearing about the assault on sophomore Daisy Lundy and last fall’s controversy over three white students dressing in blackface for a party, “they might say, ‘We’re going to William and Mary. We’re going to Virginia Tech,'” Turner said.

“‘Why should I let my daughter go there? She might get attacked,'” he asked. “Parents read those kinds of things. There’s no question why we’ve had a lower yield.”

Dean Turner’s fears notwithstanding, I think the University’s and the community’s response to this nasty incident has been commendable. Still, I can’t help being struck by their marked contrast to their responses to a series of highly publicized racially motivated attacks against University students a little over a year ago.

In February 2002 ten black Charlottesville High School students were arrested for a series of six separate attacks on primarily white UVa students (there were two Asian victims) that occurred between September 2001 and January 2002. In addition to various minor injuries one student suffered a concussion and another a badly broken cheekbone that required surgery. Several of the arrested students told police that they selected their victims because they were (or they thought they were) white. The Charlottesville Commonwealth Attorney’s decision not to prosecute these assaults as hate crimes stirred up a good deal of controversy, including complaints from David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO). (See this article in the Washington Post and, generally, this web site, put together by a public-spirited Charlottesville family that includes in one place many of the articles from the Charlottesville and UVa papers from which my account is drawn.)

In fairness to University and town officials, the victims in the earlier attacks did not report racist slurs, and it was not until the assailants had been arrested and confessed to selecting their victims on the basis of their race that the nature of these crimes was confirmed. Nevertheless, after two or three or four, much less six, episodes of black teenagers attacking white UVa students, clearly someone had a clue what was going on. No matter, for even after the admission the racial dimension of these assaults was minimized and even denied. After an initial look the FBI refused to get involved (it is actively investigating the current incident as a hate crime), and the students were not charged under federal or state hate crime laws. There were no university or alumni rewards for information about the perpetrators, no anguished presidential or deanly speeches or revised web pages. Indeed, the University’s main concern seems to have been to ask what it had done wrong to provoke such attacks and to improve its “bridges” to the community. More on that in a moment.

I am not claiming that the attackers should have been tried under hate crime statutes. I don’t like hate crime laws, and I am sure there are technical matters of evidence, etc., that may have made such prosecutions difficult in these cases. The Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney explained that he had been “unable to find sufficient proof beyond a reasonable doubt to prosecute the assailants for hate crimes.” Although that sounds like an unusually high standard for a prosecutor (not the jury, after all) to meet, perhaps he was right.

What I am claiming is that the response of town and gown to these two episodes (rolling the previous six assaults into one for purposes of comparison) reveals a troubling, deep-seated double standard. I have less than no sympathy for David Duke and his white rights organization (all Americans deserve equal rights, not white rights or black rights or brown rights), and in fact one of the things I find most detestable about double standards is that their adherents often make people like David Duke appear reasonable. (This is the thrust of Carol Swain’s marvelous book, THE NEW WHITE NATIONALISM IN AMERICA, which I discussed here.) For example, Ron Doggett, Virginia state president of EURO, sounded quite reasonable to a number of people who are not bigots when he wrote, in a letter to the Cavalier Daily:

It’s truly amazing to witness the racial double standards and hypocrisy that exist in America today. But what is taking place in Charlottesville is going way beyond the anti-white norm. A group of black youths admit to attacking people who were white or they thought were white and the mayor, police chief, Commonwealth’s attorney and media can’t figure out if it’s a racially motivated hate crime. If the races were reversed, would they have so much trouble figuring it out?

With the recent attack on Daisy Lundy the races were reversed, and there was a virtual riot of town and gown rushing to see who could most convincingly prove Doggett correct. The University response has already been noted. The attack occurred early on the morning of Feb. 26. On Feb. 28 the main Charlottesville paper, the Daily Progress, featured a long editorial (alas, not online) under a headline announcing that the city was “United Against a Hate Crime.”

When will we ever learn?” [it began]. Oh, when will we ever learn?

The hate crime attack again stings this community into a mix of shame and anger.

Shame, that one among us could, in this day and age, express such bigotry, venom and cruelty. Anger, that one among us has been attacked, injured in body and spirit, by bigotry, venom and cruelty.”

These sentiments, even if they are a bit self-congratulatory (Oh, what a sensitive community we are!), are noble, and I agree with them. But announced as they were before an arrest, even before an investigation, their certainty stands in marked contrast to the paper’s response to the previous series of serious racial attacks. For example, after the police revealed that several of the arrested assailants had admitted that they had selected their victims based on race, the Daily Progress commented in an astonishing editorial:

Whether mass attacks on students were motivated by racism perhaps has yet to be determined….

In other words, the attacks might have been racially motivated, in that skin color determined the victims, but they might not have been racistly motivated – deliberately intended to do harm to persons because of their race.

A student columnist in the Cavalier Daily tried to tackle this subtle distinction, but it easily escaped him.

The issue of motive versus intent is an often-overlooked distinction, and one that is difficult to prove in court. However, this is the criterion we should apply when examining such criminal acts.

While motive and intent practically are synonyms, there is a significant difference, one that becomes all the more important when looking at purported hate crimes. With the incident in Charlottesville, the motive of the alleged assailants is clear, but the intent still is unknown.

According to local officials, this was a crime of racism….

In the Charlottesville case, valid arguments can be made on either side, but this is for the police and prosecutors to delve into in deciding whether or not to press charges. But racial targeting, of whites or of blacks, does not necessarily amount to a hate crime.

Defined simply, motive is the reason behind any crime. A motive may be greed, love, hatred, revenge or racism. While motive may be the “why” behind a crime, it does not affect the act itself. A crime is a crime, regardless of why it is done.

But distinctions between motives are meaningless unless they affect the crimes themselves. Intent, on the other hand, is the larger goal of the criminal….

Again, my point here is not that this argument is legally wrong (although if hate crime prosecutions in fact depend on distinctions like this they are even harder to defend that I have thought). My point is that both University and community grasped at whatever straw they could find to avoid regarding the five-month series of black-on-white attacks as hate crimes, but those hesitations and restraints and legalistic niceties (if that’s what they were) were non-existent in the case of a single white-on-black attack.

It gets worse. There was a good deal of guilty, soul-searching self-flagellation at the University. Although the individual victims were never blamed for “asking for it,” the University itself was. “This is not an attempt to justify the beatings in any way,” went one such student column,

however, it is to suggest that the University community from which the victims came must address factors that may contribute to such incidents, specifically apathy toward racial and economic issues.

University executive vice president Leonard Sandbridge was quoted in the Washington Post saying, “We want to know why this occurred for the sole purpose of addressing anything that might have been the catalyst that caused these crimes to occur.” Mea UVa Culpa. “Race and everything else aside, these are our kids, on both sides, victims and suspects,” said Charlottesville police chief Timothy Longo.

Charlottesville mayor Blake Caravati, was quoted expressing the same sentiments, said “the city is approaching the incidents as ‘a teachable moment.'”

‘Sure, they did wrong, but they’re our young men and women who are going to live in the community a long time,’ Caravati said. ‘We need to be supportive of them. This is an opportunity to talk about the situation, use it to learn and change our community in a positive way.'”

Although there is reasonable speculation that the perpetrator of the Daisy Lundy assault is actually a UVa student (who else would care about who’s president of the Student Council, and recognize a candidate at 2:00AM?), there is no concern being expressed that he’s one of “our kids” who needs to be understood and supported.

In the community the all too predictable “midnight basketball” and “increase diversity” proposals were put forward.

A community group formed in response to a series of assaults and robberies near the University of Virginia and dedicated to discussing problems faced by Charlottesville teenagers suggested Sunday that a youth-oriented coffee shop or roller-skating night could help keep city teens busy and out of trouble.

[….]

In addition to the coffee shop and skate-night ideas, Robert Jordan, a representative of the youth committee, said students have discussed forming a diversity council to attend School Board and City Council meetings.

(Didn’t anyone consider that having high school kids sit through school board and city council meetings might incite them to more violence?) And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does: there was actually a good deal of sympathy and support in the community … for the assailants. Rev. Alvin Edwards, pastor of the Mt. Zion African Baptist Church who is also a former mayor of Charlottesville, led a prominent and noisy faction that was much more solicitous of the attackers than the attacked. He denied that the attacks had anything to do with race, claiming that “many local teenagers, particularly African Americans, resent the university because they consider it largely inaccessible to them.”

Committees Rev. Edwards set up had bake sales and raised over $3000, all of which was going to be donated to the legal defense of the assailants until criticism caused 30% to be donated for the victims’ medical expenses.

This was perfectly consistent with Rev. Edwards’ outspoken belief that these were not hate crimes because it is not possible for blacks to commit hate crimes against whites. In a revealing interview with The Hook, a weekly Charlottesville paper, Edwards said, among other things:

• [If a crime is basically] against African-Americans, Jews and so forth, there should be stiffer penalties.It is a hate crime if it’s against these [historically-persecuted groups].
• Q. Do you feel the same way whether it’s a member of a majority or minority group doing the violation?A. You don’t have [the same] history of hate crimes against whites – if there’s a problem it is because of what was done to [blacks] – going back to slavery, and since.

  Caucasians are not really in a position to draw conclusions about racism, they really can’t understand it [the way African Americans can]. Whites have lived with it so long that it’s acceptable and normal behavior [to them]. (Note: the brackets are in the online version. I don’t know if they were in the original or put there by the person who put the article online on his site – jsr.)

Double standards, based as they are on rejection of the principle that individuals of different races and ethnicities and religions must be treated according to the same standard, lead not only to “hard” preferences of differential treatment (in admissions, hiring, etc.) but also to what might be termed the “soft” preferences of differential sensitivity and compassion. Thus if black students attack whites, such attacks must be understood, if not justified, as expressing frustration and resentment based on real grievances. Those students deserve a compassionate and caring community’s sympathy and support. But if a white student attacks blacks, his attack can be understood only as expressing what the Daily Progress editorial quoted above called “bigotry, venom, and cruelty.”

Bigotry, venom, and cruelty should be condemned wherever they are found, but on a colorblind basis, for continuing double standards guarantee only that we will have continuing seething resentments. Charlottesville should have learned that by now.

UPDATE – Adding Michigan State, Ole Miss, and insight, Erin O’Connor has much more.