Hate is an infectious disease

By: BRIGID BRETT - For the North County Times | Wednesday, March 9, 2005 12:40 AM PST ∞

A synagogue is vandalized and spray-painted with swastikas. A Mexican migrant worker is beaten unconscious by a group of Caucasian teenage boys. A homosexual man is brutally murdered after walking into a bar and propositioning a heterosexual man. When extreme forms of hate like these make it into the news, most of us shudder with horror and feel utterly removed from such atrocious acts.

Unfortunately, we may not be as far removed as we might think. The building resentment of many of North County's white residents toward its Hispanic residents is palpable. I feel it when I read the Letters to the Editor page in this newspaper, when I hear a woman at the gas station complain about having to share "our" supermarket with "all those damn illegals," when I see the words "White Power" on the back of the leather jacket of the guy ordering his latte at Starbucks.

These kinds of attitudes are common in areas like Escondido, where a minority population has grown at a much faster rate than the existing population, says Morris Casuto, the Anti-Defamation League's regional director in San Diego. According to Casuto, "Most hate crimes are committed by people who feel disenfranchised when communities they despise move into their neighborhoods."

In 1990, Escondido had a population of 123,958, according to figures from the San Diego Association of Governments, of which 90,379 were white and 27,291 were Hispanic. By 2004, the white population had dropped to 78,765 and the Hispanic population had risen to 61,252.

Rick Eaton, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles who has studied hate crimes for more than 20 years, says there is more youth hate activity than ever before in Southern California. "We are seeing younger and younger kids getting involved in hate crimes," he says.

What's most alarming of all, he reports, is that many parents have no idea that their children may be immersed in a dangerous new hobby ---- hate. He has a few theories that might explain this: working parents who are not able to be there for their children, the growing power of music as a tool of hate, and that wonderful and terrible modern marvel, the Internet.

The recruiters of white supremacist groups know exactly whom to target, Eaton says. A lonely teenager who feels like a failure is a prime candidate. The recruiter becomes his friend, perhaps his only friend. He takes him to parties and introduces him to new people, music that makes him feel invincible, and the seductive notion that he finally has a purpose: to save his family, his community and his country by keeping them racially pure.

Both Eaton and Casuto cannot emphasize strongly enough the responsibility that parents have, not only to be ever vigilant of their children, but of their own tendencies to negatively stereotype and label entire groups of people. How can we call ourselves a democracy, asks Casuto, if we do not allow people to compete without the millstone of race, religion or ethnicity around their necks?

Racism and bigotry are as infectious as any disease, and if we want to stop their spread, then we each have to examine our own attitudes and see how they might be infecting our homes, our neighborhoods and our society.

North County Times columnist Brigid Brett lives in Valley Center.