So Much Hate

Jimmy: Part I:
Growing Up Behind the Orange Curtain

My brother Jimmy and I are only three years apart in age – he younger than I – but we might as well have grown up on different planets.

He inherited our father’s darker skinned complexion, I our mother’s lighter skinned complexion. His first grade experience – at our otherwise overwhelmingly ‘white’ suburban elementary school campus in southern California – was marred by regular after school bullying and fist fights. I remember one afternoon, after one such altercation, we were in the kitchen with my Mom. Jimmy asked her, in all quiet sincerity, if there was any way to “wash off the brown” so that he wouldn’t get picked on anymore. He was slowly rubbing his arm and looking at mine.

By the time we had both finished high school, we had been well socialized into the political importance of the differences in our skin colors. Depending on which parent we were with had long since determined who was thought to be adopted; depending on what we were wearing and where we were seemed to determine who was paying attention….. By the time I was in my late twenties, my Dad’s male co-workers were thinking I must be his girlfriend – it never occurred to them that we were related. And Jimmy’s slow but steady fall into alcohol and drugs and crime and jail was perceived as, well, predictable.

When Hate Is No Longer Skin Deep

There is nothing more potent, quick, and threatening than the assumptions made based on appearance.

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year old African-American, was walking from a convenience store to the home of his father’s fiancé in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. He was wearing a hoodie, snacking on Skittles and iced tea, and talking on his cell phone to his girlfriend. He was stalked and murdered by a neighborhood watch coordinator, who has yet to be charged.

On April 29, 2010, Vincent Kee, a 22-year-old Navajo man with developmental challenges, was lured into an apartment in Farmington, New Mexico, by three men in their twenties. The men tortured Kee for hours. They shoved a towel in his mouth to muffle his screams, burned a swastika into his arm with a wire hanger, shaved another swastika onto the back of his head, wrote “KKK” and “White Power” all over his body, and severely beat him. Two of the three men have since been convicted and sentenced; federal charges against all three are pending.

What do the crimes committed against Trayvon and Vincent have in common?

They were both targeted by hate. A hate so deep it was triggered into rage and violence by the mere superficiality of appearance.

Jimmy: Part II:
Discharge

Jimmy has, since he was discharged from the Army and estranged from his wife and child in the early 1990s, gone for long periods of time without being in touch with his family (he has lived in so Cal, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico....). This time around we have not seen or heard from him in what seems like a decade.

Every time I hear or read about a Trayvon or a Vincent, I cannot help but wonder if Jimmy’s distancing of himself from us as his family is not born of a sense of alienation and difference within us as his family. (Our parents separated when we were 13 and 10, respectively. Jimmy's relationship with my Dad had always been strained and seemed to become even more so after then).


In other words.... A schism, carved out by the racisms and sexisms of social hate and violence against “men of color,” has seemed to cut "below skin deep" into his very sense of self and place and home. Like the bullets that pierced into Trayvon’s body and the brandings and writings burned into Vincent’s skin and hair.

The Hate of a Crime, the Crime of Hate

Matthew Wayne Shepard was a gay 22-year-old student at the University of Wyoming. He met two men at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, Wyoming. They offered him a ride home but took him instead to a remote area where they robbed, pistol-whipped, and tortured him. They left him to die, tied to a fence post. Shepherd was found 18 hours later by a cyclist. He died the next day, still in a coma from his injuries, which included multiple fractures to the back of his head and right ear.

James Byrd Jr., a 49 year-old African American man, was offered a ride by three men. They drove him to a remote area of town, beat him, urinated on him, and chained him to the back of their pickup truck. They dragged him behind the truck for three miles, swerving from side to side. Byrd died after his right arm and head were severed after his body hit a culvert. The men dumped his torso in front of an African-American church and scattered the rest of his remains in 81 different places around town.

In 2009, a hate crimes prevention bill was passed in their names. The bill requires the FBI to report annual statistics on hate crimes. The FBI's Hate Crime Statistics for 2010 reported the following number of hate crimes against the following racial groups:

2,725     African Americans

            747        Hispanics

697        Whites

203        Asians

47          American Indians/Alaska Natives

Racial bias accounted for 47.3 percent of all hate crimes. Religious bias accounted for 20 percent of hate crimes; sexual orientation accounted for 19.3 percent of hate crimes; ethnic/national origin accounted for 12.8 percent of hate crimes; and physical disability accounted for 0.6 percent of hate crimes.

A 2010 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that, "Violence against American Indians, much of it motivated by racial hatred, is a pervasive yet obscure problem that is especially prevalent in so-called border towns.... American Indians are more likely than people of other races to experience violence at the hands of someone of a different race," with 70% of reported violent attacks perpetrated by non-Indians.

 But even those numbers are not entirely complete, for it it is estimated that only 10% of hate crimes against American Indians are reported.

Jimmy: Part III:
Justice In Love

I would like to believe that Trayvon will find some peace, some freedom in his journey, with the just arrest and conviction of his murderer.


I would like to believe Vincent's wounds will heal, in time, with his scars.

I would like to believe I will see my brother again. And he will know he is loved.