The Columbian reports:
It comes in many forms. Starting as name-calling, it escalates to violence. Or it shows up on a car door, on a street sign or in a driveway.
It’s hate, pure and simple. And a recent rash of graffiti in the Truman neighborhood just outside the city has drawn a chorus of condemnations from community leaders.
…
Meanwhile, last weekend’s racist graffiti have also spurred a flurry of public outcry. Several outraged community members plan to spearhead a cleanup effort to remove graffiti left in the Truman neighborhood.
On June 20, graffiti were found on cars, driveways and garbage cans at five residences in the neighborhood. They included a racist slur on Northeast 44th Avenue that named a 16-year-old black Fort Vancouver High School student, Shamarica Scott, specifically.
And the YWCA’s Jay Atwood observes:
Hate incidents are more common in Clark County than most people realize, said Jay Atwood, the YWCA’s social change program director. A recent YWCA study, which interviewed members of various minority groups, found racism ranging from subtle stereotypes to name-calling. The worst was violence.
"A lot of people in Clark County don’t report them," Atwood said. "They vary and are prevalent in all minority groups you see here in Clark County. They go from things in the mall to things on the street to things in the workplace."
To get a baseline of where we’re at as a community, I spoke with the Washington State Human Rights Commission to obtain the number of complaints in Clark County, broken down by Employment, Housing and Public Accommodations discrimination for the decade:
| Year | Employment | Housing | Public |
| 2000 | 59 | 13 | 4 |
| 2001 | 56 | 6 | 2 |
| 2002 | 43 | 12 | 4 |
| 2003 | 38 | 5 | 3 |
| 2004 | 36 | 1 | 1 |
| 2005 | 45 | 9 | 2 |
| 2006 | 41 | 13 | 6 |
| 2007 (first nine months) | 24 | 9 | 6 |
| Totals: | 342 | 68 | 28 |
| source: Washington State Human Rights Commission | |||
|---|---|---|---|
At a glance, it would appear that we hit a trough of complaints in 2003-2004, only to see the numbers edge up as the housing bubble in Clark County continued apace from 2005-2007. What's not in here are the number of graffiti, intimidation, or other hate crimes, as that doesn’t fall under the Human Rights Commission's jurisdiction.
The immediate need is repairing the damage done by the graffiti. The longer term need of course is to keep having an honest discussion of problems in the community. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, there is no separate path here, we are truly “bound together in a single garment of destiny”.
1 comments:
Good reporting. Popular sentiment that racism is unacceptable, even intolerable, is good but it is not sufficient for dealing with racist beliefs and activities. Only accurate information and honest conversations about it get us where we need to go. And these conversations need to be happening in the schools in particular.
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