About one month after a special adviser was appointed by a California school district to help address racism – with a fanfare of media coverage – a black student has confessed to writing anti-black graffiti on the school walls.
The graffiti in question were the words “colored” and “white” written above two drinking fountains as if to indict the school as following the racial-segregation model of the Jim Crow South.
The textbook fake hate crime is one of the dozens that have made news over the last several years. Fake hate crimes allow groups like homosexuals, transgenders, and aggrieved racial minorities to portray themselves as the victims of oppressors, who are nearly always white, straight, and Christian Americans.
In the case at McClatchy High School in Sacramento, the black female message-scrawler was caught on video and subsequently confessed, since there’s not much else one can do when caught on video.
Mark Harris, a black attorney with social justice and civil rights matters in Sacramento, who had been brought in by the district to deal with other incidents of alleged racism at the school,
seemed primarily interested in protecting the black student who had tried to inflame racial tension, fabricate a false narrative and implicate whites in a “crime” they had no part in. He called the act “a prank that went sideways” – with an implication of “just kids having fun” – and even tried to portray the “confession” as a voluntary act not compelled by video evidence.
“I’ve been practicing law for 40 years, people typically don’t confess to things they didn’t do, unless they’re under duress or coercion. And nobody has claimed that; not her, not her family,” Harris told reporters on Feb. 17, according to a sympathetic Sacramento Bee.
“I don’t believe those words that were on those water fountains were racist,” Harris said. “I do not believe they were hate crime or hate speech. Part of it quite honestly is because the admitted perpetrator is a young African American woman.”
The specialist in civil rights issues asked the community for its patience and understanding of the fabricated crime.
“It should be a moment for our community to come together and make sure this doesn’t destroy this person’s life,” he told the Bee, not mentioning the true victims of the act: those falsely painted as racists.
“We don’t know why she did it,” said the supposedly experienced lawyer. “This is not a situation that is the same as an overt deliberate move to do something that is racist, destructive, negative, etc.”
McClatchy High School administrators said that the girl would face “appropriate discipline.”
