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Looking for loathe in all the wrong places

Tipped by a recent post by Handsome I quickly found a link to a piece in the St. Petersburg Times concerning an outraged mob being led onto private property to destroy a Halloween display they thought was a racially-based hate crime. Apparently "Bob", a Halloween dummy with Frankenstein's head and the hands of a werewolf who had been hung by an improvised gallows looked sufficiently like a Black man to members of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement that their local leader, Omali Yeshitela, decided they couldn't wait for the police to contact the homeowner at work, opened the fence and proceeded to tear the display down and the dummy apart.

While in the end it appears that everyone is satisfied, I have to join H. in finding the vandalism to be a hate crime in and of itself, arising from a misunderstanding over a Halloween decoration by people with short tempers and, apparently, little to nothing to fear from local law enforcement. That law enforcement wouldn't be required to do something about this - an act that was apparently witnessed by local law enforcement - even without the Watsons signing a complaint bothers me. Any group that doesn't work within the laws, especially when they hadn't even given anything approaching adequate time for the homeowners to be reached, should remember that when the time comes that they want to use the law for their advantage.

I'm sure the Watson family just wants this to be set behind them and peace restored - Mrs. Watson even called the mob leader and apologized for the unintended offense - but my gut feeling is that this is an attitude that's not grounded solely in good feelings. More likely, they wouldn't want to do anything that might upset these hair-trigger reactionaries and lead to something else being destroyed. Many a Black family adopted just such conciliatory attitudes in order to survive in the South for many years; I suppose that now going to be mainly a matter of the Watsons minding their place.

Finally: Anyone who proposes that this is some measure of balancing, social justice deserves a good slap.

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