Monday, January 25, 1999
Lies don't bring people together
BY CLIFF RADEL
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Snow
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Allen
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I hate to think Nathaniel Snow and Brad Allen are guilty. If so, they let down a whole lot of people.
Accused of lying about a hate crime at Miami University, they may have bamboozled an entire community and the news media — me included.
The two Miami students were charged last week with posting racist messages at Miami's black learning center.
Based on evidence gathered at the scene last October, police say the pair posted hate-filled messages at the center and on computer screen savers. Some messages supported the Ku Klux Klan. One had a drawing of a black person being hanged.
At the time of the crime, the assumption was white racists had left the messages. Student demonstrations and news coverage followed, decrying the poor state of race relations on the Miami campus.
I wrote a column, quoting two black students about their fears and views on the Miami situation.
Were we all flimflammed? And fooled?
The crimes the pair are charged with don't amount to much jail time or fines. If they are found guilty of criminal mischief and criminal trespassing, the most each former student could get is 90 days in jail and $750 in fines.
But, the harm done would be much worse. Nathaniel Snow and Brad Allen, if guilty as charged, let down every soldier in the war against racism.
Both young men are black. Nathaniel Snow was president of Miami's Black Student Action Association. Both were active in protests against racism staged after the messages appeared inside the center.
Jon Sanders tracks examples of what he calls “hate hoaxes” on college campuses. He's a research fellow at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in North Carolina. Since 1997, he has counted five fabricated hate crimes. The Miami incident would make six.
The people who perpetrate hate hoaxes, he told me, “usually have an impatience with whatever change they want to effect. They think that by faking a hate crime they'll persuade everyone that the problem they're protesting is really bad and needs to be addressed immediately.”
“That's very disingenuous,” he said. “It never helps their cause.”
And it hurts a lot of people.
Doing a disservice
If the charges against them are true, Nathaniel Snow and Brad Allen did more than just mess up their own lives.
People who do such things disillusion their followers. After I heard the news about Nathaniel Snow, I called freshman Teria Fields, one of the two Miami students I wrote about last fall. She told me on Friday she's “learned one thing from this: Don't trust someone just because they're a leader.”
Such an act would hurt black and white students' efforts to bring racial harmony to the campus. Lies don't bring people together. They tear them apart.
A hate hoax would damage black students' relationship with the university administration. Nathaniel Snow claimed to be negotiating with the university and asking for changes in good faith. If he committed this crime, he made university officials look like chumps.
Whoever did this damaged the already tenuous relations between black and white students at Miami. “Now, when a white girl giggles as I answer a question,” Teria Fields said, “I'll wonder all the more if she's laughing because of the color of my skin.”
A setback
If Nathaniel Snow and Brad Allen sowed the seeds of distrust, they left a bitter harvest for anyone who cares about race relations in Oxford and around the area.
Someone who cries wolf this way makes it tough for the next person claiming to be a victim of a hate crime. People will wonder, is this a fake, too?
The makers of this mess created more work for people like Miami senior Carlotta Duke, the other student I wrote about last fall.
“We'll all have to work more,” she told me, “and pray harder so things get better.”
She's not giving up. Same here. This is not the end of the world for race relations. It's just a step back.
Columnist Cliff Radel can be reached at 768-8379; fax 768-8340.
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