Strange Fruit In New Hampshire? Contrition In Iowa

Baseball dugout at Quackenbush recreational field
in Wellsville, NY a day after Trump's election 2016

Now if you recall it was just about this time last year as the 2016 presidential campaign was headed into the final weeks before the November elections that some pretty disturbing reports started emerging from elementary, middle, high schools and colleges across the nation.

Schools being defaced with Nazi imagery, like my old elementary school Burning Tree Elementary in Bethesda, MD.

A detestable moment for America.

Racist graffiti scrawled on the walls of school buildings, bathrooms and hallways.

In the ten days after Trump's election in 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded at least 867 different incidents of harassment or intimidation based on race or ethnicity around the U.S.

For the most part, conservative news outlets and commentators tended to dismiss and minimize the impact and seriousness of these ugly incidents of racial and ethnic hatred and violence (stirred up by the divisive campaign of the orange-haired guy who pledged to Make America Great Again) as isolated examples of reactionary fringe-dwellers seizing the moment to express their internalized bigotry.

But as an article by Ben Thompson in the Boston Globe earlier today about racist graffiti found in the bathroom of Needham Elementary School on Monday demonstrates, it's still happening.

Another insidious hallmark of the Trump election in 2016 was that nooses intentionally began appearing in some schools again.

Casandra Merlin's 8-year-old biracial son's neck
after a 14-YO hung him from a noose

These vestiges of racial and ethnic terrorism were left in classrooms, lockers, or outdoor recreational areas to taunt, insult or intimidate African-American students.

Truly disturbing attempts to resurrect a dark and deadly chapter of America's past.

Sadly, that's still happening too.

As many news outlets have reported, recently at least one 14-year-old teenager in Claremont, New Hampshire allegedly took that a step further.

After Casandra Merlin's 8-year-old biracial son was taunted with racial epithets before a group of kids started throwing rocks at his legs, the as-yet unnamed teenager put a rope from an old tire swing around his neck and pushed him off a picnic table.

According to his grandmother, the teenager and other as-yet unidentified teens simply watched him swing back and forth three times until the boy was able to somehow remove or untangle the noose from his neck and escape.

As Angela Helm observed in an article about the incident posted on TheRoot.com on Sunday, despite growing national interest in the case, the Claremont, NH police chief Mark Chase is thus far denying media requests for more information on the investigation into what happened.

Even though it was the as-yet unnamed 8-year-old boy who was hung from a tree by his neck, the police chief seemed unusually concerned about the impact the media attention would have on the reputations and futures of the teens who allegedly committed this act.

Chase told reporters: "Mistakes they make as a young child should not have to follow them for the rest of their life." 

Nor should their age excuse them from responsibility for participating in a hate crime.

Claremont, NH police chief Mark Chase

In her article Helm pointed out:

"Notice how he called these predators 'young children', infantilizing the white teens. Conversely, teens like Trayvon Martin are made out to be hulking, menacing adults."

According to an article on Boston.com, after coming under increased media scrutiny and public pressure, sometime Monday night the police chief committed to investigate the incident as a hate crime but refused to give any more details because the kids involved are in their teens.

Earlier this afternoon a local NBC affiliate reported that Governor Chris Sununu and Rep. Annie Kuster have both released statements condemning the incident.


If it was a "mistake" as Chase suggested it certainly was a whopper.

Speaking of youthful "mistakes", did you hear about those five teenagers from Creston High School in Iowa who were shown in a photo burning a cross while wearing what appear to be KKK hoods while one held what appeared to be a rifle with a scope and another held what looks like a Confederate flag?

According to a Des Moines Register article posted last Friday, school officials decided to take disciplinary action against the students after the photo reportedly appeared last Wednesday morning.

Given the reaction of Creston Community School District administrators and members of the community, I don't think it's fair to characterize what these five knuckleheads did as representative of the town of Creston, or Iowa for that matter.

Creston, Iowa teens burning a cross

But I am personally troubled by the deeper question of what prompted them to do such a thing in the first place.

Did they have a few beers and decide it would be a gag or some kind of joke?

Or are they among the disturbing numbers of young white boys and men who've become "self radicalized" by the plethora of right-wing extremism online propagated by the alt-right community?

Was this some kind of juvenile reaction to what happened in Charlottesville?

According to Census data, in 2010 the population of Iowa was about 88.7% white and about 2.9% black or African-American.

So I really cant' see five white teenagers from Creston, Iowa (population 7,289) feeling racially marginalized - but maybe they do.

If I was a betting man I'd wager they were buying into some kind of distorted reality being peddled online by the community of alt-right bigots who find solace and courage in anonymity - and a sense of legitimacy from Trump.

Whatever their reasons their actions have certainly brought them back into reality quickly, and I as think back on my time as a junior and senior in high school, it's sad to think that the actions of these five individuals have come to dominate the start of the school year - and brought negative global attention to Creston High School.

All five boys were on the football team and coach Brian Morrison announced he'd spoken with their parents and removed them from the team; the principal Bill Messerole wouldn't comment on what, if any other disciplinary actions would take place.

Creston HS quarterback Kylan Smallwood

Both the coach and the team's quarterback Kylan Smallwood (who is African-American) expressed shock about hearing about the photo even while their comments were thoughtful, eloquent and measured in a videotaped interview about their reactions to the incident.

If there's any positive, it's clearly brought the team and members of the community together in ways that they might not otherwise have been compelled to do.

Personally I think Jamie and Megan Travis, the parents of one of the players in the photo, deserve credit for having the courage to pen an open letter published in the local Creston News Advertiser, apologizing for the incident and asking the community for forgiveness.

As they said in their letter (in part), "The photo in no way reflects our family values. Our family strongly believes that all individuals are created equally in God's eyes...Our goal is a peaceful resolution. We want to move forward and embrace our community in eliminating racism in Creston." 

Those are sentiments that I think the vast majority of Americans would share in this era of Trump's vile, petty divisiveness, pandering to nationalism, stoking "otherism" and dreams of walls.

Obviously no one was injured in Creston, Iowa as a result of what those five teens were doing in that photo, so in some ways it's different than what happened in a backyard in Claremont, New Hampshire.

But the root cause is the same.

Clearly no Kum-ba-yah moment is going to magically make everything right in a day.

But let's hope the same sense of contrition and unity in the face of ugliness that flowered in Creston, can blossom in Claremont - and that a traumatized 8-year-old boy and his community can find a way to heal.

What would Billie Holiday think about the erie song "Strange Fruit" still being relevant in 2017?