RMN:  White Supremecists Hit Denver With Moronic Message (posted 3/29/04)
Tina Griego column: Racists target city with moronic message
March 29, 2004



The morons are at work again.

Oh, I'm sorry, I guess I should be more specific. The white supremacist morons are at work again.

The West Virginia-based National Alliance has been busy spreading its message of hate around Colorado. Its members have hit both Littleton and northwest Denver. They tucked fliers into plastic bags weighted with small rocks and threw them in front yards. In the dead of night, it seems. No one I know of saw anything.

Before Littleton and the Denver neighborhood, they slithered into Eagle County, Broomfield, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Delta and Montrose. A quick check on the Internet finds traces of them in other states. Sometimes they go after illegal immigrants who, they say, are rapidly changing "the racial complexion of our population and the quality of the civilization that our ancestors built." Sometimes, they target the "Jewish monopoly of the media."

Affirmative action, multiculturalism and "political correctness in our universities" also make the hit list. Kind of sounds like this year's legislative session.

This time, the National Alliance targeted blacks. "Crime: It's a Black Thang," the leaflet read. It gives FBI statistics showing that blacks are arrested for a disproportionate percentage of crimes nationwide.

That's true, though the percentages the alliance cites are incorrect. Nor do the white supremacists include this interesting information: "By race, 70.7 percent of arrestees in 2002 were white, 26.9 percent were black, and the remainder were of other races," the FBI says. (Hispanics belong to all racial groups and are not broken out as a separate category.)

Alliance members apparently are not interested in tackling the hard questions of why black arrest and conviction rates are disproportionately higher. To do that would require actual thought. It would require us, among other things, to ask how much racial prejudice continues to exist in our judicial system.

Hide the eyes. Cover the ears. Close the mind. Ignorance thrives. The alliance dismisses as inferior, dangerous and morally bankrupt entire groups of people. Sharpen that ignorance - the prerequisite for racism - with fear, and hate is born.

And so, racists steal into neighborhoods with midnight deliveries containing messages that lead to phones that answer calls with identical tape-recorded scripts. "We favor a free, strong, white America." Non-Hispanic white, I'm presuming.

I want to dismiss them as morons. A childish oversimplification, perhaps, but does anyone really buy into this nonsense? If I write something, I tell Bill Vandenberg of the Colorado Progressive Coalition, I'm not going to use the name. Why give them the press?

I think you should use the name, he says.

Why?

"We might think that in a society such as ours, these groups are so extreme, so out there, they won't gain any traction," he says. "But the more complacent we are, the more room we give these guys to operate.

"We need our communities to be resilient, strong and vigilant in the face of these attacks. Otherwise, they will continue to happen."

These are uncertain times, Vandenberg tells me and uncertain times provide fertile ground.

"I'm a fierce anti-racist," he says, "but I can understand how some people feel threatened. I just hope they don't pursue that avenue."

And I think of a man who writes me often, typewritten letters on cream-colored stationery, embossed with his name and signed "Sincerely." He speaks in apocalyptic terms of illegal immigrants. He warns of a "cultural Armageddon."

I think about U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo and his bid to deny nonemergency services to illegal immigrants - a proposed amendment to the state constitution, which, if it wins a place on the ballot and passes, will essentially force anyone who looks "Mexican" to prove his citizenship. (And how do you like that, you Hispanics who call me to curse Mexicans? You, whose people have been here for 100 years, will walk up to a counter in a city building to a clerk who will ask you what you are before asking you what you need.)

And what of state Sen. John Andrews, who joins Tancredo in his campaign to reaffirm Western Civilization against "radical" multiculturalism, and state Sen. Ed Jones, a black man, who tried in vain to lead the gutting of affirmative action in Colorado, and U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave and her crusade for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage?

I know people who support some of these measures, and though I could not disagree with them more, they are not racists. They are frustrated, bewildered, outraged, wary of the changes around them. They seek an anchor, a place to make a stand.

But it is not so hard to see, is it, how measures such as these - whatever the sponsors' motives, however honest their intentions may be - can come to be embraced and perverted by those who practice hate. How they become the fertile ground for those championing a vision of America that is neither inclusive nor devoted to equality. "Black Thang" is crude. Much of what the alliance says superficially is not and that is the danger. The nuance. The subtle twisting of facts to sell white superiority.

Northwest Denver resident Leanna Conradt found the plastic bag and its message on her lawn on a recent Saturday. Within a day, she and her neighbor, Amy Aukema, had begun their counterattack. They set up an e-mail, berkeleyunity@yahoo.com, for neighbors. They distributed through the neighborhood 300 of their own fliers: "Hate Breeds Crime."

"Let's go outside and meet our neighbors! Let everyone know that we love the Berkeley neighborhood's diversity and that WE WILL NOT TOLERATE HATE."

Like Vandenberg, the two women tell me that this is not something a community ignores. If the attack comes on blacks today, Amy says, it will come on others tomorrow.

I remember two recent news stories. The number of reported incidents of violence and harassment against Jews and gays last year has been tallied. They went up.