Hate free zones
Clyde Grubbs talks about Tolerance.org's 10 Ways to Fight Hate and suggests making every community a hate free zone.I think that's a lovely idea. Problem is, if I were someone who felt like painting swastikas all over town, I'm not going to say "woops, can't do that in this town 'cause it's a hate free zone!".
I think this is another case of preaching to the choir.
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 7:22 AM
6 Comments:
Personally, I have to say that I think the choir goes pretty flat.
My town, (where I live, not where I work,) is a hard working class, catholic, bootstraps kind of town. The people who lived in my house 10 years ago, when they moved in as Mr. and Mrs Hyphenated-Name, kept hearing, "you hyphenate? That's way too liberal for that neighborhood."
The elementary schools are One Hundred Years old, and last year we couldn't pass a temporary tax increase to build new ones.
Three houses away from mine lives a guy whose truck has Confederate flags and white power symbols all over it.
Making a town a hate free town doesn't immediately prevent people from doing something, it starts by making everyone have the difficult conversations about whether, or how, to be a "hate-free" town. It would make people ask, what is it to be hate-free? It would mean that when hate-motivated actions happened, we would be motivated to discuss how to respond.
Being a Hate-Free town, IMHO, isn't first about haters, but about fence sitters -- the choir needs to get bigger, and this is a way to facilitate that conversation.
Ultimately, I believe, this can influence the culture, not just individuals.
We know, for instance, that bullying decreases when there are proactive, enforced bullying policies in schools. It starts with the choir, but then leaks out into the greater consciousness.
imho.
And so what do you suggest as an alternate course of action?
Happy Cindy,
I'm not as convinced as you are that the conversations you talk about would really happen. I think there would be two reactions: 1) "Wow ... are we progressive!", and 2) "Whata buncha commie pinko liberals!"
I totally agree with your point about bullying, but I don't think that's the same thing. Nobody is enforcing being hate-free - I don't know how that might be done.
If I were going to go through the effort of getting a town to subscribe to the "hate-free" concept, I'd probably also work to get promises from all of the clergy, media, and people of power (president of the Chamber of Commerce, for example), to actively buy into the idea and have multiple discussions about it within their own constituencies.
Hi Paul,
I agree with you about collaboration w/ leaders of the community as necessary for anything like this.
I have a theory, I think if you and I were sitting in a coffee house, we'd discover that we probably agree about everything.
The dis-perceptions, I bet, are of what the Hate-Free concept is and how it might be implemented.
The greatest challenge of the 10 things to Fight Hate site is that it's hard to navigate. It took me quite a bit of thinking to realize that there was more than the intro page, and then the GO link on the bottom of the first page after the intro linked to itself.
There are 12 or 13 pages that all go together, and a couple of them clearly reference community building, and collaboration: working w/ police, politicians, religious leaders, etc.
So, to my theory: Might it be that you were caught off guard by the bit that said to put up a poster declaring this a hate-free zone? It could provide the idea that if we put up a poster, the world would change. That idea is ridiculous, and putting up a poster would not make a community have a conversation about hate, it'd have a conversation about "who the hell is putting this crap all over our store fronts?"
The document isn't a community organizing manual, but a promotional document meant to put ideas out there along with stories of how these ideas have worked elsewhere. So it is not going to provide the kind of detail your analytical mind jumped straight to, like how to win friends and influence commmunity leaders.
There is lots and lots of organizing materials available to anyone who takes the idea and runs with it -- on that site and others.
No one can "enforce being hate-free" if you're thinking of it in terms of hate as a feeling -- but whole communities can create a sense of what hateful behaviors are and are not acceptable, and can educate people to have accurate information about target groups etc.
So, what do you think about my theory?
peace, my commie pinko liberal self ;-)
Dear commie pinko liberal Cindy ... :)
I think your theory is precisely on-target. I knew that when you said "So it is not going to provide the kind of detail your analytical mind jumped straight to ...". Yep, that's me all right. One thing I've been noticing about myself and trying to catch (but apparently not having a lot of success!) is that I read something ("Might it be that you were caught off guard by the bit that said to put up a poster declaring this a hate-free zone?") and that reminded me of my city (which is a "hate-free zone") and I never got beyond the idea of creating the label and then going on to the next cause. (That is, I've found myself picking up one idea in an article and immediately deciding that's the only idea.)
I did take the time to read at least some of the pages on the 10 Ways to Fight Hate site, and saw some excellent ideas. Like, if some hate group is coming to your smallish town to protest something, just close the town down. Close all of the stores. Don't show up. Don't send tv cameras. What a great idea that is! :)
I look forward to sitting in a coffeehouse sometime and see if we do agree on everything :) That might take a darned lot of coffee, though. My wife and I were in your neck of the woods a bit over a year ago ... the weekend of your local college's graduation. Saw some of the flowers on the campus ... beautiful!
Um. . . What about those "Free Hate" Zones within Unitarian Universalism?
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