DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: The legacy of Dr. King remains unrealized in light of recent events.
By: Hank Kalet
Three South Brunswick High School seniors proved last month that we have a long way to go to make the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream a reality.
The students were arrested March 21 and charged with making racial slurs in Hindi and physically harassing three Pakistani girls over a two-week period.
According to police, the teens all 17 learned several derogatory phrases in Hindi, a language spoken by Hindus in India, from a fourth student and then used them repeatedly to taunt the three girls, who were all Muslim. The three seniors also threw candy at the girls and one of the students arrested also asked one of the girls to remove her headscarf "because he didn’t like it," police said.
Police and school officials reacted quickly once they learned of the harassment and the students were charged. They also were suspended indefinitely and could face expulsion.
While I think the punishment fits the crime in this case, I am saddened that we are still wrestling with this kind of behavior 35 years after Dr. King’s assassination in 1968.
Dr. King died in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, having spent the better part of his adult life fighting for justice not just for American blacks, but for all people. His message was one of nonviolence and economic opportunity and he abhorred the kind of power relationships in which the weak are preyed on by the strong.
And that’s what happened at the high school, where according to police these three seniors clearly targeted the three girls because they thought they could. They viewed them as weak and different and that made them easy prey.
What is more troubling is that the girls were Muslims whose English skills were not strong and that the harassment comes at a time when harassment against American Muslims has been on the rise (bias incidents against Muslims were up 1,700 percent in the first year after Sept. 11, according to Human Rights Watch) and the United States is at war with a predominantly Muslim country.
The police are not releasing anymore information on the students and school Superintendent Sam Stewart said last week he was not at liberty to talk about the students or their punishment.
So, we can only guess at what might have been the students’ motives here. But I have to think that they have been getting some cues from the culture at large.
Yes, President George W. Bush has repeatedly said that we are not at war with Islam, but the targets of our anti-terror investigations are Muslims and we have detained several hundred Muslims for questioning without charges, without any evidence that they may have been tied to the Sept. 11 terror attacks or to possible future attacks.
And the television networks and some of the major news magazines seemingly have made it their policy to play up every incident involving a Muslim or allegedly involving a Muslim. On Friday, there were reports of three men climbing the towers on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. Initial reports played up the potential terrorism angle, including reports that three Middle Eastern men had been arrested. Turned out to be a drunken prank, though none of the news reports I watched mentioned the names of the men arrested or corrected their initial reports that the men were of Middle Eastern decent.
It is troubling to think that something like this can happen here, in a town that is home to a mosque and a Hindu temple. There are two churches with predominantly black membership in town and Korean, Chinese and predominantly Latino congregations, as well. There is tremendous diversity here.
But that does not mean we are immune. We have witnessed ugly incidents in the past anti-Semitic graffiti spray-painted on the walls of the Kendall Park Cinemas several years ago and some tensions in the high school and we are likely to see more in the future, a disturbing fact that only emphasizes the need to commit ourselves to fulfilling Dr. King’s vision.
His dream was a nation, a world in which difference did not matter, in which each of us would be free to live and work and play without fear, without hatred.
We have made incremental progress in the years since his untimely death from an assassin’s bullet, but we still have a long way to go.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].