Oh wow, I got my blogspot website back! Figured there was no shot after 9 years away!
On Thursday, April 20th residents of Oak Ridge
packed Pollard Auditorium for a lecture from Special Agent Andy Crabtree of the
FBI for a look into Hate Crimes law as part of the Roots of America program. It
was entertaining as well as informative, and I feel convinced that most everyone
came away with a little more information about hate crimes.
Personally, I was struck by how outdated and ineffective
many of the laws felt. It seemed to me that some of the things that can hurt
people and communities the most are largely protected under the First
Amendment. While all liberty comes with a tradeoff and no one really wants a
culture in which the government monitors all our speech, I came away feeling
like we could do better as a people. Hate speech may not seem as injurious as
hate crime, but the belief that a person’s emotional health can be inoculated
against injury simply due to protecting free speech is naïve.
Likewise, it also feels naïve to believe that we can address
hate crime, or hate speech, with data points and information alone. If more
information could heal our ills, I think it would have happened by now. Knowing
how many people are homeless doesn’t build houses any more than knowing the
data on food scarcity can create food for people. Data sets and information
point us in a direction, but it is the deeper work of aligning our skills and
resources that generate outcomes.
After the presentation from Agent Crabtree, around 75 Oak
Ridgers sat around tables to talk about the way hate crime, hate speech, and
the breakdown of beloved communities has impacted their lives. I was struck by
how far back many of the stories I heard reached – back to childhood,
developmental years, back to spaces where identity was being constructed. In
many of those spaces and memories, the pain still lingered. It seemed that
while each story I heard would have never passed the litmus test of being a
“hate crime,” there were far too many instances where ignorance and hate had
left unlawful and unmerited wounds.
Oak Ridge Periodic Tables recently won a grant from the New
Pluralists called, “Healing Starts Here.” As the conversation Thursday night
shifted into a question about what we might do to combat hate crime in our
community, I caught a glimpse of where the healing might start… it starts when we’re
together, caring for each other, supporting each other – sometimes even
acknowledging to each other the times we have been complicit in hate speech by
not taking a stand on behalf of someone else.
Educating ourselves about hate in our culture and in our
communities is something that I feel must extend beyond rote memorization,
quotable statistics, or graphs and charts. We become educated in our deepest
places when we sit with another’s pain, still our own anxiety, and allow
authentic community to rise. When we do this, we reach into the spaces that the
law cannot, we give substance to the liberty we enjoy, and illuminate a path
which recognizes that we are most free when we are together in humble and moral
service, each to the other.
Since January 1st, Oak Ridge Periodic Tables has
sponsored approximately 800 conversational meals, with over 10% devoted to
community leadership development. To subscribe to our monthly newsletter and
stay up to date on the next Periodic Table opportunity, visit us at www.oakridgeperiodictables.com
