What kind of dick do you have to be to desecrate James Meridith’s statue at Ole Miss?
The probe into the weekend desecration of the statue of civil rights icon James Meredith on the Ole Miss campus is now a federal investigation.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has joined the University Police Department in pursuing the case and considers the actions of two alleged suspects “a hate crime,” said University of Mississippi spokesman Danny Blanton.
The FBI is investigating, at the request of the university, prosecution as a hate crime in violation of U.S. Code 18243, Blanton said. It prohibits intimidation of a race and makes it a crime to deny equal opportunity and access through intimidation, Blanton said.
“That has prompted them to assist in the investigation,” he said. University and FBI officials are conferring on the investigation this morning, he said.
What did they actually do?
University of Mississippi officials said today they’re hopeful they’ll have in custody soon two men suspected of sullying the campus statue of civil rights icon James Meredith early Sunday by placing a noose around his neck and draping the statue with a flag containing the Confederate battle symbol.
Some Ole Miss alums are not amused.
Perhaps it’s a Southern thing, but we euphemize these acts of campus hatred so quaintly — an “incident” — as if they were some sort of verbal faux pas. ”Incident” implies something accidental, unpredictable, a one-off occurrence. The type of thing that might become funny after the statute of limitations for embarrassment has passed.
I can remember back to my sophomore year when we had the Deke incident. Next came the Michael Hudec/YouTube incident. Then the KKK incident. The Election Night incident. The Laramie Project incident…
At a certain frequency, incidents cease to be incidental. They become habits.
I know there is a cultural divide in this country, but you don’t see progressives desecrating Confederate statues or Northerners doing anything equivalent at their universities to what goes on semi-regularly at Ole Miss.
At least it is being treated as a very serious matter by both the school and the Feds.
Yes, there is a “cultural divide”.
Which is a gentle euphemism for saying that our country and, not to mention, one of our political parties, is made up of a sizable percentage of stupid fucking bigot assholes, and an assortment of their enablers; who will give a laugh, a wink and a nod to them when they think they are all in the company of like-minded jackasses.
And these same enablers will also give silent consent to implications of violence by these same bigots. These people are scum. Their enablers are scum. And they are deplorable creatures, who don’t deserve the right to be called human beings. It is high time that all these people be called out for what they are. The time is long over for giving anyone the benefit of the doubt on things such as this.
These people feel that behaviors like this have been sanctioned. And that is because they have; by talk radio, by right-wing politicians, by GOP Presidential candidates. They all are just as guilty as the people who hung that noose and flag.
Is this the part where we white liberals pretend to be shocked (SHOCKED!) that southern white folks still do this?
And then we defend southern white folks by saying “oh not ALL of them…” ?
And then lie and say that’s it’s equally bad everywhere?
And then prepare to be shocked (SHOCKED!) tomorrow when this happens again?
And then declare that it’s-not-race-it’s-class?
And then talk about the need for “a conversation” on race?
All to avoid “alienating” southern white folks. Which is merely a euphemism for enabling them while pretending to be on the good side.
Have fun with that.
I don’t get it. Are you saying all southern white folks are raging racist bigots?
I’m a northern transplant behind enemy lines in the south, and there are plenty of awesome southern white people who aren’t bigots.
And assuming you think only southern whites are bigots, try going outside now and again anywhere in the north. There are plenty of bigoted fucks there too.
You did 2) and 3). Really my only surprise is that you didn’t just say fuck it and do them all. I mean really – go big or go home dude.
You’re absolutely correct.
Every single southerner is a raging racist, and not on single northerner is a racist, like, at all.
Go big or go home indeed.
Have fun, and if you tune your hat just right, you’ll hear even more secrets no one else knows.
I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that every time we hear about pervasive racism in the South, someone feels compelled to defensively chime in with ‘it’s not all Southerners’ and ‘it’s not just the South!’
Which is true. However, white Southerners aren’t the victims here.
Reminds me of a comment thread where someone talks about violence against women, and a bunch of strangely defensive men start sputtering about how all men aren’t batterers, and there are women who do terrible things, too.
All one has to do is spend a little time in this little ruby red area of my state to know that what you say is absolutely true. Bigotry doesn’t stop when it hits the edge of the old Confederacy. And not to overlook the fact that I have some southern relatives who are proud, raging liberals, and who are not afraid to say it.
I’m from Cincinnati also, and will attest that racism down here in Dixie is out in the open and tolerated more than it is up north.
But it certainly doesn’t mean that the south is all bad and the north all good. Believing something like that simply makes you a delusional fucking idiot.
Besides, I take seriously the whole “First they came for the X and I did not speak up” thing.
I hate racism and bigots, but short of lynching them, what the fuck good is it to cast every single southern white as a racist?
Meh. I’m about as radical as anyone on here and speak vociferously about class, but holy shit, I’m not looking to string up all the oligarchs…just the ones who are abusing their place in society.
When it comes to conflict, the victors rarely remember, the vanquished rarely forget…
In college I toyed with the idea of burning the Stars and Bars every year on the anniversary of Appomattox, but ultimately never bothered with it, because 1) it was a dumb idea, and 2) I was afraid I’d do something wrong and end up setting myself on fire.
Though that in itself would have been the perfect description of the Confederacy: they did something wrong and subsequently set themselves on fire.
I know there is a cultural divide in this country, but you don’t see progressives desecrating Confederate statues or Northerners doing anything equivalent at their universities to what goes on semi-regularly at Ole Miss.
When was the last time someone tried to tear down a Jefferson Davis or Nathan Bedford Forrest statue? Bueller?
The two things wouldn’t be equivalent even if Amherst College students did deface a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue every year. Forrest was a terrorist, war criminal, and traitor. When Group A pisses on heroes, the cultural divide doesn’t narrow if Group B pisses on villains. In fact, it probably widens.
The fact that we largely ignore villains makes us closer to people-who-hate-heros than we should be.
“I know there is a cultural divide in this country, but you don’t see progressives desecrating Confederate statues….”
Come on, you know as well as I that a significant number of people in Mississippi consider the mere existence of the Meredith statue a desecration of their campus, committed against them by black people with the support of us yankees.
The kind of people who do this would be very happy if segregation was brought back tomorrow. In their minds, it was retrogression, not progress.
On the other hand, there’s something that really bothers me about this being prosecuted as a crime. The statue wasn’t vandalized – as far as I have read it wasn’t damaged at all.
Desecration? Really? What’s the difference between this and burning the American flag at an anti-war rally?
The only difference is the message. And while I don’t like the message at all, I’m not sure punishing it is consistent with the First Amendment.
Well, hold up.
If you buy your own flag, take into the public square, and light it on fire, that is you destroying your own property to make a statement.
When you march onto the campus of a public university and deface their property, then you’ve done something else entirely. Are you going to make the argument that they did no permanent damage to it should be treated less seriously than if they had taken a hammer to it?
Also, you understand the concept of intimidation in a civil rights context, right? It doesn’t matter a whole lot if you burn a cross in a black family’s front-lawn or on the public sidewalk in front of their home.
Boo, it’s not that it did no “permanent damage” to the status – it did no damage at all. The damage is entirely contextual and intellectual – hang a noose and flag from a highway fencepost and you wouldn’t have a federal criminal investigation. In that sense it’s more analogous to hate speech than a hate crime.
Legally speaking, that does seem rather dubious. And if you’re going to start prosecuting people because they’re communicating hateful, offensive ideas, well, you’ve just criminalized half of the American political spectrum – and which half depends entirely on who’s in power. Good luck with that.
“I’ll kill you!” is just words, but, depending on circumstances, it can be an illegal threat or intimidation. And that’s what that noose says.
What that noose said was ugly and despicable, but it’s far from a direct threat. Free speech is often easier to support in the abstract than the reality — but too important to let ugly realities distort our vision.
the statue doesn’t belong to the ppl who put the noose on it. does free speech allow me to go into your yard and put up a threatening sign insulting you provided I don’t damage the lawn (i.e. insulting the University for admitting him, threatening students, faculty and admin of the university)
They didn’t go onto anybody’s private property. This is a public area at a public university.
And insulting somebody isn’t a crime. Insulting the government (which is what the University is) particularly isn’t a crime. It’s the essence of dissent, which I thought was something to be valued in a democracy.
Insulting somebody may be a crime, according to the excerpt above, as per U.S. Code 18243.
I am assuming that “18243” is referring to US Code title 18, section 243, which makes it illegal to exclude someone from a jury on the basis of race. I assume the guy meant to refer to Title 18 section 249, which is the federal hate crime law. That only applies to acts causing or attempting to cause bodily injury.
Maybe there’s some other statute to authorizes the feds to act here, but “18243” doesn’t seem to cut it.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/245
How direct a threat should a current student take of a noose around the statue of the first black student at Ole Miss?
A current black student perhaps? That’s my point.
And mine as well – though my comment unfortunately lacked your clarification.
The noose is what catapults it up for me. The rebel flag drapped is akin to walking through a quad with a swastika or displaying it outside the Hillel house. The noose is a threat, especially in this context around a black male student.
Virginia vs Black is relevant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black
How about painting a swastika on the public sidewalk in front of a Jewish fraternity? Is that free speech?
If the noose and the hypothetical swastika are free speech then why can someone saying, “I’d like to shoot {Obama/Bush/Clinton take your pick}”, a Federal crime? Why isn’t it free speech?
Defacing public property is a crime. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no law in the US against displaying a swastika. There’s also no law against using the “N” word — and that can be just as mean, nasty, and hurtful as other symbols of oppression and racism. So, as long as no property — either public or private — is defaced, marred, etc. — a display of a swastika on public property in front of or near a synagogue is free speech.
Am I making the argument that they did no permanent damage to it should be treated less seriously than if they had taken a hammer to it?
Of course that’s the argument I am making. Vandalism – property damage – is a crime, regardless of the context.
Nobody likes it when someone says they hate you. But if saying they hate you becomes a crime, what other statements can the government criminalize?
I’ve got nothing against using social pressures – protests, ostracism, etc. – as weapons to battle this kind of hate. But putting people in jail because of it is crossing a line I really don’t think we should cross.
So, you can deface public property with purposively racially intimidating messages, and that’s protected free speech?
I don’t think that the DOJ or the Courts agree with you.
One is an act of terrorism, and the other is not. I’ll let you work out which one is which.
-Jay-
Perhaps both are.
Terrorism? Seriously?
If saying something that makes someone else scared is a crime, you might as well kiss the First Amendment goodbye.
What kind of a dick? A hooded dick!
Can I help drill the eyeholes?
With a 12 inch drill bit?
Well, this may make me guilty of having astoundingly low expectations, but if they are actually taking it seriously, good for them. Gotta start somewhere.
Ultimate cultural divide:
Metro Atlanta.
Downtown Black rapping folk. Suburban Lilly White horse folk.
Want to bridge the divide?
Go to a Black church! Much more power there than the White churches. Awesome!
Look, it’s pretty clear that the white frat boys are the real victims here.
They have to walk by that statue EVERY DAY.
Will no one think of the (overgrown) children?
Hey look, with Stand Your Ground it’s pretty much open season on black teenagers.
How insane is this law? Basically, this law sends the message that if you are ever in any kind of confrontation, better shoot first because if the other guy does he’ll get to say he feared for his life, and since an armed society is a polite society, he has every reason to believe you’re carrying, and even if you’re not, that movement you made at your beltline is all the reason he needs to think that you are. That’s right, the state is telling you that you better arm up and take matters into your own hand, because there’s no protection against someone else who does, unless you have a gun. Now juxtapose this with a legal system that is most definitely not blind, and economic system that creates some really big losers who can’t really afford the best legal representation, and it’s impossible not to conclude that these ALEC abominations were not designed specifically to empower embittered whites with lethal force to really use their weapons in the way they always intended to, to show those thugs whose boss. This law has it all: A) It’s a perfect mechanism for terrorizing minorities B) It’s an incredible scheme for marketing guns C) It posits the dissolution of democratic society itself. And judging by the news, the message has been received loud and clear by quite a few angry white guys.
Basically, these laws are to me an omnious sign of the literal breakdown of society. They should be challenged directly to the Supreme Court. But then, it’s also impossible not to see a direct line between this kind of law and the Bush-Cheney 1% doctrine of pre-emptive war, along with it’s imperialistic paranoia about terrorists, a doctrine which still largely determines our foreign policy, as well as empowers the super spooks to treat the Constitution like Angel Soft 2-ply.
Next to that, a noose around a statue’s neck just looks like a really hateful prank.
The facts don’t support your statement. SYG was not used be either Zimmerman or Dunn’s defense teams. Repeating falsehoods doesn’t make them any truer.
It’s less than clear that Florida’s 2005 SYG law directly increased the number gun murders much less white on black gun murders. Crime statistics — collection and analysis — leave a lot to be desired.
As say this as one person that loathes handguns and assault weapons and would like to see all of them banned. There are plenty of good solid reasons for supporting gun regulations and control. Hence, there’s no need to distort the facts in high profile (unique) cases to further a rational position wrt to guns.
Nope. The jury instructions were specifically worded based on stand your ground law.
More, with links to studies on the laws effects:
Again, SYG IS the state’s self defense law.
You’re confusing wording in the self-defense statute in FL that is similar to the statutes in most states with the special SYG statute. No duty to retreat and use of force in self-defense not unique to FL and predate the SYG law.
It can be confusing but competent attorneys explained the differences during and after the Zimmerman trial.
Black history month. A noose around the neck of James Meredith’s statue at UMiss campus.
The mindset that carried that noose to the statue and lifted it up in place during this month probably thought they were staking a claim to remembered power, a certain glory of intimidation and an American caste system that inoculates them from recognizing they are the problem.
I’m still trying to deal with the Dunn verdict because no Mr. Priebus, racism is not dead in America.