YIPES! What's going on at my alma mater? Hate crimes at the Claremont Colleges. I guess this happened at CMC - our arch rivals, but it's good to see the entire 5C community rally behind this problem.

An interesting article by one of my college professors. The hate crimes don't surprise him.

The L.A. Times article.

While I was at school, a hate incident occurred at the hands of a soccer teammate of mine. He was a freshman when I was senior, a big forward, decent soccer player with a tremendous amount of baggage - I think his parents messed with his head (they were both psychoanalysts). He used to drink a lot and lurk around campus, always stopping by my and the rest of the seniors rooms looking to hang out and possibly smoke pot. He got injured during the season and therefore fell out of favor with the coach (sad truth of sports). After the season ended he got weirder and weirder, always reportedly in trouble of one sort or another.

Also going on my senior year in college was a bunch of over-zealous Residential Advisors. For some reason, my class at Pomona took their RA jobs extra serious and seemed to relish in the opportunity to break up their classmates parties they weren't invited to.

Austin, my teammate, developed a reputation amongst the RA's as being a trouble maker. My friends and I, while recognizing Austin's idiocy, were somewhat sympathetic to the guy as our teammate and because our distrust of the RA cult.

Towards the end of the year of building tension, Austin went on a drunk rampage and ended up writing homophobic slurs on a gay RA's whiteboard. This was treated by the school as hate-crime - not dealt with by the police - but instead by the school. People jumped all over Austin at the time. I don't justify Austin's actions whatsoever, but I sometimes wonder if he was baited a little bit, but the over PC animosity towards his behaviour. I know that after I graduated he did not return to Pomona. He didn't fit in.

I'm not trying to draw a parallel with Austin's behaviour and the current hate crimes. I have no idea what they are a product of. But I'm sure Austin's behaviour was NOT the result of true animosity towards homosexuals. Rather, I think it was a cry for help, an adolescent lashing out for not being accepted or acceptable to others in his community. The reason I tell this story is that it may help alleviate the problem down the road. It might be worth exploring whether the hate crimes stem from a deep embedded anger towards particular peoples or cultures, or whether it's a bunch of kneejerk kids reacting to an overly PC environment where they feel out of place. In neither case are the crimes justified, but I think the two possible motivations warrent different solutions.

Regardless of the motivation of the perpetrators, the colleges are going to come down real hard on them, certainly boot them from school and perhaps have them arrested and jailed. This would be the appropriate reaction to a criminal with a history of racism, and if the victims bore no relationship to the perp. If, however, it turns out to a couple of spoiled kids, I think it might be worth exploring the specifics of the events - why the animosity towards the particular teacher or particular victims versus general animosity to those different from us. Figuring out those details might help prevent such acts of racial vandelism in the future.