February 27, 2019
By Shweta Kondapi
I take pride in being from Massachusetts. We made history as the first state to pass compulsory education laws, the first to uphold transgender rights at the ballot box and the first to introduce many other progressive reforms. Lexington embodies these ideals. Our community is always striving to be inclusive and welcome difference, such as Lexington High School’s new Women’s Literature class and the recent acknowledgement of more non-Christian holidays.
With all of these steps in the right direction, it is hard to understand why hate crimes continue to plague LHS. Swastikas have been found in bathrooms over the past two years. Last December, a poster in an LHS building was defaced with the N-word. And a few weeks ago, homophobic slurs were found on a school computer.
The growing frequency of hate crimes at LHS mirrors the rest of the country. Statistics and incident reports indicate that implicit and explicit governmental endorsements of discrimination have emboldened white nationalists. There is a certain comfort in seeing powerful people act with impunity: It gives other people a semblance of immunity that encourages them to commit similar crimes. Without repercussions, it’s hard to crack that immunity. But so far perpetrators have stuck to untrackable offenses, which makes punishment impossible, only cementing the notion that hate crimes have no consequences.
Have hateful sentiments simply been latent, festering until our political climate made people comfortable enough to show their true colors? An imagined lack of consequences may remove a deterrent, but it doesn’t provide motivation; only preexisting bigotry would give people the idea in the first place.
I think, perhaps too optimistically, that LHS is not facing a sudden swell of prejudice; rather, there are a couple of insensitive kids motivated more by a desperate, stupid desire for attention than by any serious ideology. Drawing a swastika in a bathroom stall is an edgy, risky dare, something intended more for adrenaline and the titillating feeling of being bad than for making other students feel unsafe, even if that is the result. If that’s the case, then it’s a mixed bag: On one hand, LHS would not be facing an epidemic of ingrained, zealous racism. On the other hand, the more LHS takes a stand against bigotry, the more these hate crime attention ploys might happen, because they get riskier and receive more recognition. That means we have to be smart. We have to tread the thin line of rejecting hate crimes in all instances while also not giving perpetrators the attention they clearly crave.
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