A month ago, the prestige press was convulsed over the KKK riding roughshod over Oberlin College and Clarksdale, Mississippi. What have we learned since then?
About Oberlin, nothing. As far as I can tell from Google News, the Oberlin story has vanished. This is a little odd because Oberlin officials made a big deal about how just before the KKK assault blanket sighting, they had removed two students from campus. Who were they? What had been their motivation? Nobody knows, nobody cares.
The Marco McMillian case, in contrast, continues to generate stories on Google News, each dumber than the last. For example, here's a a long Huffington Post story:
Marco McMillian's Life And Death A Test For Civil Rights In The Mississippi Delta
... In 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, Mississippi law enforcement agencies collectively reported just one of the nation’s 6,222 hate crimes to the FBI. This year, Mississippi legislators decided against expanding the state’s hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by anti-gay bias. The state also has no laws prohibiting discrimination against anyone in housing, the workplace or other key functions of life.
“Does that strike you as a place where an honest and thorough examination of hate crime is really happening?” said Mark Potok, a hate crimes and hate group expert with the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “If anti-gay bias crimes are happening, where would law enforcement find the motivation, the time, the investigative skills needed to give that possibility a serious look?”
Thanks, Mark. Keep up the good work.
