Keep hate laws for real haters
It’s difficult to summon a scintilla of sympathy for the Rehberg brothers. Twenty-year-old Justin was convicted Friday of criminal harassment and inciting hatred against blacks by setting a two-metre cross ablaze last February in front of the Hants County home of a mixed-race couple. His brother Nathan faces similar charges this week.
But since this decision may be precedent-setting, it’s worth asking whether we want to set this precedent. The law requires proof not only that the accused did the deed but also that their “motivation” was to incite hatred.
Justin’s lawyer argued the motivation for this crime—his client pleaded guilty to criminal harassment—was something else.
Justin was convinced Michelle Lyons—a distant cousin who shared the house with her black partner and their children—was spreading rumours the Rehberg brothers had herpes. In his dumb-as-dirt way, Justin lashed back, zeroing in on her partner’s race and upping the offensive ante in the process.
The intent, his lawyer insisted, was personal vengeance.
It’s complicated, of course. Cross-burning carries symbolic connotations. That this torching failed to ignite racist nutbars says more about the community, which rallied to support the family, than the act, or those who perpetrated it.
Still, we need to be careful when we attach the most heinous intent—inciting hatred is heinous—to messy personal vendettas.
One criminologist argued after the verdict that “hate laws were created for this reason… We need to prosecute more, not less.”
I’d suggest hate crimes are, and should be, so reprehensible we must designate them such only in clear-cut cases.
Consider another recent case involving a New York street gang that discovered one of their recruits was gay. They allegedly beat and sodomized him, tortured another gay man, then beat up that man’s roommate and brother. Police call those hate crimes. No kidding.
In a slightly different context, American comedian Jon Stewart got it exactly right during his recent Rally to Restore Sanity when he urged caution in our use of language. We must learn to “distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez.”
We also need to distinguish between real race haters and dumb-assed vengeance seekers.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Best interests of the child (care system)
Remember that Cole Harbour kid who had so many complex emotional issues and acronym-saturated syndromes the province’s community services department decided the only possible solution was to put him in a residential care facility where he could be helped 24 hours a day on a long-term, continuing basis?
And remember there wasn’t such an institution in Nova Scotia. So two years ago community services shipped him off to Bayfield in Ontario.
Recall that his grandparents—who’d raised him since he was a toddler and initially asked community services for help—objected to sending him so far from home. They—horrors—complained to the press and even went to court to force the government to bring him back.
They lost that battle but… well, one bit of sour publicity led to another. There were questions about the efficacy of Bayfield’s treatment approach, and allegations the boy may have been abused. This summer Bayfield washed its hands of the boy and shipped him back to Nova Scotia.
In late September, community services dumped him back on his grandparents with nothing more than a skimpy, page-and-a-half “Service Plan”— part-time/sometime help from a school liaison/tutor, family therapist and alternative youth worker—and good riddance.
But remember. It was community services that initially claimed he had so many issues and syndromes he needed 24 hour continuing care and supervision.
Remember, too, that this boy is still only 15!
It’s difficult not to see his treatment as vindictive payback by miffed community services officials who don’t like having their authority questioned.
Today, the grandparents report the boy’s behaviour is no better and, arguably, worse now than when community services took him two years ago. They’re going back to court to force the department to implement an alternative, community-based, intensive care program developed by Moncton psychologist Dr. Charles Emmyrs and other professionals. But the earliest family court date they can get is December 22nd.
Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse should be embarrassed. And the opposition should be demanding answers—not to mention a public inquiry into whatever happened to what is supposed to be the bedrock of our child welfare legislation: “the best interests of the child.”
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Convention centre choices—with consequences
CBC Radio’s Mainstreet host, Stephanie Domet, had an interesting conversation last week with federal Liberal MP Scott Brison and former provincial PC leadership candidate Bill Black.
The topic: taming Nova Scotia’s debt woes.
While Black in particular had many thoughtful things to say, I was intrigued by his answer to one question. Does it really make sense for a debt-saddled province to commit $163.5 million over 25 years to construct a new convention centre?
Black had clearly examined the numbers behind convention centre proponents’ better-than-sliced-bread claims and pronounced them “inflated.” Despite that, he concluded we would probably look back in 20 years and say building the centre was money well spent.
That’s curious. Forget what the research says because we know it lies, but don’t worry. It’ll work out. Be happy.
But could not that $163.5 million be invested as well—if not better—in improving support for the 4,000, often under-achieving black students in our school system?
More education. Higher skills. Better paying jobs. More provincial taxes…
Education Minister Marilyn More last week “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with all 68 recommendations in a 2009 report on helping African Nova Scotia students. But she didn’t put a penny toward that goal.
Instead the government anted up $163.5 million for a convention centre, most of whose ongoing jobs will likely be part-time and low-paying.
Investing in a convention centre is a choice—with consequences.
Unsurprisingly, many who want governments to sink public money into a convention centre also advocate spending and tax cuts designed to limit even more public opportunities to invest in better-educated, more-qualified citizens.
Take the Chamber of Commerce. After last week’s convention announcement, President Valerie Payn gushed “she could feel the positive vibes already” from the decision to pour public money into a convention bunker we won’t own.
Three months earlier she was bleating the provincial budget didn’t reduce the small business tax rate as much as the Chamber wanted and increased the hated HST by two per cent. “Our members have told us they wanted the province to look for spending cuts,” she said.
Oh yes, and a convention centre.
Beware those who conflate private with public interest.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
The troubled child and the vindictive state
Is it possible nanny-state community services officials have decided to punish the grandparents of a boy who dared question their decision to send him out of province for treatment by dumping him back in their laps with minimal supports, setting them—and him—up for I-told-you-so failure?
That seems the most rational conclusion after reading the vague page-and-a-half “Service Plan” officials handed the boy’s family earlier this month.
Quick rewind. Two years ago, the grandparents—frustrated by their inability to cope with the then-13-year-old’s running and self-destructive behaviours—asked community services for help. Officials grabbed guardianship of the boy and shipped him to Bayfield, a residential treatment centre in Ontario.
The working-class family went to court—spending more than $20,000 on legal fees and developing an alternative, community-based care plan—to convince the province to treat him in Nova Scotia instead. They failed.
But the ongoing publicity eventually convinced Bayfield it wanted nothing more to do with the boy. In August, it shipped him back to community services, which will be in court today to officially present its new plan of care—and unofficially wash its hands of him.
Before we examine the skimpiness of the department’s proposed “plan,” consider what the province itself previously claimed. The boy has been diagnosed with such a witches’ brew of syndromes and disorders—attention deficit hyperactivity, alcohol-related neural development, impulse control, learning disabilities—they said he needed long-term care in a structured, restricted facility.
During his 14 months at Bayfield, his grandparents claim the boy was treated with powerful drugs—whopping doses of Seroquel XR, an antipsychotic medication, among others—rarely attended school classes and was physically “restrained” on at least 10 occasions. Bayfield officials controlled—occasionally—cut off—contact with the grandparents community services wants to send him back to.
They now want to hand him back to his family, enroll him in a public high school for which he is unprepared and ill-equipped and, well… let’s see what happens. They’re “offering” the ill-defined assistance of a school liaison/tutor, a family therapist and an alternative youth worker, but the “performance indicators” for their efforts are so vague as to be meaningless.
Can you say vindictive?
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
What’s race got to do with it?
I accept the argument. Those involved in the recent decision to provide a group of—white—residents in Lake Major with keys to an old logging road so they could avoid having to travel an extra 5.5 km through the—black—community of North Preston were providing a small but reasonable favour to those most inconvenienced by a local bridge construction project.
When they—the landowners who provided the keys, Councilor David Hendsbee who facilitated the arrangement, municipal bureaucrats who blessed it—came up with this favour, they weren’t thinking about the race of those involved, or about how those who weren’t given keys might regard this favour.
I accept that.
Just as I am prepared to believe a different set of “theys” harboured no particular ill will to the black residents of Upper Hammonds Plains back in the 1990s when they decided not to extend city water services from nearby Pockwock Lake to their homes, even though main water lines traveled through Hammonds Plains’ backyards en route way to providing water to white communities.
And I’ll buy the claims of other theys that race wasn’t a factor in deciding to locate a landfill in Lincolnville in 2006.
Just as it was not a consideration when they—another different they—dumped an earlier landfall beside the same black community in 1974.
Not to forget the landfill in East Lake in 1992. And the dump in Africville in…
By one estimate, over 30 per cent of Nova Scotia’s black communities happen to be located within five km of a waste dump.
That doesn’t mean the decisions were racially-based.
Race may not have been the prime motivator behind this year’s cross burning in Hants County either.
Or in the torching of the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre in Birchtown in 2006.
And that cop who stopped Kirk Johnston’s car in 1998—triggering a landmark human rights complaint—may not have done so just because the boxer was “driving while black.”
As a white person, I have no difficulty believing race was not behind any one of those specific incidents or individual decisions.
But I can understand why a black person might see a troubling pattern.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Africville… a look back at the struggle for redress
Today's announcement (February 24, 2010) of an agreement between the Africville Genealogy Society and various governments will mark the culmination of a decades-long, sometimes seemingly endless and too often hopeless struggle.
The deal—like almost anything to do with Africville—will be controversial. But as we consider what it means, it is worth looking back at how long—and how hard—it has been to get to this point.
Over the years, I've done a number of stories and columns—not to mention a novel, Reparations—about the struggles of Africville's former residents. Here are a few of them:
- Irvine Carvery's a 'born optimist'
- A 1994 profile of the former Africville resident who started the Afrciville Genealogy Society and launched the fight for recognition of the injustices done to them.
- Column on the Carvery sit in
- A May 1991 column about the Carvery brothers' sit-in
- Seaview Park church replica will honor memory of Africville
This Halifax Daily News column originally appeared on December 18, 1991. Incredibly, today's settlement includes yet another promise to build the replica of the still unbuilt-church. - Irvine, the UN and the Hotliners
- The local aftermath of the 2004 UN report on reparations.
- The compensation issue drags on
- The city attempts to pressure the Geneaology Society. A column from March 1995.
- Victor and Eddie's excellent adventure
Revisiting the story of Irvine's brothers who staged a camp-in at the site of their old community to try and force the city to acjknowledge their grievances. - An update on the eve of another Africville reunion
From The Coast, July 27, 2006 - Yet another year... and still no church
From The Daily News, July 26, 2007
If you'd like to know more about the real Africville, you may also want to check out these web sites, as well as the Africville Genealogy Society website.
From Wikipedia
From the CBC Archives
Pamela Brown
Dissident Voice: The Ethnic Cleansing of Africville
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Subscribe
About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.