Hoax crimes

Mr. Sanders is a research fellow for the Pope Center for Higher Education Reform in Research Triangle Park, N.C. He is the editor of Clarion, the monthly journal on higher education published by the Pope Center.

At Duke University last November, a group of students hanged from a tree a black doll bearing a sign that read "Duke hasn't changed." They also covered with black paint the nearby Class of 1948 granite bench. The site of the mock lynching was the gathering place for members of the Black Student Alliance, who had been planning a protest outside the office of Duke President Nan Keohane.

The identities of the perpetrators -- evidently white racists --were unknown for nearly a week, and the campus reaction to the incident was one of horror and dismay. The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper, published a letter from undergraduate Stephen Poon denouncing the episode as a "racial crime." Members of the BSA claimed that it showed how tense race relations were on campus.

Several days later the truth was out: the perpetrators were not racist whites, but blacks looking to create an impression of racism on campus. Instead of being condemned, the guilty parties were unconditionally defended by their ideological kin: "The idea behind the act," wrote Worokya Diomande in the Chronicle, "is being overlooked (as is usually the case). The University has not changed. Blacks are allowed to be enrolled here, but the idea is the equivalent of the transition from field slave to house slave."

There is a new trend on college campuses: not of hate crimes, but of students and faculty creating make-believe racist and anti-gay incidents to illustrate, as the phrase goes, "that hate could happen here," and of students, faculty, and administrators using the fictional crimes as "evidence" of the urgency of their multicultural agenda.

At Eastern New Mexico University, threatening posters started appearing around campus last September. "Are you sick of queers polluting this great land with there [sic] filth?" asked the error-ridden fliers. "I thought so. Want to do something? Join the Fist of God. With his might, we can ride [sic] the world of there [sic] sickness. Ask around. We'll find you." The poster identified eight people on campus as homosexual and concluded: "Take us seriously, or we'll begin executing one queer a week following this list."

The four men and four women listed soon received threatening e-mail messages and letters. Shortly after the posters appeared, the person whose name topped the list, a lesbian teaching assistant named Miranda Prather, was attacked in her home. She told police a masked assailant had slashed her cheek with a kitchen knife.

In the ensuing investigation, police examined surveillance footage of a nearby laundromat where the threatening fliers had been posted. Their search was ultimately successful, and they were able to identify the culprit as . . . Miranda Prather. Later, they found a knife in Miss Prather's apartment that matched the wounds in her cheek.

As in the Duke case, however, no one seemed to care that the "hate crime" was a hoax. Elizabeth Jarnagin, an editorial writer for the Amarillo Globe-News, continued to decry anti-gay bigotry. "Let me tell you about polluting with filth," Miss Jarnagin intoned to the poster-writer, after Prather had been exposed. "Hatred is polluting with filth. Instilling terror is polluting with filth. Bigotry is polluting with filth. . . . Few of us are as blatant about it as the Fist of God. Yet hatred and intolerance are there."

At the University of Georgia, this year, resident advisor Jerry Kennedy found the door of his dormitory room on fire. Everyone concluded that a bigot had been responsible: Kennedy was openly homosexual, and his door was covered with gay-activist literature. The Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Student Union sent a letter to University President Michael Adams asking him to address the incident by creating a hate-crime task force and obtaining a faculty advisor for the LGBSU. Meanwhile, LGBSU members wrote messages in chalk around the Tate Student Center, including "Stop burning down our doors" and "Are you next?"

The attacks on Kennedy, meanwhile, did not stop. After the third time his door was set afire, Kennedy said he thought it was "strange that somebody, in order to get to me, would risk the lives of at least five hundred people [in the dormitory]." Asked what he thought of the LBGSU's response, Kennedy said, "It makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing, and I appreciate the support."

Shortly thereafter, the official student newspaper the Red & Black learned that Kennedy had been the target of 9 of the 15 hate crimes reported on campus since 1995 -- not just the fires, but threatening phone calls and incidents of criminal trespassing. The head of the campus police said: "He's certainly had more [harassment] than anyone else I've known of." Kennedy was arrested and charged with two counts of arson and four false reports of a crime, and a student who had been suspected of setting one of the fires was exonerated. A faculty member, dealing in race discrimination told the Red and Black that she "hoped the Kennedy case would not hinder dialogue about homosexuality."

At Guilford College, a Quaker school in Greensboro, N.C., the president of the Student Senate, Molly Martin, was assaulted in her office late one night in February. Her assailant knocked her unconscious, opened her blouse, and wrote "nigger lover" on her chest. Miss Martin refused medical attention and asked campus security not to call the police.

The attack occurred a week after anonymous letters and fliers criticizing Miss Martin had begun to appear. Miss Martin had appointed two black students to the Senate, and fliers warned students not to vote for her unless she promised an all-black Senate. She had also led the Senate the previous semester in endorsing a proposal for the creation of a full-time director of African-American affairs at the college, whose student body of thirteen thousand includes about ninety blacks.

The incident was proof to some that the college had strained race relations. "Guilford students weren't ready to start dealing with the issues we were presenting," Edward LaMont Williams, president of the college's African-American Cultural Society, told The Chronicle of Higher Education Daily News, "but the incident made the campus realize that racism is a real issue on campus that needs to be dealt with."

Along with increasing security, the college pledged to hasten its selection of a director of African-American affairs, inaugurate a series of dialogues on race relations, and make changes to the curriculum to include issues of race.

Meanwhile, speculation arose that Miss Martin had staged the attack herself. The police could not recreate the incident satisfactorily. Miss Martin had never shown anyone the alleged writing on her chest or damage to her office; she said she had cleaned things up before going to campus security. Although she had supposedly been knocked unconscious, she did not exhibit any bruising; and police said it would be very unusual for an assailant in such a case to unbutton the victim's blouse instead of ripping it or pulling it down to write on her chest.

In June, Miss Martin withdrew from the school. She sent an open letter to the campus apologizing "for acts that were inappropriate and that were injurious." She was referring to her inability to perform her duties properly as Student Senate president; she did not admit to any wrongdoing concerning the alleged attack.

Meanwhile, Guilford College plans to continue to address race relations by revising the curriculum, hiring more minority faculty, and even founding an institute on race relations. On American campuses, where it is assumed that our country is soaked through with bias, any hate crime will do -- even if it never happened.

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