Hateful speech isn't hateful action [View All]

[cynatnite]

New York - Here's a quick news quiz: What do the Jena 6, San Diego Padres outfielder Milton Bradley, and the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University have in common?

In all three cases, Americans appear to have forgotten the difference between hateful speech and hateful action. And when we lose sight of that distinction, we lose what should be most distinctive about America itself.

Start with the six African American teenagers who were arrested for attempted murder last December in the beating of a white classmate in Jena, La. The arrests came after several other racial incidents in Jena, including white students hanging nooses from a tree at their school to warn blacks against sitting under it. Blacks complained that the whites who hung the nooses were simply suspended from school, while the African Americans who beat their classmate faced criminal charges.

But there's an excellent reason for punishing these behaviors differently: One involved symbols; the other involved fists. Although the attempted-murder charge against the black teens was clearly excessive (and since reduced), they committed an obvious act of physical violence. The noose-hanging white students didn't.

Nor did the umpire who hurled a slur at Mr. Bradley last Sunday. Bradley charged the umpire and fell to the ground, sustaining a season-ending knee injury. "I'm not going to stand pat and accept this," he told reporters, "because I didn't do nothing wrong."

Nothing wrong? Like the racist noose-hangers in Jena, the umpire should be disciplined if he said something gratuitously insulting to Bradley. But no slur can excuse or justify Bradley's response. A hateful act is always worse than a hateful word.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070927/cm_csm/yzimmerman27