Wait, wait...this woman got beat with a block of wood and this eejit's talking about hurt feelings?! Oh, HELL no.

I'm glad to see the rest (or many of them) coming together on this, though.

Who ever said:

"we understand that someone got hurt and someone got their feelings hurt, but our kids don't necessarily have to be exposed to it"

is nothing but an enabler and a deeply selfish soul. Nothing worse than those that refuse to see.

Holy Cow, Nez! I knew nothing about this story. Thank you for chronicling it so vividly. JeJe. We've gotta stand with the hunted and be ready to grab the hunter's barrel if need be.

This a muy badass looking blog. Sorry....gringo here, no habla espanol...except for a couple of cuss words and variegated unrelated conversational phrases. Anyway...I read about this story at rawstory and then found your great telling of it. truly very very sad that my fellow gringos state that our kids shouldn't have to be exposed to it. well yes motherfucker, they should. this is what happens when white people in general stand idly by and do not stand up against racial intolerance. you have batshit crazy psychos like that ghostly figure who assaulted poor mrs. littlejohn simply for living. it's maybe a good thing that your kids read that. it might spark a conversation in which these ign'ant ass honkies can educate their children about the fact that we're all god's children and if you see someone being disrespected or something on account of their race, you should step in. it's much better for the kids to know that there is some Ugliness out there....it doesn't mean they have to be a part of it. I'm glad the mayor took a relatively enlightened approach. Seriously, it's just not fair that psychos are allowed to destroy this country. I've been doing this a long time and I work in low-income, mostly minority schools, but those kids at my school know i got their back.....and similarly here. if decent white people don't stand up, the batshit crazy extra from i see dead people types will rule this country (well.....) Anyway, love and peace to all my homies here.

Mike Gallagher? The same Houston radio "talk jock" who distributes tee-shirts that read "This is America: Please Speak English" -- that Mike Gallagher?

One hopes he learned that words have power and can cause real harm... but somehow I get the feeling he's bought into Grace's mode of thinking and just wants the "offending garage doors" to go away...

Great post. Great blog!!!

Browne

Hey Nez...I saw a recap of this story via Browne's blog. I wish I could say that I'm shocked, but I'm not. One of the things that struck me was that the "what about the children?" refrain. This woman is upset that her kids will have to see it, but not too upset that neither she or her spouse did nothing to stop it? Did nothing afterwards? What kind of self-absorbed Dragonettes are these people raising?

I concur with your sentiment tabooj.Well said!!

Well said indeed. That luxury of fighting racism attitude reminds me of some of the more "gifted" Ron Paul commenters at my site who insist the very act of paying attention to any act of racism (no matter how violent) robs us all of the ability to consider "serious issues".

Until all forms of bigotry drift away in the winds of change.

Responding to fabooj. . .

Children are the ultimate excuse. Fragile as tissue, delicate as morning dew. Like water, they dissolve and absorb everything. Imminently corruptable, they melt into fetid goo as soon as they are exposed to Something I Find Personally Disagreeable.

Amazingly, "what about the children" doesn't work when actual children are exposed to actual harm: thus, we couldn't get CHIP passed. Arsenic in the water? Fuck the kids. Bus stations clearly correlated to increases in asthma in black kids? Fuck the kids, twice if brown.

So when do we hear kids talked about passionately? Whenever they're irrelevant. No surprise hearing the refrain in a hate crime issue.

Yeah the parent is doing their kid a disservice. Maybe if they're 5 years old you don't have to tell them that someone was brutally assaulted, but they can at least be told that what was written on that garage was something no one should say to anyone, and someone write it on that family's garage without even knowing them because they were black, and that's wrong. The older they are the more you can tell them about the violent side of it, and the importance of stnading against violence like that.

Kids who never have parents teach them how to react in situations like that are not going to know how to react when they have to. More likely to make jokes about racial violence and not take it seriously because they never saw their parents do so.

The police investigation will disclose that the Silk's older son spray painted the doors and that the so called racial slurs are hearsay on Gamble's part (he was not present) as Silk has never been quoted regarding what Head said or didn't say. There's more to this tale than black and white...shades run thru it.