Hating In the Boys Room

"Boys will be boys"? It's never a good excuse, but when it comes to hate, it's completely unacceptable.

Yesterday, I took my son to meet with his new high school teachers for the first time. The school was having an Open House for that purpose in the evening, but with Martin on the Autism Spectrum, it works better if he goes when there's time to discuss what he needs.

Everything went smoothly, right until the end, when Martin and Casey went to use the bathroom. While I was standing and talking to one of the Special Ed. teachers, Martin came back with an odd look on his face. "Um, hey," he muttered, trying to come up with the right way to say it. "There's some inappropriate graffiti in there."

As the teacher went to try to find the school's principal, I had the boys show me the graffiti. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting but it definitely wasn't what I found.

WTF?

Inside of one of the stalls was a drawing of a Clansman lynching a stick figure, who was helpfully labelled as "Black." There were multiple swastikas. The letters "KKK" were sprinkled in at regular intervals. All that was missing was a drawing of a guy with a Tiki torch.

When I returned to the teacher, she was still trying to track down the principal. Once we found him, the teacher quickly explained the situation and what the boys had found. His response was astounding.

"In the one boy's bathroom?" he asked. "I know, it's been there since last year."

The teacher paused for a second before exclaiming, "The hanging one has been there since last year?"

I pulled up the photos that I had taken and showed them to the principal, hoping that maybe we were talking about two different things. The principal, who was trying to give directions to the staff setting up for the Open House, glanced at my phone and said, "I know, it's terrible. I was livid when I found out about it."

He explained that the school's maintenance group said that because of the coating on the doors, that there was no way to repair or cover it up. He said that they said the only way to take care of it would've been to remove the stalls. Another adult in the group said, "Maybe that's what should have happened."

The Shifting of Blame

After leaving the school, I apprised my sons' mother of the situation, which made her understandably angry at the response I had received. She met the boys and I at the school for the Open House, and as we went in, she made it clear that she was planning on pushing the school to address the situation... quickly.

When I had been there earlier in they day, there had been a brief talk about covering the graffiti up, at least temporarily, with people coming back into the school. Before we said anything, though, I went to check to see if that had at least happened. It hadn't.

From there, I let my ex-wife take the lead since she was already in attack mode. She might be small, but she has no trouble taking on anyone when she knows that she's right. Many in the boys' school system had learned a long-time ago that it was a bad idea to underestimate her -- including the principal.


She had the principal explain again why the graffiti was still visible in the bathroom. He offered details about the investigation that had been conducted after it was originally found, but still provided no explanation for why it was still there.

He repeated his assertion that the maintenance people had said that there was nothing that they could do. "There are literally three things that I can think of off the top of my head to cover it up," the boys' mom clapped back.

The school system has a new superintendent, so in the end, we ended up explaining the situation to her and accepted her assurance that it would be addressed. Living in a small community, it's easy enough to follow up on that to make sure that it happens.

Uncomfortable Life Lessons

My sons are not worldly, but they're not completely uninformed. Where their parents would've both read a newspaper daily at their age, they get information a different, more Millennial, way. One of those ways, thanks to my having covered the show for four seasons, has been through SNL's "Weekend Update."

Sure, they hear stories while their folks listen to NPR and they learn current events in school, but just like the generations that grew up with The Daily Show, Martin and Casey have a tendency to view the ridiculousness of real life through a comedic prism.

While their reaction was to joke, especially Martin who has trouble with social niceties as it is, there was nothing funny about this one. And, I'm saying that as an Irish Catholic comedy writer, who regularly used his father's funeral for a routine.

I'm confident that, as parents, we can explain to our sons what is wrong with hateful graffiti. The fact is, though, that my kids don't actually need that explained. Their parents have taught them since birth that racism is wrong and that you don't judge anyone for any reasons beyond the type of person that they are.

Complicity by Apathy

Seeing a swastika carved into a bathroom stall in a gas station bathroom is, unfortunately, a fairly normal sight. Having it left standing in a junior high/high school is an entirely different situation. Allowing graffiti that depicts the Ku Klux Klan lynching an African-American to stand for nearly a year in a school is unbelievable to the point of feeling farcical.

How do you allow preteen and teenage boys to spend a year seeing graffiti that could be considered a hate crime? How do you, through a lack of action, make it seem like the views represented in the graffiti are in anyway acceptable?

The answer is that there really is no excuse for it. It's easy to say that it was done by impressionable teens who were probably just doing it to get a reaction, and that it doesn't necessarily reflect what they've been taught or how they truly feel.

Even if that were true, allowing that inflammatory message to remain up teaches a lesson that cannot be endorsed by any educational institution in our country. Trying to downplay racism and hate, in the end, provides a larger forum for those who would espouse those views than they deserve.

That a public school administration needs to be told that it's wrong to keep hateful messages visible to the entire male population of its student body is as disturbing as any Alt-Right rally throughout the country. This isn't about the people who take the extremist views that lead to someone going into a church or mosque and shooting innocent people. This is about the countless others in communities throughout the United States who shrug and say that there's nothing that they can do about it.

The apathy of citizens is far more dangerous than the messages being put forth by any fringe elements of our society, no matter what side of the political spectrum we're talking about. Having the administration of a school take the same apathetic approach is wholly unacceptable. Even if only one child takes away from that lack of response that racism and hate are acceptable, that's one too many.

When a 14-year-old with an Autism Spectrum Disorder is able to recognize what's wrong with a situation quicker and more effectively than school administrators, that's a problem.

We rely on public schools to teach our children in ways that will make them better adults. Unfortunately, it seems that there are still some lessons that the people running those schools have yet to learn.