Hope Against Racism essays

Hope Against Racism essays He was a white man in a Confederate flag T-shirt come to a rally of the Ku Klux Klan. She was a face in the crowd, a black teen-ager who wanted to ``verbally harass him.'' But the crowd became a mob. They descended upon him, pummeled him to the ground, started stomping him with their feet and hitting him with signposts. And Keshia Thomas faced a decision: to join the mob or to be a human being. This was Keshia's choice: She fell atop the prostrate man, used her body to shield him from the blows. Ask why she did it and she says, ``I was just doing what my parents taught me: Do what's right. You can't change a man's view by killing him.'' It happened a week ago in Ann Arbor, Mich., the compelling sideshow to a human carnival. Fifteen Ku Klux Klansmen had come to rally for the cause of hatred. But an estimated 1,000 anti-Klan demonstrators, a multiethnic tidal wave of outraged humanity, went after them. They broke windows, threw rocks and eventually had to be driven back by police using tear gas. Eleven people were arrested; at least two were reported injured. It's a story with multiple morals: that we must defend free speech, especially for those views we abhor; that it is too frighteningly easy for a rational group to become a blood-lusting mob; that supporting a noble cause doesn't give you license to beat a man's head in with a signpost. But the most compelling lesson is embodied by Keshia's choice. She is, in some ways, a standard-issue teen-ager. Eighteen years old, laughs easily, dreams of becoming a forest ranger, wants to go to college but worries that she can't afford it. She says when she rushed at the man in the Confederate flag shirt, ``I wanted to say, `what did I ever do to you? There's no reason to fear me.''' About that man, we know next to nothing at this writing. Not his name, not his hometown, not his Klan affiliation, if any. We do know that that shirt, worn in that place, was provocative. And tha...