Enough is enough

Jose Sucuzhanay, age 31, was the victim of a hate crime in New York City. While brutally beating him to death, his attackers reportedly yelled various anti-Hispanic and anti-gay slurs. He died of severe head trauma before his mother could arrive from Ecuador to be with her son.
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I typically reserve my Sunday blogging for a variety of random comments, often frivolous in nature, but not today. Not when yet another innocent, decent human being has been senselessly murdered purely on account of their ethinicity and (perceived) sexual orientation.

Jose Sucuzhanay was, in fact, Hispanic - of Ecuadorean origin, to be precise - but he was not gay, at least from what we currently know. Last Sunday, he and his brother (a well-established NYC real estate agent, Romel Sucuzhanay) went to a bar after a church party and were walking back home in the dead of night, somewhat intoxicated. Apparently, they had their arms around each other as they stumbled along the dark Brooklyn sidewalks back to their apartment (who, other than the Pope, hasn't been so drunk at least once coming back from a bar that they required the assistance of a friend to walk straight?) But in the bigot's violent mind, the sight of two men, arms around each other, is quite easily misconceived.

What happened next was as shockingly brutal as it was brief in duration. A vehicle approached the brothers out of nowhere. Several black men armed with weapons jumped out, yelling anti-Hispanic and anti-gay slurs. Jose's brother managed to escape, though one of the assailants ran after him. Another assailant smashed a beer bottle over the back of Jose's head. After he fell helplessly to the sidewalk, another attacker proceeded to batter him repeatedly in the head with an aluminum baseball bat, continuing the vicious assault long after he was rendered an unconscious, bloody mess. Several 911 calls were made by witnesses, sirens were head approaching in the distance, and the cowardly sons of bitches who commenced the assault fled. As of today, they have yet to be apprehended.

This is not the first brutal hate crime to be seared indelibly into the American psyche, nor will it (unfortunately) be the last. Yet the feelings of poignant rage and indignation that surface so fiercely from each of these episodes serve to affirm our collective humanity, our collective decency, our collective conscious awareness that events such as this demean all of humanity; they are effectively an attack on the very nature and essence of a civilized, modern society in which all men and women are bestowed with full equality and the requisite freedom from coercive force that is necessary to enjoy those liberties. So powerful are these moments, so strongly do they resonate to the very core of our human decency, that they have often served as the most potent catalysts for sweeping social reform, as was the case with the brutal murder of young Emmett Till and the then nascent Civil Rights movement.

And indeed, what we must not hesitate to recognize is that we are not primarily in a war against bigots, but a war against bigoted ideas. You can imprison a violent bigot, but if the idea that motivated their actions persists, he or she is easily replaced. We must be relentless in castigating, renouncing, and marginalizing those among us who use their free speech to malign entire tranches of humanity, whether it be along the lines of religion, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other such category.

The blood of this man is upon the hands of those, such as Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo, who frequently and viciously denigrate Latino immigrants as illegal, crime-prone, dirty burdens to our society. We are a nation of immigrants, and we should have learned our lesson damn well by now. These same baseless, racist tirades have been used against African Americans, the Germans, the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese, and virtually every single group to have entered this country at some point. Latinos demonstrate the same rich diversity of all other ethnic groups, and the vast majority of Latino immigrants to this country are diligent, hard-working individuals who have been of tremendous cultural, spiritual, and economic benefit to our country and society.

The blood of this man is upon the hands of those who continue to espouse the view that LGBT people are a malformed menace to society. That the assailants were all black, coupled with the recent strong evidence of black homophobia as demonstrated by the overwhelming support for Proposition 8 and Amendment 2 among that community, is a damning indictment of ignorant, homophobic ministers in the Black Church, one of the cultural pillars of the black community. Shame on these ministers, disgraceful and unquantifiably ignorant bigots such as Harry Jackson. Countless young black men and women establish their philosophical roots in your churches. You are a pathetic disgrace to the communities that you claim to serve, and you are woefully ignorant of your own heritage as members of a frequently maligned minority. Furthermore, your remarkable inability to establish a connection between the prevalent homophobia of today and the anti-black equality hysteria of the first half of the 20th Century - a connection that has been fully acknowledged by Coretta Scott King - demonstrates your blistering philosophical ignorance and your vacuous grasp of the core tenets that underlie human equality.

And most of all, the blood of this man is on the hands of all people who fail to become outraged at incidents such as these. The people who divert their attention from the more brutal tendencies of their fellow brothers and sisters because these topics are not "pleasant." The people who are not gay or Hispanic - who may not even know someone who is gay or Hispanic - and will ignore this incident as nothing more than a "problem with decadent cities, not my concern." The people who will read a will a story such as this and then dismiss it because "I don't commit hate crimes, so this is not my problem." Incidents such as this are a collective problem, one that touches all of humanity and demands nothing more than a fierce, tireless condemnation from each and every person who believes in the principles of the common dignity of all men and human liberty.

Enough is enough. Another young man full of promise is dead today because, at some point, anti-gay and anti-Hispanic ideas were allowed to take root and flourish inside of the twisted minds of his assailants. And as long as we continue to perpetuate those ideas - or at the very least, not do everything within our human power to eradicate them - he will not be the last.