The message we need to read in graffiti

We’d like to think the reporting of a recent flurry of incidents involving anti-Semitic graffiti at three Connecticut schools is merely an indicator of growing sensitivity. Perhaps students and staff are raising hands in objection rather than simply scrubbing away offensive symbols and remarks or ignoring them entirely. To dismiss them is to normalize them.

That’s our glass half-full conclusion.

The glass half-empty take isn’t a glass at all, and it will never be empty. It’s that Pandora’s box that uses social media to fuel hate so feverishly that toxic messages are spread by children.

Regardless of the interpretation, it’s disturbing that within one week, anti-Semitic graffiti was found at Hamden High School, Middlesex Middle School in Darien and Staples High School in Westport.

Officials at the schools deserve credit for immediately seeking guidance from the state chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, which provides programs to educate students on the impact of anti-Semitism.

“Three in a week like this, in schools, this is unusual,” Connecticut ADL Director Steve Ginsburg said. “... In Connecticut, and nationwide over the past several years, we have seen a trend toward more than we did in the decades before.”

While we support the response of school officials, educating students on the issue shouldn’t merely occur as a reaction. This will happen again, and it could happen anywhere.

Just a few weeks ago, similar graffiti was found at a Newtown synagogue. Earlier this year, a swastika was painted on the doors of St. Augustine Cathedral in Bridgeport.

The number of reported incidents wavers, but never disappears. The ADL reported 39 anti-Semitic incidents in the state last year, a drop from 49 in 2017.

Former state Rep Toni Boucher and state Sen. Tony Hwang succeeded in securing the passage of bills in 2017 and 2018 that required tougher convictions on hate crimes and mandated lessons about the Holocaust and genocide in Connecticut high schools.

It might sound absurd for a student to graduate high school without learning about these issues, but Boucher noted that the legislation languished for a decade. Support tilted after the national rise in reported incidents of anti-Semitism following the 2016 election.

Ginsburg wisely pointed out that perpetrators of the graffiti may be unaware of the significance of the words and symbols they use. They could, he reasoned, simply be trying to incite reactions from peers and staff members.

Social media gave new muscle to bullies and opened floodgates to blind discrimination. Carving bigoted messages with a knife or cheap pen is more primitive than spewing hate speak online, but the effect can be the same.

We applaud the empathy Ginsburg suggests be shown to youths who may be uninformed. Unfortunately, this is a lesson too many Americans of all ages still don’t grasp. Four states (Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina and Wyoming) still lack hate crime laws.

The only hope of emptying the Pandora’s box is to teach students before such hate is expressed.

Carving bigoted messages with a knife or cheap pen is more primitive than spewing hate speak online, but the effect can be the same.