Time to revisit hate crimes debate

Earlier this week we learned that the Governor’s Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes is currently member-less and inactive. What a pity, since another story from this week makes it clear that someone needs to re-examine the issue of hate crimes and make some sense out of it:

A St. Charles East High School student was in a Kane County courtroom Tuesday, accused of scrawling a racial epithet in his former girlfriend's locker in what his attorney called a teenage spat gone awry.

The 14-year-old boy, who is white, also is charged with creating an Internet image of a black man being lynched and sharing it with other students in the computer lab at St. Charles East.

The boy is facing felony charges that could put him in prison until he is 21.

What really blows my mind about this episode is that the school is planning to “design an education program to emphasize racial tolerance and understanding.” Forget, for a moment, that this boy was, presumably, racially tolerant and understanding enough to be in an inter-racial relationship in the first place. But consider the cognitive dissonance of expecting that he should know better (as the stiff punishment he now faces implies), while recognizing that there is a need to educate the rest of his classmates about this.

Seems to me that we are either holding him to a different standard, or the school is wasting time addressing an issue his classmates should also already be expected to understand.