Ronnie Polaneczky: By their silence, pols sanction hate speech

SO IT'S SETTLED: Hate speech is now sanctioned by the city.

Wilson Goode Jr., his fellow members of City Council, the city's Commission on Human Relations and even our reform-minded mayor have made that clear.

Not with their words. With their initial deafening silence, and then with their tardy, half-baked responses to the vile, racially charged behavior of Goode's aide, Latrice Bryant, three long weeks ago in a Council meeting.

And we're all the worse for it.

Because of the pass that's been given Bryant, none of us has the right to expect advocacy from the city if we're ever slimed because of the color of our skin, the origin of our ancestry or the bent of our religious beliefs.

Worse, future practitioners of hate speech will have every right to expect that their own despicable actions should be as casually dismissed as Bryant's have been.

God, this thing is frustrating. Our leaders just don't get the precedent they've set with their lame response.

At least the Anti-Defamation League saw the harm in what Bryant did.

"To use such highly charged words in a manipulative, self-serving, divisive way, and to make allegations that are unsubstantiated, is reckless and irresponsible," wrote ADL regional director Barry Morrison in a letter to Goode.

The whole thing could've been so simple to remedy. The moment she held up those hand-made signs accusing Fox-TV news reporter Jeff Cole of being associated with the Ku Klux Klan, someone in Council could have stood up and condemned Bryant's display.

It would've taken two minutes. It never happened.

At the following week's Council meeting, our august body of legislators had a second opportunity to say something leader-like.

Instead, Goode went on a tear about how he doesn't see enough diversity in the media.

Last week, Bryant finally wrote to her boss apologizing for her "inexcusable" actions, which she followed with a list of excuses for what she had done.

Why Bryant apologized to Goode and not to the city in the context of a formal Council meeting is beyond me.

Why Goode, as her boss and our public servant, didn't apologize to the public for the very public actions of one of his employees is equally beyond me.

And why no one from Council took a stand against Bryant's actions is baffling. This is the legislative body that, last year, voted to strengthen the prohibition of ethnic intimidation in the city by forbidding the display of three "symbols of virulent animus: a noose; a burning cross; or a swastika."

Yet they still couldn't see fit to at least chastise Bryant for making a sign implying that a white reporter belonged to a group that routinely uses these symbols to intimidate blacks and other minorities.

They mocked the very spirit behind the law.
 
Disappointingly, so did the mayor, who offered no opinion on Bryant's tantrum, and so did the city's Human Relations Commission.

Last week, my colleague Stu Bykofsky filed an HRC complaint about Bryant's behavior. The commission decided Stu had no standing in the matter, since he hadn't been the target of Bryant's sign and hadn't been at the meeting where it was shown.

This is the same body, Stu noted, that accepted a complaint against Geno's "Please speak English" sign from its own chairman, even though he had not been denied service at the cheesesteak shop.

Stu was testing the teeth of the amended ethnic-intimidation law, which I'd written about the week before. In that column, I inadequately represented the incident that had prompted Council's new law, and I'd like to clarify things.

I wrote that the incident had occurred on the construction site of the Comcast Center: An African-American hoist operator alleged that a white member of the glaziers' union shook a noose at him and said that he "wanted to kill someone."

However, both the District Attorney's Office and the FBI investigated the case and concluded that no crime had occurred. I didn't know this when I wrote my column, and I apologize for not telling the whole story.

Ironically, it seems fitting that a new law with no teeth resulted from an incident that no one can prove even happened.

Just another sad fact in this disgrace of a case. And we're all the worse for it. *

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

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