This year, Halloween arrived with some real-life haunting: teenage kids from Baltimore area private schools who costumed themselves in reminders of America’s lingering racial and religious wounds. They imagined this was amusing.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that another kid posted photos of these dimwits on social media in an effort to shame them, and identified their schools, so that the entire country can see what happened and maybe explain why such actions are so painful to so many of us.
One photo shows a boy dressed in an orange jumpsuit with the name Freddie Gray on the back. Some joke — Gray’s death two years ago, while in police custody, set off days of street outrage in Baltimore.
Other photos showed kids in jumpsuits with racial slurs, and another shows a boy with a swastika and a racial slur painted on his back.
We’ll leave out the names of their schools here. It’s comforting to see that the grownups at those schools have issued statements expressing their embarrassment while reminding us that these are young people who are sometimes given to acts of insensitivity.
And most important, that this will be used as a teachable moment.
In a time in which online hucksters have marketed Anne Frank as a Halloween costume (before cooler heads prevailed), is anyone truly surprised by such action? On the precise day when a terrorist murders eight innocents in New York City, is this the worst news of the day?
No – so let’s keep it in perspective.
We live in a big country where there are bound to be idiots among us – as well as bigots, and terrorists, too. Sometimes, we pay a heavy price for an open society.
As a nation, we hope to keep such hatefulness out of sight – or when it surfaces, to have our leaders express the proper revulsion. That’s what made Donald Trump’s equivocation in the aftermath of Charlottesville so troubling – he couldn’t grasp the difference between the neo-Nazis and white supremacists and those who were protesting their acts of hatred.
The leaders of Baltimore’s schools now have the opportunity to make distinctions where the president of the United States could not. It’s a moment to explain a little history to those who haven’t yet learned it, to tell them why we shouldn’t divide ourselves by race or religion, and not turn a time of innocent holiday celebration into a reminder of historic pain.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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