Another Hoax "Racist" Incident: After High School Cancels Football Season Over Alleged Racist Messages, Police Say Mother of Alleged Target is "Strong Suspect"

The outrage. The candlelight vigil. The accusation.

Isaac Phillips delivers a statement at a candlelight vigil in his honor, calling out his football coaches for what he says was a lack of support after racist graffiti was spraying on his home earlier in the week, at Lunenburg's gazebo park on Nov. 18, 2013. The graffiti was directed at Isaac and his status on the Lunenburg High School football team, prompting the vigil and the suspension of the football season indefinitely.

The facts:

The investigation into who spray painted a home with racist graffiti last month has turned toward the woman who lives there.

Police said on Wednesday that Andrea Brazier [mother of the alleged target of the racist graffiti] is now considered a “strong suspect” in the case.

Officers say they executed a search warrant on Tuesday and seized two cans of spray paint and ammunition from the home.

Brazier, who is white, and her husband Anthony Phillips, who is African American live at the home with their 13-year-old son, Isaac. Brazier initially cast suspicion on her son’s Lunenburg High School football teammates, saying he had been bullied in the past.

The school’s superintendent cancelled the football team’s final game on Thanksgiving after no one came forward to take responsibility.

On Monday, Lunenburg police announced that there was no conclusive evidence that anyone on the high school football team is linked to the graffiti.

A police affidavit obtained on Wednesday indicated that Brazier had stopped cooperating with investigators and had changed her story several times.

Initially she told officers that her 6-year-old daughter heard someone outside of her window and saw someone wearing a feather head dress on either November 14 or 15. She later said that alleged incident occurred on November 4.

Police discovered two cans of spray paint in the family's firepit, burned up. They suspect those cans were used to spray the "hate messages." The father claims the spray paint was used in some kind of home-improvement project in the living room, but apparently the police don't believe them. Not only did the mother begin changing her story, implausibly claiming the racist messages were left November 4, or alternately, November 14 of 15 (10-11 days later-- hardly a plausible mistake), but the father offered three "distinct" versions of his story as to how the spray cans wound up in the firepit.

As the police began asking these questions, the mother began saying she just wanted the investigation to end, and when they put it to her that someone in the family had defaced her own car, she began saying "Okay" and then "You don't understand."

The school superintendent who collectively punished the football team for something they didn't do, Loxi Jo Colmes, is now saying she didn't punish anyone at all.

Colmes also addressed the cancellation of the Thanksgiving football game. “I never looked at the cancellation as a punishment although it is certainly viewed that way by many,” Colmes said. “In the end the safety of students and attendees at the game was deemed to be of paramount importance. At no time did I or any employee of the schools indict or implicate any of our players. In fact, my statements were that the graffiti investigation could NOT be limited to the team.”

Uh-huh.

For a really interesting analysis of the phenomenon of racial hate hoaxing (for fun and for profit), read David Thompson. Here he speaks generally of people in the Militancy Industrial Complex:

In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out - or invent - something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.

posted by Ace at 12:09 PM

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