KKK is not worth our hatred

Little Black Box
    By Alex DeMille

There's nothing like some good old-fashioned evil to band a community together. But when the community is as diverse as the residents of New York City, and the evil as marginal and unimportant as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), one has to wonder what the point of a protest is.

The downtown Manhattan KKK rally on Sat., Oct. 23, was a pathetic sight to behold. A meager 12 Klansmen stood within a steel barricade, surrounded by police officers stationed to protect the Klansmen's First Amendment rights. Barred from wearing their traditional masks by an obscure 1845 law, many of the Klansmen covered their faces with Confederate flags. Thousands of people swarmed around them like vultures, waving banners and yelling anti-Klan slogans. Gosh, I had no idea cosmopolitan New Yorkers are against racist hate-mongers—what a show.

After the rally, during which a police officer was hit in the head with a battery and several protesters were arrested for inciting violence against the Klansmen, the event was lauded as a great display of unity by a highly diverse community. When I heard this, I got that sick feeling that I always get after hearing an insipid comment about diversity and togetherness. Like many such examples of "togetherness," the KKK rally pitted the accepted masses against the peripheral few—a great throng of non-protesters screaming about a non-cause against a group of people who are basically a non-issue. If the rally was an example of New York urban unity, then maybe I can stir up some Yale unity by organizing a protest on Cross Campus lawn against baby eaters. I bet I'd get a good turnout. We could all hold hands and sing songs and yell about how our infants are meant for love, not consumption. Then I could put it on my résumé.

In reality, the presence of the KKK is not a simple issue, and should not be branded as simply "evil." In other parts of this country, it is a symbol of what divides our nation. The Klan is an indicator of how small portions of rural white America feel increasingly isolated and threatened by America's changing landscape, and thus sense the need to lash out. Unfortunately, the group's preachings also render a message that is not only hateful and ludicrous, but anachronistic and irrelevant in our modern society.

To protest the Klan's message is to underestimate the average American by characterizing the KKK as an actual threat that needs to be combatted. When a group rallies against the Klan, it validates its existence and its preaching. It gives it an enemy. When the New York City government refused to allow the Klansmen a sound system to project their message, it gave them the opportunity to complain about "being silenced." Every protester waving a sign was helping to turn the presence of 12 misguided cowards hiding behind a Confederate flag into a media event worthy of notice.

In the end, the KKK should be ignored, perhaps pitied. But a protest, in the name of the majority against an almost insignificant minority, causes strife where there was none and conjures conflict out of thin air—all in the name of a moral standard so obviously right, it need not be invoked. My advice to New Yorkers and everyone else: save your energy for something worth fighting against, and leave the Klan to flounder in its own obscurity.

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