Quest for tolerance

By NANCY KIMBALL

The Daily Inter Lake

Katy Allen-Schmid cannot get Tiffany's story out of her mind.

The 13-year-old girl from Maine literally lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Her family was low-income and black, Flathead High School junior Allen-Schmid said, just like many of their neighbors. When a teacher in school made yet another derogatory comment in class one day about the poor, black folks on the other side of the railroad tracks, Tiffany had had enough.

She sued.

"She was 13 years old, but she was the only one who stood up and said that was wrong," Allen-Schmid said. Tiffany encouraged her classmates to testify at the trial. Many did.

Tiffany won her case. Ironically, the teacher was disciplined by being transferred to a school on the side of town he had just denigrated.

But Tiffany's boldness awakened a town to a long-simmering problem that otherwise may have continued quietly crushing lives and opportunities for years.

Tiffany was just one of the diverse group of people Allen-Schmid and fellow Flathead student Neil Hilton, a senior, met at the first-ever Not In Our Town National Gathering held last month in Bloomington, Ill. The conference was designed to model how communities fight hate and violence across America.

They traveled with Jen Molloy, with whom they work in Peer Court. It's one program run by the Center for Restorative Youth Justice, which Molloy leads in Kalispell.

The national gathering was sponsored by The Working Group, the organization that produced the 1995 film "Not In Our Town" about Billings' response to a rash of hate crimes in 1993.

Ever since, The Working Group has been helping local communities deal with intolerance and violence by holding film screenings and community discussions. In that effort, the organization produced "The Fire Next Time" in 2005, chronicling bitter divisiveness among the Flathead Valley's forces of economic development, environmental activism and anti-government extremism.

Kalispell Mayor Pam Kennedy spoke at the gathering in Bloomington.

"Going into it, I wasn't aware they would be so interested in the Kalispell situation," Hilton said.

Kennedy spoke on how community members responded recently when the Gaede family moved to town, by distributing literature and organizing events aimed at combating the white supremacist message of Prussian Blue, the music duo formed by the family's twin daughters.

After Kennedy's talk, participants broke into small discussion groups to brainstorm ways the situation could be handled.

"I thought we could be more effective and respectful" through music, said Hilton, himself a musician. "They use music in their message, so we could use the same medium promoting what we feel is a more positive message."

Others, he added, were "more aggressive" and suggested stopping the family's message before it started working its way through the community.

Later, others at the gathering frequently approached Hilton and Allen-Schmid with the question, "I hear you're from Kalispell. What's going on?"

Allen-Schmid had her eyes opened in another way.

"There was a lot of focus on how racism starts in school," often through jokes with unwittingly racist undertones, Allen-Schmid said.

Youths at the gathering came up with a list of racist jokes they hear regularly, wrote them on cards, and asked adult participants to read them aloud. If an adult simply couldn't read the card to the group, he or she was allowed to pass it to the next person. None did. But several wept.

It brought up tragic stories they had just shared - of unrelenting racial slurs that eventually contributed to the suicide of a Native American girl, of a girl teased in gym class about her weight until it led to her cutting her wrists, of Tiffany's story of daily racial slurs.

"We all are white Christians [here] and we just don't think of the jokes as offensive," Allen-Schmid said.

That came home to her in a big way during one lunch break with a group of good friends.

One of them told a racially off-color joke during the conversation. Typically, Allen-Schmid simply would have felt awkward and remained silent. This time, she told them of what she had just learned in Bloomington, and asked why her friend told the joke - or why any of them ever tells such jokes.

"They didn't mean anything by it; they just wanted to get a laugh. They said, 'We didn't understand,'" Allen-Schmid said. She suspects that's the case with a lot of people in the Flathead.

"People don't realize that words do a lot more than just cause someone to frown. It can lead to all these negative impacts."

At the end of a youth presentation during the gathering, Hilton drew a standing ovation when he wrapped up with his observations. He spoke about what youths are tired of hearing - homophobic, xenophobic, bigoted, intolerant and hateful talk.

He said he came home carrying the powerful impression left by a family's story of their 10-year-old daughter's passion for ending hatred and violence through the early days of the Not In Our Town movement.

Allen-Schmid said she is crafting the newly gained awareness into her path toward tolerance, understanding how she conducts herself among friends and in the community, appreciating "how lucky we are to not experience it here," she said.

"We need to express the fact that these things are wrong," she said. "We need to stop jokes [and other hateful talk] before it develops into violence."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com