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Summer in Maine means visitors from out of state. Even with the crowds, that’s usually a good thing. Everyone is welcome here in Vacationland.
Well, almost everyone. Racists can stay home, please and thank you.
While we’re celebrating America this week, everyone should also remember that this imperfect union is made up of people from all sorts of backgrounds. There is no one way to look or be American; that is a beautiful strength of this country.
So it is decidedly ugly and un-American to assume someone is from another country just because of how they look, to threaten them, hurl racial epithets at them, and to tell them to go back where they came from.
This is what a woman from Florida allegedly did while visiting Kennebunkport recently. According to the Maine Attorney General’s Office, which has rightly filed a civil rights complaint against the Florida woman, she allegedly made racial slurs against an Asian-American woman, who was visiting from Massachusetts, and threatened to run her over in a parking lot.
The Attorney General’s Office alleges that the June 6 incident, which began with sampling chowder at a restaurant, involved the accused calling the other women a “foreigner,” a “Chinese [expletive],” telling her to go back to “your country,” threatening to run the other woman over, and swerving her van in her direction.
All together, this alleged behavior is not only abhorrent, it also appears to be a fairly clear-cut violation of the Maine Civil Rights Act. Along with other protections, this law protects people from violence or the threat of violence based on “race, color, religion, sex, ancestry, national origin, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation or gender identity.” Since this law was passed in the 1990s, the Maine Attorney General’s Office has used hundreds of injunctions to prohibit offenders from violating the act again.
“Maine should be a safe, welcoming place for everyone,” Attorney General Aaron Frey said in a June 28 statement. “The Maine Civil Rights Act recognizes that bias-based incidents like this one cause not only extreme harm to the victim but also to others in the community who might fear similar, unlawful, treatment. That is why my office will continue to pursue civil injunctions to protect communities targeted for their identities.”
The Maine Attorney General’s Office should continue these efforts, regardless of whether an alleged perpetrator is visiting from another state or from Maine. No one in Maine, or anywhere else in America, should experience this. Racism sadly already exists in Maine, and while working to combat that, we don’t need to be importing any more of it.
There is a bleak yet unmistakable irony in this alleged June 6 incident, with a person coming all the way from Florida and telling someone, from just down the road in Massachusetts, to go back where they came from. As the alleged victim responded, according to the AG’s office, “you wouldn’t say this to a white person.”
Far too many people equate being American to being white, as if people from other backgrounds are automatically not from here. This racist way of thinking and acting has seen a frightening uptick in recent years, particularly directed at Asian Americans.
A 2022 report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino found that anti-Asian hate crimes went up over 300 percent in 2021. Black people remained the most targeted group in most cities, that report found.
“Especially during a time when groups are trying to divide and pit vulnerable communities against each other, we must remember that we are stronger together,” John C. Yang, president and executive director of the civil rights nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told NBC News last year.
The alleged conduct of the Florida woman in this recent incident here in Maine is obviously grotesque. But don’t think for a second that it’s isolated. Asian Americans and other minority populations are frequently facing hateful language and actions. Many hate crimes go unreported. All of this requires continued response from people in power and continued outrage from those of us who recognize that hate has no place in this state or this country.
