A missing flag in Milton. Burnouts on roadway murals in Jericho. Vandalism of a mural in Montpelier. White nationalist insignia on a dam in Waterbury.
As protests against racism in Vermont have intensified, becoming a near-weekly occurrence in towns small and large across the state, another trend has emerged with them: a rise in bias incidents and vandalism of anti-racist displays across the state.
Between June 1 and July 20, the Vermont Attorney General’s Office received 15 bias incident complaints — just two fewer than it received in all of 2019, according to data obtained by VTDigger. There have been a total of 38 bias incident complaints received by the AG’s office since the system was created 18 months ago.
“It’s the public face of hate,” Tabitha Moore, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Rutland, said of the spate of incidents. In Rutland earlier this month, the words “White Lives Matter More” were posted on the side of a downtown building.
“It’s what happens when people are either actively hateful, blissfully unaware or unwilling to face the truth of racism in Vermont,” she added. “And it’s going to keep happening.”
Bias incident complaints can include allegations of hate crimes and civil harassment offenses, as well as biased but protected speech. They also include any type of bias, from racism to homophobia and anti-semitism.
Assistant Attorney General Julio Thompson, who heads the Civil Rights Unit — the branch of the AG’s office that receives the complaints — said the cause of the rise wasn’t clear.
“I can’t say it’s more incidents occurring, or whether people are reporting to us, which is what we want,” he said.
For advocates like Moore, though, the incidents of late have been a continuation of what “is always going on.”
“It’s always been happening, but the media wasn’t paying attention, and everyone was content to sweep it under the rug as a one-off,” she said. “But collectively, that just cannot happen anymore. I think we’ve reached kind of a tipping point between Covid-19 and this recent spate of hate. It’s pretty difficult to ignore.”
The other difference, she said, “is that before, we couldn’t even get a mural up because the white people that control the land didn’t understand the reason for it.”
VTrans, the state agency that controls roadways, released new guidance on removing street art after state employees removed anti-racist chalk messages from a bridge in Jamaica.
Garry Scott, the director of fair and impartial policing with the Vermont State Police, said the VSP has retrained officers to code more violations as bias incidents, which they may not have previously.
“Within the last year, we have retrained our members that any time they come across an incident that has any type of bias to it — even if they don’t know the motivation — they should code it as the vandalism and the bias code that would be appropriate for that,” he said.
At a press conference Friday, Gov. Phil Scott speculated that Vermont is unlikely to be an outlier in seeing a rise in racist behavior.
“This has become, again, another one of those polarizing issues, which shouldn’t be polarizing — we should all come together as Americans and get through this and do the right thing,” Scott said. “But at the same time, I believe we are seeing, again, more volatility in this area.”
From a vandalized sign and a stolen flag at high schools in South Burlington and Milton to symbols of the white nationalist group Patriot Front in Waterbury and Swanton, racist incidents have also been making headlines across the state. In Montpelier, the Black Lives Matter mural that was painted on State Street was vandalized within a day.
Noel Riby-Williams, who helped organize the initiative to have the display in front of the Statehouse, said she wants “a more clear statewide outline” for police response to bias incidents, though she acknowledged it can be hard to identify perpetrators.
“It doesn’t really seem like there’s enough being done,” she said.
In 2019, Attorney General TJ Donovan rolled out the Bias Incident Reporting System to address exactly that, launching it the same day that he announced he would not press charges against Max Misch, whose racial harassment drove former Rep. Kiah Morris, one of three Black lawmakers in the Statehouse, out of politics.
Racial justice advocates say the system is little known and ineffective.
The Civil Rights Unit has opened 14 bias incident case files during the past two months, compared to 23 in all of 2019. When a file is opened, the Civil Rights Unit assigns a matter to an investigator based on bias incident complaints, media reports or other information.
Thompson, the unit’s chief, said the AG’s office is working on community-based approaches to cases where a bias incident occurs that cannot be prosecuted, such as a Nazi flag hanging in a window that upsets neighbors.
“We are increasingly finding that a lot of the calls we receive fall in this category where there’s not necessarily something you can sue about or someone who might be arrested or brought into criminal court about, but there are still frictions and there are still people who are hurting in the community,” he said.
“And we’re trying to facilitate that work in the community with the understanding that when there is a non-legal, but rather relationship, conflict in the community, bringing in the attorney general’s office might exacerbate things,” he added.
Moore said the support she gets from the AG’s office is limited — including the instance of a recent incident in Middlebury. “The NAACP is having to do the work,” she said.
She added the system “has a lot of really big flaws” — such as reporting processes for individuals “so cumbersome and intense that a lot of people just give up.”
“It was designed by the system, not designed by the people. And whenever you’re trying to do something for the people without the people, you’re going to mess it up,” she said. “I believe that the intent is there, but the infrastructure, the support and the resources to make anything happen through that office is not there.”
Mark Hughes, the co-founder of Justice for All, is more skeptical of the AG’s intent, because the timing of the announcement coincided with Donovan’s decision to let Misch off the hook.
“I view the bias incident reporting protocol being implemented immediately following that decision as nothing more than damage control of the attorney general, TJ Donovan — period,” Hughes said. “That’s what it was.”
In an emailed statement to VTDigger, Donovan said the system was a “step in the right direction.”
“Before the implementation of the Bias Incident Reporting System, there was no organized statewide sharing of information regarding bias incidents between law enforcement, state agencies, and community partners,” he wrote.
“While still a work in progress, creating this system is a positive step in the right direction because it acknowledges and seeks remedies for victims, whether in the form of criminal, civil, or community justice,” he added.
Some Vermont towns are forming community groups of their own to address issues of intolerance. In Craftsbury, where a Black Lives Matter mural in front of Craftsbury Common was defaced by burnout strips, a racial justice task force has been formed after more than 50 residents called on the Selectboard to create one.
Tofowa Pyle, who graduated from Sterling College in 2017, said that overall, he has found “a lot of support” from community members as a person of color. When racist incidents occur, such as the theft of Black Lives Matter signs at Sterling while he was a student there, “for a person of color, you feel like you need to be on guard or on the lookout,” he said.
While working in a nearby town after graduating from Sterling, Pyle said he carried a canister of gasoline in the back of his truck to avoid having to knock on a stranger’s door.
“It’s very open and comfortable and inviting during the day, but at night, you have to really be careful because you don’t know who these perpetrators are, and you don’t know when they’ll strike,” Pyle said.
Not all perceived bias incidents have occurred under the cloak of night. At a protest against racism last month in Craftsbury, a man named Jasper “Jay” Wright drove his truck past with a Confederate flag flying.
“What occurred with the counterprotest in Craftsbury put a public face on the fact that racial bias does exist in Craftsbury — in a community where we think that we’re open and welcoming,” said Farley Anne Brown, a Sterling professor who serves as the town planning commissioner, who pushed for the racial justice task force.
As more of the public has moved to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement, though, more virulent forms of racism have emerged. “Now that white people are starting to get it more, white people who don’t are just pushing back louder,” Moore said.
Likewise, the Rev. Arnold Thomas — pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Jericho, a town where a Black Lives Matter display was defaced by burnout strips — said the response “is to be expected” because serious conversations about race in the state have “never fully taken place.”
“I see this effort on the part of white supremacists similar to that of what I understand to be the Battle of the Bulge,” Thomas said, referring to Germany’s last major offensive during World War II.
“There is a last-ditch effort on the part of whites who wish to preserve their hegemony to prevent what I see as the inevitable of a truly multi-racial, multicultural nation of color emerging.”
Hughes, too, expected pushback to renewed anti-racist efforts. “There’s never been anything that’s done in this nation to advance Black people that has not been met with backlash,” he said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: As Vermonters speak out against racism, a ‘spate of hate’ has also emerged.