Brewster, why you decided to take a shot at St Peter's Prep was unnecessary. Both high schools (McNair) are excellent and offer their own view on a high school experience. The issue at hand reflected a very bad mistake made by a young man that could happen in ANY high school-public or private. To make comments about a school that supports a particular way of thinking and then to judge the entire entity when it appeared to not meet the standards they set for their students - was judgmental and snarky.
You certainly made the right decision by declining their offer.

What's truly sad (for him) is that his classmates did elect him as Vice President in the same election - a fine activity for any transcript. Would he have won this position even without the texts? I cannot say. His Google profile listed several activities and honors - he seemed like a good kid under the influence of some very poor decisions/ideologies.

And what happens to the next kid who really goes through something like this? They lie in the wake of this farce - a "boy who cried wolf" perception that puts the burden of proof on a victim deserving of justice.

** *
PS ? looks like Vigilante was spot on?.

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Despite all the racial conspiracy theories I still think he did it simply to get elected class president. With high school kids today it's all about having a nice resume for college. He tried to play an easy hand and it blew up in his face. He got what he deserved and has learned the harshest of lessons. Perhaps he has a future in the HCDO?[/quote]

Not sure how you meant conspiracy, but this story at its foundation is about race and manipulation of his fellow students playing up "white privilege" . I think it is safe to say that kids that generally run for those types of class positions are quite bright and have a broader understanding of the world than many of their peers. He knew what he was doing, he just underestimated the administration's response, which included notifying the police. It was far too late when he asked for no further investigation. This appeared to be racial civil rights and school bullying which are both against the law and if the administration failed to respond????

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Despite all the racial conspiracy theories I still think he did it simply to get elected class president. With high school kids today it's all about having a nice resume for college. He tried to play an easy hand and it blew up in his face. He got what he deserved and has learned the harshest of lessons. Perhaps he has a future in the HCDO?

BEST OF THE WEB TODAY

August 28, 2013
The Harms Race Hate-crime hoaxes and "counter-Trayvonism."

By JAMES TARANTO

Four "hateful text messages" appeared on the phone of a 16-year-old black student who was running for Student Council president at St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City, N.J. "We have NEVER and will NEVER have an (n-word) to lead our school," read one of the messages, according to a report in the Jersey Journal:

The message went on to call President Obama by his middle name Hussein and used a racial slur in referring to Obama, a police report said. "We will never make that mistake again. Drop out right now . . ." it continued, a police report said.
Can you guess where this is going? The Journal reports that the unnamed student "sent the texts to himself, a school official confirmed last week." (He lost the campaign for president, was elected vice president instead, and eventually complied with his own demand: "A source said he no longer attends the school.")

This isn't the only fake "hate crime" to come to light in the past week. Last March, as The Daily Caller's Chuck Ross notes, administrators at Ohio's Oberlin College shut classes for a day and held "campus-wide teach-ins focusing on racism and homophobia" after "virulently racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages" appeared around campus and "a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit" was spotted "near the Afrikan Heritage House."

The perpetrators in the Oberlin case, Ross reports, turn out to be "privileged Obama-supporting white kids." One of them, Dylan Bleier, conducted a voter registration drive for the 2008 Obama campaign and belonged to a group called Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism (apparently he was from the upstate New York town where Cornell University is located).

Hate-crime hoaxes are of course nothing new; the practice goes back at least to 1987 and Tawana Brawley's fraudulent rape claim. We'd like to draw a connection to a phenomenon that is new: what blogress Ann Althouse has dubbed "counter-Trayvonism."

Althouse links disapprovingly to a Twitchy.com item about a candlelight vigil for Delbert "Shorty" Belton. He was an 88-year-old World War II veteran, wounded at Okinawa, who was beaten to death in North Spokane, Wash. The suspects were described as black males between 16 and 19.

Counter-Trayvonism, according to Althouse, refers to efforts "to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case" by "looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white . . . to undo the distortions."

She thinks this is a terrible mistake:

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it. Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." They consider that kind of talk naive (at best). They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."
Those are the 2 well-defined and socially presentable opinions in this country, and decent, sincere Americans have argued from these positions for decades. Now, we're seeing some conservatives who seem frustrated by this taking account of race that's been done on the left. They seem to think it's a good time to spotlight violence committed by black people. This is not a good idea! It's fine to mourn Shorty, but these candlelight vigils are intended to stir hearts the way hearts were stirred at the Trayvon Martin demonstrations. . . .
To stir hearts counter-Trayvonistically is to nurture feelings that white people are oppressed by black people. This alternative to colorblindness is profoundly stupid. 1. It abandons the easy to express, principled position that many people perceive as the high ground. 2. It steps into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you on. And 3. It gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.
Our first reaction on reading this a few days ago was to agree enthusiastically, particularly with that first point. We are an exponent of the colorblind view and are no more comfortable with counter-Trayvonism than with Trayvonism.


Associated Press
A memorial for Delbert Belton

But on further reflection, we have some doubts about points 2 and 3. To begin at the end, we'd say worries about "white supremacists among us" are overblown. The impulse behind counter-Trayvonism seems quite the opposite of a supremacist one. It imagines whites to be in an inferior position to blacks--"that white people are oppressed by black people," as Althouse herself puts it.

In that regard, it is in fact the mirror image of the contemporary liberal view of race. The left does not advocate black supremacy. Instead it asserts that blacks continue to be victims of oppression and are owed special treatment as recompense. Hence the parallel between counter-Trayvonism and fake hate crimes: While the murder of Delbert Benton was real and the St. Peter's text message was fraudulent, both were presented as synecdoches of racial oppression. Trayvonism, counter-Trayvonism and fake hate crimes all arise out of the perverse aspiration for victim status.

We are also dubious of Althouse's assertion that counter-Trayvonism plays into the hands of the left. That seemed right to us at first, but then we saw some of the reactions from the left--particularly one from Josh Marshall, proprietor of TalkingPointsMemo.com.

Marshall complained last week that "the right-wing racial resentment-o-sphere has been aghast about the horrific murder of Chris Lane, 22, a young Australian." There are three suspects in that case, "two black, one either mixed race or white." Actually, Marshall seems aghast too: "The really sociopathic nature of the crime was brought home by the fact that one of the accused assailants allegedly told the police, 'We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.' "

What troubles Marshall, of course, is counter-Trayvonism--or, as he puts it, the "jagging about the 'double standard' when the same thing happens and the races are reversed." He observes accurately that the Martin and Lane cases are actually quite different: Whereas Zimmerman was interviewed and released after shooting Martin, the suspects in the Lane murder were promptly arrested and charged with murder. Marshall does not note the other obvious difference: that unlike Zimmerman, Lane's alleged killers do not appear to have any basis to claim self-defense.

Anyway, although Marshall makes some reasonable points, his tone is not a reasoned one; clearly he is agitated by the comparison. So is Brian Beutler, who wrote a similar piece the same day for Salon.com. We read this as evidence that the counter-Trayvonists have struck at a weakness, not a strength, of the left.

Most interesting, however, is Marshall's concluding paragraph:

This is the part where this kind of article falls back to say, well, race is complicated. It's not as simple as it was in the old days. But actually, it's still not that complicated. This whole episode amounts to little more than another plea from the subsection of aggrieved white Americans who still crave both social dominance and and [sic] the seat at the front of the racial victimization bus.
Saul Alinsky's fourth rule was: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." The counter-Trayvonists may ultimately be wrongheaded, but if they can provoke as conventional a liberal as Josh Marshall into disparaging "the racial victimization bus"--a colorblind sentiment if ever there was one--then perhaps they serve a dialectical purpose.

'Wish the kid well'?? Let's hear a major mea culpa from this kid, along the lines of 'I'm totally sorry I smeared my fellow students by tarring them with a phony allegation that was race based, in a means to get myself elected to student council' before we wish the kid well. Just sayin.[/quote]

I do not disagree, that is only one of the lessons I hope he learned... it would have been nice if he apologized in a public student forum, but it is late for that now.

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'Wish the kid well'?? Let's hear a major mea culpa from this kid, along the lines of 'I'm totally sorry I smeared my fellow students by tarring them with a phony allegation that was race based, in a means to get myself elected to student council' before we wish the kid well. Just sayin.

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Personally I wish the kid well... I hate to think any stupid thing (non-criminal) I did in high school would held against me 30 years later... I hope he has learned all the lessons that are to numerous to mention here... but it is a little disingenuous to say this was over in 3 days. This story went on for weeks, as did the official investigation. When graduation/summer came I think the administration/police already knew the results but said the investigation was ongoing with the hope it would disappear at the start of the fall school year. The media didn't let it drop, so here we are.

My concern is that the kid wasn't charged and it would seem the matter has been concluded by police - Therefore he is not guilty of anything in the eyes of the law. If anything he is guilty of lying and speaking to the media about the lie - Then again if it was a crime to lie and lie in the public arena, every politician would be charged and guilty of a crime!

PS, He's still just a kid and would peoples thoughts be any different if he was 10 years old instead of 16. His dishonesty was a lie he carried for 3 days and it will now cost / haunt him for a life time - Anyone will be able to google his name in the future (especially HR depts. of any corporation) and hold it against him.

If he was charged and found guilty the records would have be kept 'under lock and key' because he is classified as a juvenile

It's good to see how often in recent times people are motivated to make up racism where it doesn't exist. This is just another piece of evidence that real racism against blacks is just getting harder and harder to find.

FAB:

You are misunderstanding the law that you quoted. The law you quoted doesn't apply in this case. You missed the first requirement of applicability: "pertaining to juveniles charged as a delinquent or found to be part of a juvenile-family crisis". Emphasis is mine.

The kid is an asshole, the parents are clueless (at best) or complicit (at worst) and he will now have to live with the consequences. For those who don't think this will follow him, or affect his future, you are naive. This will temporarily stunt, or affect, his high school career, which can easily have the domino effect of affecting his college career. And, as someone else pointed out, in this age of digital media, this will be forever around (and, easily accessible) in one way or another.

But I wonder about the sanity of the parents. I can understand the boy making a dumb mistake, but I get the feeling that the parents are somehow disingenuous or naive

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The truth was a fairly obvious after the first week when the student seeing how this was spinning out of control requested that there be no further investigation. I do not fault parents for supporting their kids, but at some point, the parents must have asked the kid directly, is this the truth? This is what happens when the media has preconceived agendas they want to promote, as opposed to just reporting the news. This never should have gotten to this point and ultimately it was up to the student to be honest.

Its the information that relates to the outcome of the investigation that is of concern.

No doubt the kid screwed-up, he lied and maybe your words of wisdom jerseymom, should have be voiced to the him ... but then again the parents might of thought the threats were real and they wanted some sort of justice or exposure that their kid was facing.

In hindsight we are all experts when we have the full and truthful story, however Police information is confidential and there appears to be laws about disclosure of such information when it involves a juvenile.

This is when the Parents and Police were correct to say 'no comment' when the media came calling for the outcome of the investigation.

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The only one(s) that "screwed up here" was the kid/his parents who granted permission for a full disclosure, sit down interview with CBS news when the story broke:

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/05/3 ... ng-for-council-president/

THAT'S where his name was identified, THAT'S where the teen continued to perpetrate his lie, and THAT'S where he (not the school), compounded his mistake. It's telling that the reporter noted how "composed" the teen was throughout the "ordeal."

I counsel my young kids again and again about this new ground we walk on - creating our digital footprints - and how many of our choices/decisions will be set in stone digitally unlike anything we've ever seen before.

Quote:According to the 2010 US Census, whites are 73.8% of the population, or 58.2% white non-hispanic. So I doubt it.

Well... this news story went viral... it is a link on Drudge Report. This story is not going away anytime soon.

Did someone screw up here ? Could a law suit be pending ?

http://law.onecle.com/new-jersey/2a-a ... iminal-justice/4a-60.html

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Well according to the news story he doesn't go there anymore. In any case, this was a dumb mistake that he made while he was young that won't make much difference in the grand scheme of things. Maybe he won't get any teacher recommendations for college but if he has good grades, I'm sure he'll get into a good school. Can't say I feel sorry for the kid and I don't think his future is ruined over this either. Hopefully he learned something and the rest of the world will just forget about it.

The kid should be expelled from school imo. Why would he ruin/jeopardize his future over something as silly as class president!

Although he pulled a Tawana Brawley his actions didn't result in quite the same collateral damage, thank God. It's nice to note the news coverage that it was an ugly hoax are as loud as the original, now disgraced, story.

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It was the news media fault identifying the family... the kid and his parents were on TV news repeating the same lies that the kid told the administration. He was not believable on the report I saw when the student kept on describing the incident in third person. The kid was not hard to identify because he was running as an underclassperson for a student council president seat. Any student could have told the media the kid's name while the media was onsite banging the "racist institution drum" against a noteworthy Jesuit School. This racial polarization activity is all to common in educational institutions today with little or no consequences to the perps.

I feel a bit sorry for the kid. He may have been given very bad advice by his parents. He may have been so caught up in the competitive culture of getting into the best universities that he did something unethical, and possibly criminal to have "student council" on his college applications. He will probably not be able to get references from any of his High School teachers, etc.
Let's not forget he's a teenager, a black teenager in a very traditional, jesuitical environment.

The St. Peter's Prep kid should have read this first!

http://www.coloredgirlconfidential.co ... -feeling-like-an-asshole/

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These were NOT kids but ADULTS, and I'm surprised they weren't charged for some sort of vandalism and the cost to clean their mess up.

The police only spoke to the parties involved on what they discovered - Police didn't go public, the school did.

If I had a kid that went to that school, I wouldn't be happy with how it was handled ... but that's just me and wonder if the kid was from a prominent family, would they have acted the same way and exposed the kid publicly with confidential / sensitive information provided to them by Police?

St. Peter's Prep still get a 0/10 from me and the cops get 10/10 for giving the news reporter no ammunition for their news story.
The school could have been better served with a PR specialist!

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If this school did that, then everyone would be asking what exactly happened? What are they covering up?

This is much better because now we know the truth. And all the school did was confirm what the police source told the JJ anyway.

Apparently there's been an epidemic of this type of behavior in New Jersey schools recently. Wonder what's going on?

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/ ... aking-racist-threats?lite

"Jersey City police spokesman Bob McHugh refused to comment on the investigation on the grounds the student is a juvenile".

Doesn't this suggest the Police didn't make a comment - I read nowhere the police are charging the kid for anything.

This is still a kid, no gang affiliation or criminal record - What the kid did was unquestionably wrong but the school handled it extremely poorly as well ... in my opinion.

The school could have simply said the investigation uncovered that the nature of racist remarks where unfounded and reframe from making further comments.

If the school is so disgusted or outraged by this kids behavior, why don't they expel him from the school or sue for damages?

Of course the father said no comment, his kid did something really, really wrong. I imagine it's illegal as well.

The school has every right to tell the truth. There's no gag order. It is a private school that is reliant on alumni donations and tuition. If people think that the school is full of racist students, it would tarnish their reputation and they could lose tons of money. That kid is lucky no one is pressing charges. What a douchebag

Quote:

Sorry, please read better next time.

From the article: "said school spokesman James Horan, who confirmed the result of the probe after its disclosure by a police source."

When something is confirmed after being disclosed by a police source, here's how it went.
1) disclosed by a police source to the JJ
2) newspaper calls the school and says hey we heard this is how it went, can u confirm?
3) school confirms.

If you are going to bash anyone here, don't bash the school. Bash the kid who was so starved for attention/wanted to cry RACISM so badly that he made up the entire incident. Should be arrested for filing a false police report and wasting police time and taxpayer money.