New MoCo Anti-Hate Task Force targets growing number of bias incidents among youth

Panel includes members of Black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ+, Jewish, Muslim communities

July 18, 2023 1:02 p.m.

This article, originally published at 10 a.m. July 18, 2023, was updated at 5:02 p.m. July 18, 2023, to add quotes and further information about the task force from Jim Stowe.

When Jim Stowe’s adult daughter was exiting his Rockville neighborhood in her convertible one day, she was stopped by someone asking what she was doing in the area. Even when she said she had been visiting her parents, she was asked where her parents live.

In another instance, when Stowe’s son was visiting from college and took the family dogs for a walk, he was stopped by a community member who also asked what he was doing in the area.

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As the only Black family in their neighborhood, Stowe recalled these events July on 11 at the inaugural meeting of Montgomery County’s Anti-Hate Task Force as examples of the racism in his own community.

Stowe also serves as the director of the county’s office of Human Rights, working toward eliminating racism and discrimination in the county through initiatives focused on fair housing and combatting the incidence of hate/violence activities.

“How does this happen? How does this common experience … get avoided?” he said. “I’m hopeful that these [task force] discussions will get to a place where we allow ourselves to become not only ambassadors of the process, but meaningful ambassadors in this community.”

Stowe said these instances displayed that no one is exempt.

“If you are someone who thinks that you are informed or somebody who thinks that you are at least aware of some of the issues, some of the concerns, that you work at trying to be such,” he said, “that even you may very well have experienced the same kinds of things of those who may not be as impacted or engaged as you may think that you are.”

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He and other members of the Anti-Hate Task Force gathered last week at the Wheaton Library in Silver Spring to form a plan to determine ways to make Montgomery County a safer place for its diverse population amid a growing number of hate incidents. The taskforce of about 30 county residents includes members of the Black, Latino/Hispanic, Asian American Pacific Islander, LGBTQ+, Jewish and Muslim communities.

The number of bias incidents in the county has grown 69% over four years, from 93 in 2018 to 157 in 2022, according to the county police department. From the over one million residents in Montgomery County, more than half identify as non-white and one in three identify as being foreign born, according to the MCPD Annual Bias Report. The task force will devise strategies, offer solutions, and provide ideas through the personal stories of task force members and members of the community on how everyone can feel safe, said County Council President Evan Glass (D-At-large).

“We welcome our diversity, we celebrate it, and we want everybody to be welcomed, safe and seen for who they truly and authentically are,” said Glass, the first openly LGBTQ+ person to serve on the council.  “Unfortunately, there are some people in our community who do not welcome our diversity, who do not celebrate us as individuals, for who we truly and authentically are.”

It is pushing through the anger and pain of being a victim of a hate incident that motivated county resident Jeff Le to join the task force.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, I got spit on at an airport,” he said. “My parents are Vietnamese refugees…during the pandemic they were also told that they were the reason why the virus is here and that’s a hard thing to hear from your neighbors. So, that’s how I got involved on these issues.” 

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Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus Jones said that not a week has gone by this year that he has not received at least one report of a hate incident or hate crime, with some instances receiving three or four reports at a time.

According to State’s Attorney John McCarthy, a hate incident is a broader term than a hate crime, and most of the cases that were reported to county police did not fit into the hate crime identification.

McCarthy defined a hate crime as a crime motivated “either in whole or substantial part by another person’s or group’s race, color, national origin, religious belief, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, homelessness or disability.”

Information shared within the meeting made one issue a priority of discussion and concern: hate incidents among youth.

“I was flabbergasted this past school year to see the number of incidents that occurred at our schools or in the school community,” said Jones. “I think this is an important piece to this committee to understand about where this focus must be, and I think that discussion is clear.”

According to the bias report for 2022, 130 hate incidents were targeted toward individual victims. Of them, 34 (26%) were under the age of 18, a 183% increase from 2021. Within that cohort, 30 children were victims of assault/intimidation at or during school by other students.

Montgomery County Public Schools recently released data showing it received 237 reports of hate bias incidents over the course of the 2022-23 school year. Of them, 45.7% were race-based, 37.8% were religion-based and the remaining 16.5% were LGBTQ-related.

Rev. Ali K.C. Bell, who uses he/they pronouns, said his son has been a regular target of hate incidents at a MCPS school.

“I had a conversation with my son who’s at Montgomery County Public Schools. We’ve only been here a year as county residents, and he told me about an incident that happened to him in his high school and I said, ‘that’s a hate crime,’” he said. “He said ‘no, that’s just being a Black boy in Montgomery County.’”

Bell, who moved to Montgomery County from Atlanta, said the county was described as a “promised land” of diversity that sold him on moving here.

In addition to parental concerns from members of the task force, members and county leaders said it was clear that hate in youths stems from what they are taught at home.

“We need to be honest that this is coming out of our community. There’s a lot in our youth that does not sprout from the youth; it sprouts from adults in this community in positions—sometimes leadership in certain situations—but just frankly using whatever means they have to spread a divisive view about how different people in our community should be related to,” said County Executive Director Marc Elrich (D).

The next step of the task force is to connect and gather information in strategy sessions with members of affected communities.

On Aug. 1, the task force will have a virtual meeting where further information on their work will be provided. On Aug. 29 the task force will start its virtual meetings to present information on affected communities they gathered, which will continue Sept. 19, Oct. 10, Oct. 25 and Nov. 9. On Nov. 28, the task force will meet in person again to report everyone’s ideas to see the direction they will go in unison, Glass said. 

“In the meantime, talk to each other,” he said. “We want this to be impactful and we want this to be meaningful.”

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