Long Island's Zip Code Prejudice Problem

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A story recently ran in a regional news outlet reporting on a man who’d been arrested for child endangerment. His 11-year-old son had found an unloaded gun in his house, shoveled it into his knapsack, and headed off to Tangier Smith Elementary School, in the William Floyd School District. Though police described the weapon as “non-operational,” it was a gun nonetheless. The ghosts of Columbine and Sandy Hook began to whisper in everyone’s ear.

It was a small story, one that would have likely been a larger story had the gun been functioning and loaded. To boil the story down to its most basic lede: A Mastic Beach man was arrested for allowing his son to have access to a gun in any form or function.

Emphasis on Mastic Beach, apparently. No sooner had the story gone live on the outlet’s website, than the comments started rolling in. Racist, derogatory, ignorant, juvenile comments of the “no surprise here” nature. In a perfect storm of bigotry, one commenter managed to disparage blacks, Hispanics and the working poor in one single sentence.

I’m from Mastic Beach. When I think of Mastic Beach, I think of film directors, photographers, teachers, songwriters. I think of Joe L. Joe L is a chef. He graduated from William Floyd High School—threw his cap in the air just one row behind me in the “L” section. There are hundreds more like him. Then there are the other heroes of any community—the volunteers, the two parents heading off to work in order to keep a roof over their children’s heads. When I think of Mastic Beach, I think of the long, white strand of beach at Smith Point. I think of the drawbridge at sunset.

I also think of the crime, the oddities, snickering at the beach sign that must read “Clothing Required,” the same as I think of the classmates I have lost to drugs, lost to prison, lost to the cycle of dysfunction and aimlessness.

Thank God those things only exist in Mastic Beach, right?

The comments I read were a case file of life imitating art. One of the themes of my novel, Little Beasts, treats how prejudice and its requisite sidekick, misunderstanding, can have tragic consequences. The year I graduated high school, three teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas were convicted of a brutal triple-homicide almost solely on the evidence that they were part of a Satanic cult. What evidence? They wore black. They died their hair black and listened to Metallica. Case closed. The trial led to the term “Satanic Panic,” a syndrome whereby an entire community can become gripped with unfounded fear and lash out at the innocent.

One of the accused was sentenced to death. Last year, they were released on a bizarre legal provision that allowed them to plead guilty (to the crimes they didn’t commit), be sentenced to time served and released. The young man on death row didn’t want to take the deal. He couldn’t stomach pleading guilty to butchering and cutting the genitals off an eight-year-old boy. He was convinced to go through with the plea only when he was told that his decision would negate the deal for his other two co-defendants serving life sentences. He was convinced that he’d be in a better position to clear his name out of jail than waiting for the executioner to come knocking.

Our fears, our tendency to relegate people to the realm of symbols: the jock, the hippy, the gun nut, the homo—these are the very tendencies that give birth to tragic misunderstanding.

I wonder, sometimes, if it’s true that no matter how successful I become, no matter how I might contribute to my world, I’ll still get those sidelong glances when I tell people I’m from Mastic Beach. I’ll still get asked, not what I did in school, or how my teachers steered me in positive directions, but what caliber weapon did I carry. Others from my town have experienced this same prejudice. It even creeps into the mindset of law enforcement, which can be especially dangerous.

Am I my zip code? Are you? Are we content to carve the world up along ethnic and financial labels? And if we are…can we ever expect to see change in how we treat one another? And in how we are treated?