Rabbi Peter Levi waited as LAC room T-1200 filled quickly with anxious and excited Long Beach City College students ready to listen to his Nobody is Born a Bigot presentation, which tackled the extremist and white supremacy ideologies.
The October 30 event comes after several LBCC faculty voiced their concern about inclusivity, according to LBCC Vice President of Human Resources Gene Durand.
“This speaker series was very important for me to bring to the district because I firmly believe it is my duty to ensure that we have safe spaces to have difficult conversations,” said Durand.
Durand hopes that events like these will allow students and faculty to gain competence when it comes to delicate issues and conversations like these.
During the presentation Rabbi Levi shared images of students setting up red party cups in the form of a Swastika. He also shared memes that people created like Hitler pointing a gun at Anne Frank’s head.
This all served as a means to expose the multiple occurrences of bigotry, racism, and anti-semistism in California’s highschools and social media.
Levi, who is a regional director for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), shared the various data that ADL has found due to reports and surveys conducted and explained why reporting acts of hate and violence are crucial.
“That’s when we learn that 74% of people who play multiplayer online games are harassed because of some aspect of their identity. We didn’t know that before,”
“When it gets reported it becomes part of a spreadsheet, it becomes data in a report,” Levi said.
Levi explained how acts of hate and violence, whether seen or personally experienced, must be reported in order for the data collected to be used in a way that can create change.
“Reporting creates data and data creates policy,” explained Levi.
Third-year LBCC student Jeesica Rojas who attended the event said that it is interesting to learn about things like these that open your eyes in regards to the biases we all have towards other people and the mentality we have toward ourselves.
“Nowadays it’s like a trend to hate on yourself, so now it’s becoming a trend to hate on everybody else,” said the administrative justice student.
Levi said that hate and hate speech is not new, but the ways in which hate and extremist ideologies are being normalized is.
According to Levi, while social media has brought positive interactions they are also a gateway for extremists and white supremacists to recruit people and even children as young as 12 years old, which is why it is crucial to report acts like verbal and written threats.
“That’s why it is so deeply important to understand that words matter. The gas chambers weren’t built with bricks they were built with words. That’s why it’s so important to call it out in those early stages,” said Levi.
Any sort of harassment, discrimanation, hate speech, and/or threat can be reported to the Anti-Defamation League at PLevi@adl.org.