Unhinged White People on Long Island

Suffolk County has the highest foreclosure rate in New York state. It also has a county executive, Steve Levy, who has built his reputation on xenophobic rhetoric and proposed legislation about ridding the county of "undocumented" workers. His popularity is so great among the majority white population that Levy, a Democrat, was cross-endorsed by the Republic Party in the last election.

With fear pervasive in Suffolk, the inevitable happened. A bunch of teenage white boys made sport out of mugging and killing an immigrant from Ecuador in the town of Patchogue. Marcelo Lucero, a 37-year-old immigrant from a poor village in Ecuador had lived in and around Patchogue for 16 years, and worked in a dry cleaning store, sending savings home to support his mother, a cancer survivor.

Steve Levy called the seven teenagers, out for thrills, "White supremacists." Some immigrant advocates on Long Island have described the attack as a reflection of widespread anti-Latino sentiment and racial intolerance in Suffolk County. Click here to read the New York Times article.

Steve Levy tried to turn this horrendous murder into a one-day news story rather than symptomatic of seething resentment, which he has been partly responsible for igniting. He was forced to apologize yesterday.

VIGIL TONIGHT: Community and religious groups will gather at 7 tonight at the site of the attack at Railroad Avenue and Sephton Street near the Long Island Railroad station in Patchogue. The candlelight vigil is expected to start with a religious ceremony and words from Marcello Lucero's family.

It gets worse on Long Island. On Tuesday night, in Mastic Beach, also in Suffolk County, scores of cars were defaced with violent anti-Obama graffiti. Overnight painted slogans "Kill Obama 08" as well as sexist slurs appeared on about 40 cars in this diverse neighborhood.

Long Island does not have a good history of racial harmony. It began as a segregated area and remains one of the three most highly segregated suburban communities in the country. As more Latinos move into the area, many legally, many to work in agriculture and restaurants, Steve Levy has fueled fires of intolerance. This is in direct contrast to Nassau County's executive Tom Suozzi. When Suozzi was mayor of Glen Cove, he helped start the first day laborer job site, and remains committed to humane treatment of immigrants, whether legal or not.

Racial intolerance is not an acceptable reaction to the economic insecurity that we are all feeling. It's up to the community, all of the community, to speak out against it, to make it clearly and unambiguously unacceptable.