Posted on 01/26/2017 2:17:43 AM PST by nickcarraway
Family didn’t fly Nazi flag, but after mistake on Facebook post, they’ve been targeted with so much hate they want to escape neighborhood.
In the few days since the neighbor living in the other half of her Oshkosh, Wisconsin, duplex raised a Nazi flag, life has been impossible to fathom for Rosangela Diaz and her family, though they had nothing to do with the emblem of white supremacy — and don’t even look the part of people who would. Rosa is a fifth-generation American of Puerto Rican descent; her husband, Jeremy, is African-American.
Still, stacks of hate mail have arrived at their home since the hateful emblem was hung outside the neighbor’s door last Friday. The windshield was broken on Rosa’s car and the tires were flattened. The Diazes have received death threats on social media. With no return address but an out-of-state ZIP code stamped in the postage field, a mysterious package arrived at their home Wednesday. Rosa and Jeremy won’t allow their four active sons to play outside, as they desperately want to do, because they’re afraid someone will call the boys Nazis, as happened a few days ago to their oldest sons, ages 11 and 8.
Why the family has been targeted with an unrelenting display of hate stems from a colossal misunderstanding.
The duplex where the Diazes live fronts two streets, so the two tenants technically live on different streets, though they occupy the same dwelling. A passerby noticed the neighbor’s Nazi flag on Friday, snapped a picture and posted it on Facebook with the address — the incorrect one, the one on Diaz’s street — and assailed the reported rise in white nationalism in America during and after the 2016 presidential election season.
The post flew around social media many times beyond the initial shares by the first 3,000 people who saw it. Some who shared it removed the address, but commenters just added it back in. They also threatened to blow up the house, set it on fire and worse, Diaz told Patch.
Diaz chooses to believe her neighbor, who said he flew the Nazi flag Friday, the day President Donald Trump was sworn in, as a political statement against hate groups whose members may feel emboldened by the election. Nothing in their previously friendly neighborly banter gave Diaz cause to believe otherwise, she said.
Be that as it may, Diaz wants anonymity for her family in a new neighborhood.
Crowdfunding Campaign for Rent, Deposit
Diaz reached a breaking point Monday and started a GoFundMe campaign to scrape together deposit and rent money for a new place. That was the same day two different men knocked at her door to call her out over the Nazi flag and all it stands for.
“The first man called me a Nazi,” Diaz said. “I told him, ‘I am obviously Hispanic, and my husband is as dark as night. I’m not who you want.’ About 20 minutes later, another man knocked, but looked directly at me and said, ‘You guys obviously didn’t put that flag up,’ and I sent him around back, too.”
Monday was also the day Diaz’s sons were taunted and called names.
“I can deal with the hate mail. I can deal with the regular stuff that comes with being a biracial family. But for people to start approaching me and the kids, that’s too much,” she said
‘You Would Think Racism Would Die’
That’s the worst part of this ordeal for Diaz — having to explain to her biracial children how to navigate a society increasingly polarized over race.
“If it was just me and my husband, I could deal with it,” but hassling kids about adults’ choices — even if the wrong assumptions are made, as they were in her family’s case — should be off limits, Diaz said. That is true whether the target is one of her sons or Barron Trump, the 10-year-old son of Donald and Melania Trump. who was mercilessly ridiculed on social media the weekend of the inauguration, she said.
“As a mom, I spend a good portion of my life teaching my children about equality and treating people with respect and love,” Diaz said. “I tell them we have to love no matter what, because that is what we are made for. But it’s hard when you have adults approaching your kids with hate.”
The 8-year-old “blew it off” when he was confronted outside the family’s home, Diaz said, but her older son retreated inside of himself some and still hasn’t talked about what was actually said.
Her older son learned about Anne Frank, the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in school, but most of what he knows about the American Nazi movement is knowledge gained the last few days, Diaz said.
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“When this happened, I knew I had to talk him about what is going on,” she said. “I didn’t want to panic him, and at the same time I wanted to remind him that people fight for our freedom of speech. Despite how horrible it was to fly a Nazi flag, that’s a human being’s opinion, and we shouldn’t be mad at the person who posted it.
“I’m doing my best to raise my boys to be productive citizens, to work hard, to love people and to be great kids,” she said. “We’re setting the best examples we can at home.”
‘And He Is 11’ If there has been one bright spot this week, it’s that school is the same happy place for the Diaz children that it has always been.
“My 11-year-old is the only minority in his sixth-grade class. We tell him color doesn’t matter, that color is only skin deep,” Diaz said. “When I pick him up at school, he gets an outpouring of hugs and handshakes and the dances boys that age do, so it makes me believe he’s not being bothered in school and his friends love him.”
The sense of rightness in the world was short lived, and worry over the hate that has rained down on her family over the past five days crept back into Diaz’s voice. She paused, then sighed.
“I’m just hoping this doesn’t start a fire in his heart to hate,” she said finally. “You would think racism would die, but lately there’s so much hate, everywhere.”
With hecklers stalking her family’s home, Diaz walks her boys to their school about half a block away. She has taken some time away from work to deal with the nightmare, but she won’t be able to do that when she goes back to her job.
“Still, even today, people were driving by with cameras taking pictures of the house,” she said Wednesday. “I’m terrified my kids will be walking home one day and get questioned.
“Kids should be living a normal life, and not worrying about someone approaching them,” she said. “It’s already enough pressure trying to raise an African-American kid — people don’t see the Puerto Rican in him — and now he has to deal with taunts that he’s a Nazi supporter.
“And he is 11,” she said emphatically.
‘People Don’t Grasp How Big This Is’
The Diaz family’s landlord has offered to move them when another property is available, but Diaz doesn’t know how long that might take. Social media posts can live forever on the internet, and Diaz doesn’t feel safe.
“This is going to continue,” she said. “I know this is going to keep going.”
Setting up the crowdfunding campaign wasn’t an easy for the proud Diaz, her family’s breadwinner for more than a year. They’re minus Jeremy’s income for now. He worked for years at General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, but is now legally blind due to an eye disease. The family moved to Oshkosh in 2015 to be closer to specialists who will perform a cornea transplant next week. Their closest family is an hour and a half away.
To support the family, Rosa juggles a full-time job as a baker and a part-time gig as a night auditor at an area hotel, working about 75 hours week between the two. Jeremy is now a stay-at-home dad to the couple’s other two boys, ages 3 and 1, and the family gets by on about $2,000 a month, just above the federal poverty line. They don’t receive government assistance.
“Every single penny counts, and goes to where it needs to go in the budget,” Diaz said. “We’re not in a position to be moving. I’m just asking for rent and a deposit, so I can move my family.”
Monthly rent for a three-bedroom house or apartment in Oshkosh runs about $750 a month. Strict rental codes in the city require a bedroom for every two people.
Oshkosh police reportedly told Diaz that the FBI is investigating, but the phone calls, letters and other unwanted attention keep coming. The police department did not immediately return Patch’s request for comment.
A woman of strong faith, Diaz said she believes “love is going to win above all,” but has felt an unfamiliar rage in her heart over the past several days. It takes “all of the God-given composure, all that God has given me” to quell it, she said, describing the emotional rollercoaster of the past five days.
“Eventually it will die down and this will be a harsh memory,” she said, “but right now, we need to leave.
“We’re getting anthrax and bomb threats,” she said. “People don’t grasp how big this is.”
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Yes, Lindbergh was a utopian liberal fascist of the first water.
Sorry, I don't believe that explanation. Not even a liberal, as profoundly stupid as we know they are, is so stupid as to think such a flag could make a statement (protesting racism).
If he really believes that, then I challenge him to dress up in a KKK outfit and march through the west end of Louisville as protest against white supremecy.
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