It’ll take more than a slur in the snow to stop a museum in Idaho from its mission.
Someone wrote the N-word in the snow on top of a storage unit at the Idaho Black History Museum.
Phillip Thompson, the museum’s board president and executive director, said he saw it Wednesday morning.
“I saw it and I almost chuckled, but I was also shocked,” Thompson told CNN affiliate KBOI. “What they did was pointless (given how cold it is).”
Thompson’s not making a police report, reasoning the cops wouldn’t be able to do anything about it and that “they have much more important things to do.”
Also, this isn’t the first time the facility’s been hit by hate. In 2002, vandals drew a swastika on the building’s doors.
A giant heart
But whenever ugliness rears its head, the goodness comes to counter it.
One museum supporter, repulsed by the slur, left a message of her own in the snow.
By dragging her shoes along the ground, Kirsten Furlong drew a giant heart in the museum’s front yard.
“The hate just spreads. That’s why we have to stop it and take action,” she said. “There’s a lot more people who don’t agree with that message, so those people have to act.”
Thompson said the fact that people continue to leave racial slurs proves that the museum’s stated mission — to build bridges between cultures — is still valid.
“People want to (act) like this doesn’t exist, or act in such a way that we’re past this,” he said. “And we’re not.”