It was catastrophic news for the progressive City of Austin, Texas- a University Town, a high-tech  city, a city that rates near the top of Bob Florida's creative class ladder, a blue town that gave about 75% of its votes to Barack Obama in November 2008. But the evidence was there in the daily newspaper on Friday Morning, staring the City right in the face. There was an ugly, undeniable truth that could not be swept under the rug of privileged cosmopolitanism no matter how hard the sheer numbers of alternadads and yoga instructors walking the streets tried. Austin, the city that fancies itself above the red state fray of the rest of the Lone Star State, now had a swollen black eye.

The News?

Racism and its ugly stepsister, segregationism, are alive and well in the Capitol City of Texas. As it  turns out, the Jim Crow mentality that plagued the South from Reconstruction until the late 60's had not been eradicated once and for all with the stroke of LBJ's pen or the election of the nation's first African-American President, but was only dormant.  The incident in Austin in the early a.m. of Friday morning was like a return of bubonic plague or small pox. We can only pray that it is an isolated incident.

Perhaps this is the feared racist backlash spurred by Obama's election. I hope not. 

Ms. Frische and her children had lived in the neighborhood for more than 10 years without any trouble. They knew that they didn't look like most of their neighbors. Still, they got along, and made numerous friends in the area. Unfortunately, a recent news article in the Austin American-Statesman called attention to the neighborhood she lived in and the hue of the her skin and the skin of her children.

Like the Ku Klux Klan of old, the racists struck under cover of darkness at around 4 a.m.  They delivered a brick through the bedroom window of Ms. Frische's 4 year old son. Tied to the brick was a message,- one that basically said that Ms. Frische and her family were not welcomed in the neighborhood because of what they looked like. Luckily, neither the 4-year-old nor anyone else in the home was injured.

The local NAACP was strangely calm, stating that "this type of incident was rare."

A photo of the brick and the message are below.

A sad day. A sad, sad day. I wander if President Obama will defend Ms. Frische the way he defended his friend Henry Louis Gates, also a victim of racism.

I was hoping such ugliness was in our past.

More details of the incident at http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/07/25/0725brick.html