On March 9, 2004, a visiting professor at Claremont McKenna College named Kerri Dunn gave an evening lecture about hate speech and racism.  Since her contract at Claremont was almost up, she needed a dramatic evening to reverse her professional fortunes and justify putting her on track for a permanent position.  Lo and behold, by strange and fortuitous coincidence, when she walked out to her car after the lecture her tires were slashed and somebody had painted anti-black, anti-female, and anti-Semitic slurs all over it.

Voila! instant hate crime star.  She marched back into the lecture hall and pounced on her own students.  “Why did she do that?â€� you ask, understandably puzzled.  Well, because only her students could have known that she was thinking of converting to Judaism.

“Thinking of converting?â€�  Yeah, that’s right, Kerri Dunn wasn’t Jewish.  She wasn’t black, either.  She wasn’t even reliably female, apparently, since she later announced that she was a lesbian.  All in all, this might have been the most inaccurate hate graffiti ever scrawled on a car.

Nevertheless, ignoring the inaccuracies, Kerri Dunn threw the Claremont campus into a tizzy of self-reproach and self-loathing, and starred in a campus rally the next night where she harangued the students and faculty for their inner racial hatred and inner anti-Sem... er, anti-Irish-American-thinking-of-converting-to-Judaism-ism.  Or something like that.

You know the end of the story (since this is a website about bogus hate crimes).  Two witnesses saw Kerri defacing her own car, and she ended up being charged and convicted of filing a false police report and fraudulent insurance claims.  She was sentenced to one year in prison and a $20,000 fine.

I don’t even know how to categorize this one.  Is it a bogus racial hate crime?  No, she’s white.  Is it a bogus anti-Semitic hate crime?  No, she’s not Jewish.  Let’s face it, she was just a nutjob trying to make a living in the hate business.  Maybe I should start a special category.

Sources:

3/18/04 - La Voz De Aztlan - Lesbian professor stages phoney hate crime at Claremont Colleges

5/10/04 - The American Conservative - Hate Hoax

3/15/10 - The American Conservative - The Godmother of Fake Hate Crimes

3/16/10 - Claremont Conservative - Jail Bird Kerri Dunn Publishes From Prison Using CMC Affiliation

Wikipedia - Kerri Dunn



Posted from Reno, Nevada, USA

June 16, 2012 - If lesbians are not “reliably� female, do you consider them to be occasionally male? - M.R., California

J.P. replies: Seems to me the answer is self-evident.  If you’re having sex with a woman, aren’t you acting as a man?