It is a relentlessly cold and bitter country we live in when the defense of a Texas schoolteacher against a complaint that she fondled a seven-year old black girl in her class is basically "I'm proudly racist and I would never sully my hands to touch one of them."

A first-grade teacher at an Humble prep school cited her racial prejudice against black students in denying allegations that she fondled a girl in her classroom last month, according to court records. Esther Irene Stokes, 61, of Montgomery, was charged with indecency with a child April 10, court records show. The 7-year-old student told police that Stokes, her teacher at Northwest Preparatory Academy Charter School, sent all the students out of the classroom and touched her on her "private part" on the outside of her clothes on March 1, according to a criminal complaint filed in the case. Humble police met with Stokes after she failed a polygraph examination. Stokes denied touching the girl "on any part of her body," prosecutors said. "The defendant stated that she doesn't like black students because she was prejudiced," the complaint states. She told police that "she does not like the complainant" and has "very little to no interaction" with her.
Well, that makes things perfectly okay, right?  I mean from a hideously cynical standpoint, people don't spend long stretches in prison, have to register with law enforcement for the rest of their lives, and have to get special license plates for being bigoted racists.  It has the additional bonus of not actually being that bad to some people, unlike sexually abusing a child, a repulsive and universally reviled act by civilized humans.

The fact we have a teacher of small children invoking this particular social calculus is hideous, frankly.  What kind of human being, much less a person employed to shape the minds of young kids, decides "Well, this is a great idea for getting out of this sex offender thing, I'll just say I'm a racist.  Score!"  What's the lesson here for a first grader?  As a parent of a child in that class, or in that prep school, or of a child that age at all, how do you possibly explain that story to your kids?

In school I had an older white teacher in her 60's when I was in 2nd grade.  I grew up in a medium-sized town in western North Carolina.  She was my first real introduction in 1981 to institutionalized racism.  She thought I was a disrespectful little moron, that I should be held back, that I was stupid.  In reality I was bored out of my mind because I was spending seven hours a day being taught stuff I had already figured out (even back then I was the biggest nerd in the county.)

A gifted black kid was a Rodent of Unusual Size to her because we simply didn't exist.  So she made my life hell, marking my math answers wrong when they weren't, holding me up as an example of someone who was lazy and awful, putting me in the corner for misbehaving all the time when all I really did was sat there and tried to reconcile what the heck was going on.  My parents had told me to listen to my teachers, that they were there to help me, but this one wasn't doing so at all.

It was only after I told my dad that I got a D on a math test and I showed it to him that he figured it out.  He saw the answers were correct and marked wrong anyway.  My teacher assumed my parents were just as "lazy" as I was and that they weren't too bright either and would just simply accept it.  Fortunately for me, the complete opposite happened and the situation was rectified in near-record time.  I was lucky and still am.  She retired soon after.

And yet that year of struggle I went through was nothing compared to this poor girl being fondled by someone she was supposed to be able to trust, and then seeing her teacher claim racism as an excuse.  You have to be a soul-free husk in order to pull something like that.  It's 2013, and we're still committing these awful acts.

How can anyone do that?