By noon today, anyone in the Deaf community who hasn’t heard about it is either on a safari in a remote land without pager/internet access or in a coma.

Seven kids at MSSD have been sent home pending an investigation into what Dean Katherine A. Jankowski and DC police are calling a “serious incident” with “racial overtones” and others in less official positions are calling a “hate crime” or “attack.”

Whatever you call it, it’s clear that it’s about to blow up (or it already has) as the “threequel” to the Jena 6 story in which six black high school students were charged with attempted second degree murder of a white classmate. Protests subsequently erupted with participants taking the position that the punishments for the black students were unusually excessive and racist, especially in light of several racially charged incidents (including an “adolescent prank” in which white students hung three nooses, said by some to represent the Ku Klux Klan on a tree traditionally marked as “white” territory on school grounds) occurring before the alleged murder attempt in which participants received the proverbial slap on the wrist.

Last night CNN broke open the story of seven MSSD students (six white, one black) sent home after marking a fellow student (three guesses what color this student was) with swastikas and “KKK.” Gallaudet community members had already been apprised of the situation in a campus-wide e-mail from Jankowski earlier in the day (Edit: I’ve just found out MishkaZena carries the text of that e-mail).

According to Metro Police chief Cathy Lanier, “no charges have been filed and no names have been released” and the investigation is ongoing.

Puh-leeze.

There may be no legal charges filed, but these students — and, by extension, MSSD, and by even further extension, the entire Deaf community — are already carrying the full weight of a “hate crime” on their shoulders. And in a community this small, you bet your pretty hiney names have already been released. Maybe not to the press, but to community members for sure. I’ve already been apprised of two identities only moments after waking this morning, and I didn’t even ask for them. If I started asking around, I could have a roster pretty easily. But their names are quite beside the point.

Any investigation that ensues will only be caricatured and dwarfed by the speculation and the pontificating in which the people affected by these incidents will partake.

Take, for example, one blogger’s guess that perhaps the MSSD students didn’t understand the meanings of the symbols they scrawled onto their classmate’s skin with marker. I find this idea worth only fleeting consideration since actual usage of the symbols implies some sort of understanding. But it’s an idyllic thought, one that speaks a desire I share, to ascribe some sense of innocence to these people, even if only because of their youth.

Or, from the same blogger, the speculation that gaps in language and education in deaf students are partially responsible for the atrocity of their actions. As much as I want to dismiss this sentiment as heavy-handed hasty generalizations about all deaf people (which is why I say this isn’t an incident with impact limited to only MSSD), it’s impossible to deny that this is a thought that’ll go through many people’s heads, both ignorant and knowledgeable about the Deaf community. And so it’s a response that needs to be addressed, and addressed yesterday.

Another blogger has been quick to draw the connection between what he’s branded as the “Gally 6 or 7” and the Jena Six. But his interpretation isn’t one of shock at the racial atrocities committed; he’s taken a step back and looked at how the media rhetoric used is shaping our understanding of these events.

Though I resent the arbitrary connection to the Jena Six and I find his quickness to dismiss racism as a complication in the entire scenario problematic, I agree.

Hundreds have descended on Jena, LA, shouting for reparations for racial injustice. Down there, one crime has morphed into the figurehead for many, and the uncivil behavior exhibited by some small-town citizens has suddenly come to stand for the good ol’ Southen brand of hate. It seems no one’s interested in the real story behind the charges anymore, nor is anyone interested in listening to anyone less than famous. Those who showed up with good intentions, carrying signs calling for a rainbow-infused world, have bought into the subtle lie that peacemaking speeches and politicking constitute actual social action and that the violent transformation of these kids’ lives is worth the national spectacle.

And what surprises me about the stories, both in Louisiana and in DC, which seem to be almost certainly doomed to be cast as the slam-BAM chain-reaction proof of high school racism in the 21st century, is that people are actually shocked.

Um? Hello?

Wasn’t racism/diversity a hot-button issue on campus during last year’s presidential protests?

Wasn’t that long ago that the Super Bowl commercial featuring Terrell Owens being propositioned by Desperate Housewives star Nicolette Sheridan was denounced as scandalous and inappropriate. I’m pretty doubtful, in this age when people call the American Secretary of State’s boots “sexy” (or when they demean a person who’s achieved such a high ranking in the U.S. government on the basis of her gender, calling her Bush’s “office wife”), that those objections stemmed from the raunchy nature as much as it suggested cross-racial friendliness.

Being a citizen of the 21st century is no immunity from social mores and vices that existed in the 20th. They might have different feels and they may have different reporters extolling their stories, but they’re still here, lurking under the surface in ways we consume regularly without realizing it. As a citizenship, we’ve done more to brush it under the rug, perpetuate it behind closed doors, and call ourselves a happy family than to actually face our own demons.

As long as people believe the way to cure racism is to become blind to race and difference as opposed to embracing it, we’re taking one step forward and two hundred years and a mob scene back.

When this blindness takes the shape of calls for racial harmony without acknowledging the real gut-slinging that it’ll take to achieve that harmony, I get worried.

I get worried that people will forget that there are at least eight kids at MSSD in pursuit of a high school diploma whose lives hang in the balance here, figuratively. They have the opportunity to understand the role they play as young victims and perpetrators (whether there’s a difference, I’m not sure) of a socially-constructed existence in which they’re cast into characters that are either black or white, though few people want to talk about the script.

Odds are, however, that they’ll never be able to improvise this on their own in a way that they’ll be able to go on to life after high school with a lesson learned. No, they’ll be forever influenced by people who want to demonize and objectify them, body and soul, as pawns in this national struggle over the status quo.

They’ll be denied a chance to look at all the different little things that contributed to their role this one weekend: parental lessons, self-esteem, self-awareness, educational experiences, social experience, social conditioning, methods of school supervision, peer pressure, identity politics, socio-economic status and so on.

I’ve just read over what I’ve written as a reaction to this becoming a national story. Frankly, I find the things I’ve said overblown, effusive, and simplistic, especially as a white woman who knows next to nothing about what really went down in that MSSD dorm that weekend other than what I read online.

Overblown, effusive, and simplistic? Yes, I think so.