On April 8, Coach Shaka Smart of the Virginia Commonwealth University’s men’s basketball team celebrated his 34th birthday. Four days earlier, he signed an eight-year extension to his current contract as head coach of the VCU Rams, increasing his annual salary (before bonuses) to a cool million.

What’s all the fuss about Coach Smart? National College Athletic Association men’s basketball fans got to know him as his team’s unlikely entry in the 2011 NCAA basketball tournament—and subsequent victories over heavyweights like Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State, and Kansas—thrust his unique coaching style and personable yet cool, professional approach into the spotlight. At the height of all this hoopla, Shaka’s brother, author J.M. Tyree, wrote a personal essay about his brother’s sudden fame, and Shaka’s natural ability to roll with it.

Tyree also noted that since he and his now-famous sibling have “different dads, different last names, and different ethnic backgrounds” most people don’t assume they’re related. According to The Washington Post, Shaka’s father, a native of Trinidad, left his family in 1994 when Shaka was a teenager. In a New York Times profile, Shaka said being named after Shaka Zulu, a prominent African warrior king known for his ability to unite people, was “about the best thing” his dad ever did for him. Born in 1977 in Madison, Wisconsin, he was raised by his single mother, Monica King, a health teacher who also taught Lamaze at night to support her family. In addition to Tyree, Shaka has mentioned other brothers and sisters in interviews, including an adopted brother whose heritage was also mixed-race.

A stellar student, Shaka was accepted at Harvard, Yale, and Brown but opted to play point guard for a coach who appreciated and believed in him at tiny Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He excelled there in basketball and as a history major, and took classes in Black history, culture, and music. He graduated magna cum laude and went on to get a master’s degree in social science from the California Un

iversity in Pennsylvania—while serving as an assistant basketball coach there.

After two years as a basketball director in Dayton, Shaka worked as an assistant coach at Akron, Clemson, and the University of Florida, then went to VCU in 2009. He married his wife Maya, an entrepreneur and journalist, in May 2006; the couple is now expecting their first child.

Shaka collects motivational or inspirational quotations and poems, a habit he began in early 2007 while at Clemson. His list is now 115 pages long, organized alphabetically by author. His favorite, according to a profile of him on VCUAthletics.com, is the first on his list: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”—John Keats

How smart is Shaka Smart? He achieved a near-perfect SAT school in his senior year of high school. In 1999 at age 22, he was one of only 20 students in the U.S. to be named to the USA Today All-USA Academic Team. As a coach, he teaches his players much more than basketball strategy, constantly talking with them about their class assignments, offering to help, even encouraging his staff to check up on players’ progress with challenging projects.

According to his mom, though, Shaka remains so wise and cool under pressure because of the challenges he faced growing up as one of only a few kids of color in a predominantly white suburb. At age 16, Shaka stood up to an older white boy who had threatened one of his brothers…and refused to back down even when he was threatened, too. By his junior year in high school, Shaka was responding to such intimidation by striving to educate. He and a group of like-minded friends organized a multicultural event that brought Native American and Hmong dancers into the school to perform and featured workshops on racism and homophobia.

“I remember all the time dealing with prejudice,” Smart told The Washington Post at the height of March Madness, “and I think that’s part of what has fed my competitive drive, because especially when you’re a kid, people can be unkind. And it hurts.”

Karen DeGroot Carter, a native of Syracuse NY and a graduate of Syracuse University, lives with her mixed-race family in Denver. Her novel, ONE SISTER’S SONG, explores challenges faced by people of mixed-race heritage and her blog, BEYOND Understanding, highlights resources that promote tolerance and celebrate diversity. Contact Karen at karen@mixedandhappy.com.

By Karen DeGroot Carter – In primarily white, tiny, picturesque Arroyo Grande, Calif., where African-Americans comprise less than one percent of the population, a young woman of black and Hispanic heritage not only stands out, but runs the risk of becoming a target. That sad fact became evident when a mixed-race 19-year-old looked out her bedroom window just after midnight on Friday, March 18, to see a huge 11-foot cross burning in the empty lot next door, just 12 feet from her home.

Shortly after the teen called 9-1-1,  the cross crumbled and police arrived. They asked to borrow the stricken family’s water hose to put the remaining fire out. The young woman, a friend of hers who was staying overnight, and her single mother reported that they overheard the police officers joking and laughing with firefighters who’d also arrived on the scene.

Once the fire was out, the police left without taking the family’s statement or picking up the shovel that was left by the criminals who’d put up the cross, doused it with an accelerant — to be sure it would burn awhile — and set it on fire.

When the teen’s mother called 9-1-1 again the following morning, she asked that the shovel be retrieved and explained her daughter was a person of color, the Arroyo Grande police department began to refer to the incident as a hate crime. Originally it was reported simply as “embers burning in an empty lot.”

“It wasn’t embers,” the mother told a local newspaper. “It was a fallen 11-foot cross.”

In this same article, the teen’s mother insists the investigation of the hate crime was botched from the beginning. She also complains the Arroyo Grande police department added insult to injury by asking her in interviews about her “sexual history from the last 10 years,” insisting they needed such information, as well as “a detailed accounting” of places she and her daughter had lived.

“They know their department hasn’t handled [things] correctly,” she said. Due to the original filing of the incident as “embers burning in an empty lot,” questions remain as to whether any of those embers—with evidence of the accelerant used—were collected and correctly stored to aid in the investigation.

Two weeks later, and despite the offer of a $3,500 reward by the city of Arroyo Grande and San Luis Obispo County CrimeStoppers for information that leads to a conviction in this case, no arrests have been made. Though one local reporter has presented evidence of an active skinheads community in Arroyo Grande, the city’s police chief continues to downplay such a presence, telling CNN,  “There’s no active hate groups in Arroyo Grande, none that we’re aware of.”

The family’s lawyer, meanwhile, insists the family is not only concerned with the effectiveness of the investigation but has “ongoing concerns about their security.”

Canadian Precedent
A mixed-race family in Nova Scotia was forced to live with similar concerns for most of last year after a cross was burned on the front lawn of their home by two brothers eventually arrested, released on bail, and—11 months later—convicted of their hate crimes.

Shayne Howe, the only black person in his community, and his partner, Michelle Lyon, who is white, have five children who were aged 2 to 17 at the time. All of them were home when a six-and-a-half-foot cross with a noose attached was set aflame on their front lawn in the middle of the night early Sunday, February 21, 2010, shortly after the couple had arrived home from a friend’s birthday party.

Their 17-year-old daughter was the first one of the family to see flames on their front lawn.  Howe thought at first a car had been set on fire due to the height of the roaring flames. He eventually realized it was a cross and heard men he couldn’t see yelling “Die, n—–, die.”

Two suspects, 19- and 20-year-old cousins of Lyon’s father who held grudges for a comment Howe had made to them, were arrested within days but released to their grandparents’ custody a week later. This fact—coupled with the April 19 apparent arson of Lyon’s car in a lot near her home—rattled the family, as did the long process of trying the two brothers.

Despite widespread support from their community that included a festive rally and walk and an active Facebook page, they decided by November of last year to move.

Though the case received significant attention in the local press shortly after the incident occurred and through the brothers’ convictions just this past January, U.S. media all but ignored it. The brothers have voiced public apologies and served their sentences. While one was sentenced to two months in jail, the other was sentenced to six months but served only two months due to four months’ time he spent in custody during the trial. Both will perform 50 hours of community service, will undergo substance abuse counseling, and will be on probation for 30 months.

The cross burned by these two men was dumped into a dumpster by local police and the noose hung on the cross was never found. In this case, as in the California case, police actions effectively hindered the subsequent investigations. If hate crimes of any type are to be tried successfully, awareness among the public in general and police officers in particular must be raised. Such crimes are not pranks. They impact individuals and families to an extent onlookers may never fully understand.

As Michelle Lyon told a local paper shortly after the cross was burned on her family’s front lawn, her 14-year-old daughter had grown afraid even to wait for her school bus. Who knows what else the Howe-Lyon children have come to fear, how much this crime and their family’s move will impact their ability to trust others or their tendency to question themselves because of the color of their skin?

What stresses have the hate crime targeted against them placed on Shayne Howe and Michelle Lyon’s relationship? Who knows what a young woman of mixed-race heritage in California, in a town marketed as “the gem” of the California coast, thinks about herself and her place in such an idealized world after having a very large cross burned mere feet from her bedroom window? We’ll never know.

All we can do is insist our public officials not only recommit to protecting everyone from all types of abuse, but recognize that hate crimes deserve to be taken just as seriously and investigated just as efficiently as any other crimes. The victims of these two cross-burnings and of hate crimes committed against people of any heritage or orientation in recent—and long past—years deserve at least that.

Karen DeGroot Carter, a native of Syracuse NY and a graduate of Syracuse University, lives with her mixed-race family in Denver. Her novel, ONE SISTER’S SONG, explores challenges faced by people of mixed-race heritage and her blog, BEYOND Understanding, highlights resources that promote tolerance and celebrate diversity. Contact Karen at karen@mixedandhappy.com.

By Karen DeGroot Carter

Akron, OHIO — When Khristi and Charles Cunningham take their twins, Triniti and Ghabriael (Gabe), anywhere in their Ohio town, they know to allow plenty of extra time. “They get a crowd when people learn they’re twins,” Khristi says, “not only because of their different complexions, but because Gabe is so much bigger. People ask ‘Are you sure they’re twins?’”

Khristi and Charles are sure. Born September 25, 2009 and now 17 months old, Triniti and Gabe do look very different from each other: Triniti has brown skin and hair and eyes while Gabe has fair skin and hair and blue eyes. According to their mom, they got a lot of attention in the intensive care unit where they stayed after they arrived 11 weeks early weighing only about three pounds each.

“The nurses called them ‘the black and white twins,’” she remembers, adding some of the nurses jokingly asked if she and Charles were sure they had the right babies. “When their incubators weren’t near each other at first, some of the nurses thought they were just two babies with the same last name.”

When the twins’ incubators were finally put side-by-side, it became evident they were indeed unique. As far as Khristi, who’s white, and Charles, who’s black, were concerned, they were perfect. “We’d joked—what if we had one black and one white twin,” Khristi says, explaining she’d  had a lot of time to think about her twins while on bed rest for six months—four months in the hospital—during her high-risk pregnancy. “I watched TV a lot, went on the Internet a lot, and prayed a lot,” she says, explaining that after a miscarriage at four months during a

previous pregnancy, she and Charles knew if this one didn’t work out, it would be their last. “We just put it all in God’s hands.”

Khristi and Charles met when they were both correctional officers in an Ohio prison; they moved to Akron when the twins were born to be near Charles’s family. The twins see their paternal grandmother all the time and their maternal grandmother, who also lives in Ohio, at least once a month. “It really helps to have family around,” Khristi says.

Determined to raise her twins grounded in the knowledge of “where they come from,” Khristi notes she’s had to deal with some online comments questioning how she’s going to successfully raise such “different” children, even asking her “What have you done?”

“We’ve been dealing with [prejudice] for years,” Khristi explains; when she and Charles lived in a more rural community, she was referred to as “the little white girl” Charles had married—and was fired by their mutual employer—at that time, an auto company—for no other reason. Charles had been fired by the same company and reinstated only after the Ohio Civil Rights Commission was brought in to investigate. Charles now works as a case worker for at-risk youths.

“This is why we don’t mind taking time to talk to people when we’re out with the twins,” Khristi insists. “People do have questions and they should be answered. It’s the only way to fight prejudice.”

For their part, Triniti and Gabe don’t seem to notice all the fuss. Like any twins, they alternate from sharing to picking on each other. Triniti, who is 10 pounds lighter than her brother, is the “tough” one who’s always trying to “beat up” her twin. “Gabe thinks it’s funny,” their mom says. “It’s like she’s tickling him.” Though they no longer share a crib, the twins still curl up next to each other to sleep sometimes. Their parents have a photo of Triniti and Gabe sucking each other’s fingers when they were newborns. “They’ve definitely bonded,” Khristi notes. “They’re like two peas in a pod.”

Karen DeGroot Carter, a native of Syracuse NY and a graduate of Syracuse University, lives with her mixed-race family in Denver. Her novel, ONE SISTER’S SONG, explores challenges faced by people of mixed-race heritage and her blog, BEYOND Understanding, highlights resources that promote tolerance and celebrate diversity.