This is the message Trevor Coleman, director of communications for the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, expressed Thursday at the Kellogg Center during a hate crime conference through Michigan Alliance Against Hate.

More than 300 members from a number of cultural organizations attended speeches and workshops by invitation, although the event was open to the public as well.

Awareness through workshops

During one of nine workshops at the conference, Coleman described hate groups and racial animosity as a lump on a person’s body. A trip to the doctor’s office is needed, because it could be an indication of something going on. The bump could be benign, malignant or a tumor, he said.

He said Michigan’s “body” has lumps that must be examined, and it is up to civil rights organizations to play doctor. If they are malignant, civil rights organizations must find a way to cut them out before they destroy the rest of the body.

“This conference is a health checkup,” Coleman said. “We have to make people aware and fight these tumors.”

Winston Williams, a United Auto Workers employee who attended the conference with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the workshops were informational and very much needed. Communicating with different groups is a big step in removing the fog that exists between certain organizations, he said.

Too much segregation, not enough integration

Coleman said many first-year students who come to MSU from a segregated high school or town find themselves mixed in with many types of people for the first time in their lives.

Two individuals with different skin colors who have never met could be the same age with the same background from a middle-class area. However, the isolation they are used to keeps them in their comfort zones, and they fail to branch out, Coleman said.

“Michigan is a state with a very big problem,” Coleman said. “It is third in the nation in hate crimes, even though it is a relatively small state. It’s up there with California, and it has more (reported) hate crimes than Mississippi and Alabama combined.”

Awareness can be spread effectively in large numbers, said Harold Core, public information officer for the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.

“The biggest issue we have is the fact that we are so segregated based on race,” Core said. “We just don’t interact. Because people are not interacting, it’s easier for people to blame someone else for an issue we all think about.

“If we could get people to interact, the first thing we would realize is probably the best way to handle a situation, and how to all work on it together.”