An ugly, inhumane act in Bangor last week got an unexpectedly compassionate response from the victim.

Late last Friday night, racist language was spray-painted all over Tahmoor Khan’s car as it sat in his driveway, the Bangor Daily News reported. A neighbor encountered two people vandalizing the vehicle, and they ran off. Police have charged two 15-year-old girls with the crime.

The graffiti included a racial slur several times, along with “KKK,” “KKK Supporter” and a call to kill Black people, some of it scratched into the car with sandpaper.

Asked what message he would give the people who defaced his car, Khan told the BDN, “Be better as individuals. Be better as human beings.”

We shouldn’t expect people targeted by hate to be so gracious in response. It’s hard to overstate the violation and discomfort that are felt when one’s property is destroyed and their family’s safety threatened, all because of how they look. No one should be made to feel that they are unsafe in their home or unwelcome in their community.

But even in the days following such an unsettling attack, Khan was able to see the humanity in the people who attacked him.

The culprits themselves were not able to extend the same courtesy to Khan and his family. The vandals in all likelihood did not think of their targets as real people, just abstractions. If the perpetrators were indeed the teenagers now charged, perhaps their adolescent minds, in that moment, saw the Khans not as people but as outlets for their own fear and ignorance.

If so, they wouldn’t be the first to give in to their worst impulses. The Khan family knows this as well as anyone. Nearly two decades ago, in the days following the attacks of 9/11, a man threatened to kill Khan’s father at the family’s Pakistani restaurant in downtown Bangor, then told an employee to “go back to where he came from.”

Just like the people who vandalized Khan’s car, the man who threatened Khan’s father couldn’t see the humanity of those he attacked; they represented only something different from himself.

Those feelings have no place in a healthy community. Our first collective priority has to be the safety and well-being of our neighbors. It is incumbent upon all of us – but particularly those with power, privilege and influence – to stand up for and beside members of our communities who are targets of hate.

Communities should have no tolerance for hateful acts. But that doesn’t mean the perpetrators are irredeemable, particularly when they are young and likely acting on what they’ve been exposed to.

When someone harms their community with an act of hate, they should have to atone for it in a real way. They should be made to realize how their actions hurt people – actual, three-dimensional people who have to go about their lives carrying the pain and dread caused by those actions.

They should learn to give their neighbors just one ounce of the grace Tahmoor Khan showed last week.

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