In the few days since the neighbor living in the other half of her Oshkosh, Wisconsin, duplex raised a Nazi flag, life has been impossible to fathom for Rosangela Diaz and her family, though they had nothing to do with the emblem of white supremacy — and don't even look the part of people who would. Rosa is a fifth-generation American of Puerto Rican descent; her husband, Jeremy, is African-American.



Still, stacks of hate mail have arrived at their home since the hateful emblem was hung outside the neighbor's door last Friday. The windshield was broken on Rosa's car, and the tires were flattened. The Diazes have received death threats on social media. With no return address but an out-of-state ZIP code stamped in the postage field, a mysterious package arrived at their home Wednesday. Rosa and Jeremy won't allow their four active sons to play outside, as they desperately want to do, because they're afraid someone will call the boys Nazis, as happened a few days ago to their oldest sons, ages 11 and 8. Why the family has been targeted with an unrelenting display of hate stems from a colossal misunderstanding.

The duplex where the Diazes live fronts two streets, so the two tenants technically live on different streets, though they occupy the same dwelling. A passerby noticed the neighbor's Nazi flag on Friday, snapped a picture and posted it on Facebook with the address — the incorrect one, the one on Diaz's street — and assailed the reported rise in white nationalism in America during and after the 2016 presidential election season. The post flew around social media many times beyond the initial shares by the first 3,000 people who saw it. Some who shared it removed the address, but commenters just added it back in. They also threatened to blow up the house, set it on fire and worse, Diaz told Patch.

Diaz chooses to believe her neighbor, who said he flew the Nazi flag Friday, the day President Donald Trump was sworn in, as a political statement against hate groups whose members may feel emboldened by the election. Nothing in their previously friendly neighborly banter gave Diaz cause to believe otherwise, she said. Be that as it may, Diaz wants anonymity for her family in a new neighborhood.

Crowdfunding Campaign for Rent, Deposit Diaz reached a breaking point Monday and started a GoFundMe campaign to scrape together deposit and rent money for a new place. That was the same day two different men knocked at her door to call her out over the Nazi flag and all it stands for. "The first man called me a Nazi," Diaz said. "I told him, 'I am obviously Hispanic, and my husband is as dark as night. I'm not who you want.' About 20 minutes later, another man knocked, but looked directly at me and said, 'You guys obviously didn't put that flag up,' and I sent him around back, too." Monday was also the day Diaz's sons were taunted and called names. "I can deal with the hate mail. I can deal with the regular stuff that comes with being a biracial family. But for people to start approaching me and the kids, that's too much," she said

'You Would Think Racism Would Die' That's the worst part of this ordeal for Diaz — having to explain to her biracial children how to navigate a society increasingly polarized over race. "If it was just me and my husband, I could deal with it," but hassling kids about adults' choices — even if the wrong assumptions are made, as they were in her family's case — should be off limits, Diaz said. That is true whether the target is one of her sons or Barron Trump, the 10-year-old son of Donald and Melania Trump, who was mercilessly ridiculed on social media the weekend of the inauguration, she said.

"As a mom, I spend a good portion of my life teaching my children about equality and treating people with respect and love," Diaz said. "I tell them we have to love no matter what, because that is what we are made for. But it's hard when you have adults approaching your kids with hate." The 8-year-old "blew it off" when he was confronted outside the family's home, Diaz said, but her older son retreated inside of himself some and still hasn't talked about what was actually said. Her older son learned about Anne Frank, the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in school, but most of what he knows about the American Nazi movement is knowledge gained the last few days, Diaz said.