Turn tide on hate
Rise in such crimes can be stopped with the help of leaderswho halt divisive rhetoric.
It should come as no surprise that the latest tallies from the FBI show that the steady rise in hate crimes has persisted. President Donald Trump has played on America’s divisions ever since he announced his campaign in 2015, and reports of rising violence and other crimes motivated by bias against gender, race, orientation and religion have followed his election.
In 2019, the latest year for which numbers are available nationwide, there were 7,314 bias-driven criminal incidents reported by law enforcement agencies. Among them were 51 homicides — the highest number since the FBI started collecting data in the 1990s. The overall number of hate crimes rose above 7,100 for the third straight year, hitting the highest level in more than a decade.
While it would be easy to foist all the blame on the current president and his embrace of racist rhetoric as a way to roil his base, the truth is not so simple. The rise in these kinds of crimes reveals that our problem with hate goes much deeper than one man.
This nation was founded on the ideal of liberty and justice for all, but our history is replete with examples of how we have fallen short of those lofty ambitions. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and systemic racism all are proof of how slow to bend the long arc of justice has been in America. The 45th president’s words and policies merely emboldened the racism and xenophobia that have been part of our country’s history from its founding.
These annual reports should serve as reminders of the work we must continue — and of how the way the president and other leaders speak can either stir up the embers of division or help douse them.
“What the political rhetoric does is put fuel on the fire,” Mark Toubin, Southwest regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the editorial board. “Instead of helping people relate and overcome the changes, it takes advantage of people’s concerns about what’s happening and uses it for political gain.”
The use of social media, which can send messages of hate or help around the globe in seconds, works as an “accelerant,” Toubin added.
Like any problem, the first step for America in tamping down the violence and hate is to recognize the problem, and to correctly identify it. Violence and intolerance from any direction should be opposed. But the bulk of domestic terror threats stems from racially-motivated extremism, specifically white supremacists, as FBI Director Christopher Wray made clear in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee.
White supremacy in all its shapes, and it has morphed into forms alternatively subtle and brazen, is the threat that our elected officials should be combating. There is much they can do to stem the tide.
A good start would be to require all law enforcement agencies to track and report hate crimes to the FBI. Too few currently do, and if the crimes aren’t being tracked they can’t be addressed.
In addition, Congress should pass the NO HATE Act, which would fund training for police, hate crime prevention programs, victim hotlines and better hate crime reporting.
President-elect Joe Biden framed his campaign as a battle for the nation’s soul, and he has made inroads in that direction by talking about the need for unity and healing. “Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses,” he said in his victory speech after clinching 270 electoral votes. “And what presidents say in this battle matters. It’s time for our better angels to prevail.”
Once inaugurated, Biden can do more than talk about it. Trump has cut funding for programs that fight extremism, and Biden can reverse course. But Biden can’t do it alone. Every elected official in the country must condemn racist rhetoric, bias crimes and white supremacy.
More importantly, all of us as Americans must commit to becoming allies in the long struggle still unfolding to perfect the soaring promise of America’s founding — that in this country, all men and women are born equal and are entitled to lives free of the fear that discrimination, hate and violence bring.