Blacks face hate crimes amid gains
Despite national focus on issues, incidents go on
Indiana officials are investigating a July Fourth weekend incident in which a white man is accused of yelling, “Get a noose“and pinning a Black man against a tree.
This came after nooses were found hanging in Las Vegas, Portland, Oregon, and Baltimore, and nooses were used to target a Black person at work in Nebraska and a Black man at home in Delaware. Five Black men were found hanging from trees in California, New York, Texas and New Jersey – all ruled as suicides, though activists called for further investigation.
A range of racial incidents have happened since George Floyd’s death and subsequent protests against racism and police brutality. In Illinois, a man was charged with a hate crime for allegedly riding his motorcycle into a protest and hitting two people. Authorities said a KKK leader tried to run his car through a group of peaceful protesters in Virginia. Video shows a white man accelerating his car toward a Black woman in a Wisconsin parking lot.
Also in Wisconsin, a white lawyer who allegedly spit on a Black teen protester was charged with a hate crime, and a white man who allegedly burned Althea Bernstein, a biracial woman, with lighter fluid is being investigated for a hate crime.
Gunshots damaged a historically Black church in Kentucky, and five white people face hate crime charges in an attack on a Black pastor in Virginia.
Across the USA, Black people reported alleged hate crimes – criminal offenses motivated by bias. As the Black Lives Matter movement has rallied demonstrators and gained support across racial groups, concerns have arisen about violent backlash targeting people of color, similar to the ones that played out during previous movements against racism.
The incidents have left many Black Americans fearing for their safety.
“They feel afraid that there are violent racists who are going to go after them,” says Roy Austin, a Black lawyer who was the former deputy assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
History of backlash
During previous movements toward racial equity, white Americans responded with violence.
More than 4,400 Black people were killed in terror lynchings from 1887 to 1950, starting with the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War and through protests against discriminatory Black codes and Jim Crow laws, according to the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama. Once Black men were able to vote, Southern states used many tactics to prevent them from casting ballots, including mob violence and lynching, according to the Constitutional Rights Foundation.
Economic progress has also been met with violence, such as in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when what was known as “Black Wall Street,” was destroyed in 1921 by a white mob that massacred hundreds of Black people and left thousands homeless. During the civil rights movement, Black people were terrorized with police brutality, including the use of fire hoses and dogs.
A year after the Black Lives Matter protests that began in 2014, sparked by the police shooting of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Missouri, police killed more unarmed Black people, according to Mapping Police Violence. The number of people killed by law enforcement has remained steady – roughly 1,000 people per year – in each of the past four years, according to The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” project. In Black Lives Matter protests since 2014, police have responded with tanks and tear gas, firing rubber bullets and pushing protesters to the ground.
Hate crimes are underreported
Though FBI hate crime statistics showed a slight dip from 2017 to 2018, incidents of person-directed physical assaults (rather than property damage or vandalism) were up both year over year and compared with the past decade, said civil rights attorney Brian Levin, a professor and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State UniversitySan Bernardino.
Activists said there are probably many more hate crimes unreported.
Lecia Brooks, chief workplace transformation officer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the FBI’s hate crime report is not reliable because its data collection is voluntary. Many law enforcement agencies report zero hate crimes in their cities or don’t report to the FBI.
Law enforcement officials tend to rule hangings as suicide, even when evidence points to a lynching, Brooks said.
“It’s hard when you don’t have trust between community members and law enforcement, which speaks to the fear of African American communities when they believe it could have been a lynching,” Brooks said. “It’s indicative of radicalized trauma and trauma when someone is hanged.”
Edward Dunbar, a clinical professor and psychologist at the University of California-Los Angeles, whose research focuses on hate crimes, said law enforcement in communities outside the South historically are more likely to report attacks against people of color as hate crimes.
“The best predictor of a state reporting hate crimes for the last 25 years is what side were you on for the Civil War,” he said “The Union has the highest reportage, the states that were on neither side have a reasonable number, and the Southern states have the lowest numbers.”
Many victims do not report incidents of hate crimes because of distrust toward law enforcement, said Jeannine Bell, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, whose research focuses on systemic racism.
“There is plenty of space for reforms to increase trust within the African American communities,” Bell said.
Though most states have hate crime laws on the books, it can be difficult to prosecute these crimes because the government must prove the primary motivation for the offense is a bias against a protected class. In Iowa, two white men charged with assaulting a Black man have not been charged with hate crimes. Though they yelled racial slurs, it was not enough evidence to establish race as the primary motive, according to police.
Law enforcement officials must ask the right questions, said Stacey Hervey, a professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver whose research focuses on extremism and hate crimes. Hate crimes are identified by the language used, the identity of the perpetrator, prior hate crimes and witnesses’ testimonies. The growth of cellphone videos can help law enforcement officials prove a hate crime.
Incidents of police brutality, even when bias-motivated, are often not ruled as hate crimes, noted Jessica Hodge, a professor at the University of St. Thomas.
Racist rhetoric can fuel violence
Election years can be particularly violent for minority groups when lawmakers target them as scapegoats, Levin said.
“When leaders make statements, it actually correlates with increases in hate crimes,” Levin said. “When sociopolitical landscape gets divisive, often the group that is singled out for disdain is where we see an increase in hate crimes against that group.”
There’s been an uptick in anti-Asian crimes because of racist rhetoric surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, Levin said. President Donald Trump has referred to the virus as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.”
According to the Pew Research Center, 3 in 10 Asian Americans say they’ve experienced slurs and jokes since the COVID-19 outbreak.
According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ report in 2018, anti-Muslim hate crimes have increased by 74% since Trump’s election.
Anti-Latino hate crimes rose 21% in 2018, according to the FBI. In 2019, one of the deadliest anti-Latino attacks occurred in El Paso, Texas, when Patrick Crusius, a white gunman, killed 22 people in a Walmart.