Hate crime hoaxes aren't rare
Actor Jussie Smollet recently claimed to be the victim of a politically inspired hate crime. Numerous politicians, public figures and even some national news outlets uncritically accepted that claim and amplified it. Smollet's story has since fallen apart.
One hopes this will cause more people to view such claims with a critical eye. Even if false reports were not cause for subsequent embarrassment for believers, the impulse to ascribe virulently racist views to roughly half the country does nothing to enhance discourse.
Smollet, who is black and gay, said he was assaulted about 2 a.m. on Jan. 29 by two men who shouted racist and anti-gay slurs as well as “This is MAGA country!” The latter is a reference to President Trump's “Make American Great Again” campaign theme.
There were immediate problems with Smollet's story. To believe him, you had to believe two thugs wandered the streets of Chicago on one of the coldest nights of the year while carrying a rope noose and a bottle of bleach. Yet many prominent figures accepted the story uncritically, denouncing the alleged event as a “modernday lynching.” The Human Rights Campaign declared the alleged attack was “not an isolated incident” and that there is “an alarming epidemic of hate violence in our country.”
Instead, the attack was bogus and Smollet now faces a felony charge of filing a false report. Unfortunately, such false reports are not rare.
In 2016, a woman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, falsely claimed a man threatened to set her on fire if she didn't remove her hijab. That same year, Jordan Brown, a gay pastor and activist, falsely claimed a baker at Whole Foods wrote a homophobic slur on a cake. Brown relented only after Whole Foods sued and produced video contradicting the claim.
Reporting on the Smollet case, the Boston Herald recapped other hoaxes, including a Kansas State University student who said a racist note was left on her door in 2018 (she wrote the note herself) and a 2013 incident in Massachusetts where a racial slur was painted on the home of a biracial teenager (the student's mother painted the graffiti).
It should be a red flag that many false hate crime reports portray alleged perpetrators as Republicans. That should at least suggest underlying motives may be involved.
Crimes motivated by blind hatred do occur. The 2017 murder of a transgender teen in Missouri is an example. But they are rare. The FBI maintains a log of all reported hate crimes from graffiti on up. In 2017, it included around 7,000 incidents. National Review Online points out that's an incidence rate
“in the range of 0.00002 percent.”
Thus, those willing to believe such events are not only common but representative of the attitudes of millions of fellow Americans are giving in to a prejudice almost as irrational as the bigotry that fuels genuine hate crimes.