"The Hate Crimes You Don't Hear About"
The Hate Crimes You Don’t Hear About
by Russ Kick
Cleveland, Ohio. A white man on a moped accidentally bumped into a truck being driven by a
black man. He fell over but was not injured. A crowd of 40 white people pulled the black driver
from the truck and brutally beat him. One of them climbed in the truck and ran over the driver, killing
him. The crowd cheered.
Jacksonville, Florida. A group of four to six white men agreed that they would brutalize the next
black person they saw walking down the street. That person turned out to be a mentally disabled
50-year-old, whom they beat and stomped into unconsciousness. He later died of his injuries.
Are you surprised that you’ve never heard of these sickening murders based on racial hatred? You
didn’t see saturation coverage on the news. You didn’t hear politicians decrying racism. You didn’t
see a livid Jesse Jackson on CNN. Why? Because these acts of brutality didn’t happen exactly as I
described above. Oh, they happened, all right. The only thing is, the races of the attackers and
victims were reversed. That is, a white man was beaten and then crushed by a mob of 40 black
people who were furious that a black man bumped into his truck.¹ In Jacksonville, it was a gang of
black men who stomped a mentally-disabled man to death solely because he was white.²
Because these hate crimes were perpetrated by black against whites — even though
they were based completely on racial hatred — the national media, politicians, and civil
rights leaders ignored them.
If these acts of savagery had indeed happened as I originally described them above, you would
have heard about them. But because they were perpetrated by blacks against whites — even though
they were based completely on racial hatred — the national media, politicians, and civil rights leaders
ignored them. As opposed to the deaths of Yusef Hawkins and James Byrd, these deaths are only
reported in the local media. And even then, the races of the people involved are often not mentioned.
Below are some more hate crimes that have been ignored because they happened the “wrong
way” (i.e., they were black-on-white instead of white-on-black).
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Upset about a racial name-calling that occurred earlier that night,
several black men savagely beat a random white man who had had nothing to do with the
incident. He slipped away from his attackers, but they forced him to swim into a lake to
escape. He drowned. The three men were sentenced to less than a year in jail.3
Massachusetts. Four black men decided to murder the next white person they saw. That
unlucky soul was a college student from Boston, whom the men stabbed to death.4
Indiana. A black man was arrested for killing seven white people with a shotgun. He
explained that he murdered his victims due to his “deep-rooted hatred” of white people.5
Miami, Florida. The leader of a black supremacist sect (i.e., the “Yaweh ben Yaweh cult”)
was convicted of the murders of several white people. He ordered his followers to kill any
and all “white devils.” They killed at least seven white people, bringing back body parts to
their leader.6
North Carolina. Seven black men kidnapped a white woman, raped her, put her in a tub of
bleach, shot her five times, and dumped her body. The murderers said they did this for racial
reasons.7
North Carolina. Four black teenagers lured a white, ten-year-old girl into an empty house.
“There, they sodomized her, strangled her with a cable wire, and beat her to death with a
board. In the past few weeks, the trials in the Tiffany Long case have received extensive
coverage in the North Carolina press. But with two of the three defendants already sentenced
to lifelong prison terms, and the third now standing trial, the national media have all but
ignored the story. Only the Associated Press has reported on the trials, in a single, cursory
piece. The AP, of course, failed to mention the race of the people involved — an oversight it
seldom if ever committed in the case of Amadou Diallo.”8
Boulder, Colorado. After discovering that one of their members had never had sex with a
white woman, an Asian gang went looking for one. When they found a white University of
Colorado student, the six men gang raped her in their minivan for two hours.
At their trial, “Detectives described the woman’s night of terror, including repeated threats
to kill her.
“The woman leaped out of the minivan after one of the men raped her. Naked, she sprinted
across Lefthand Canyon Road before Steve Yang tackled her, authorities said.
“‘They were all screaming at her, calling her names and hitting her,’ Detective Jane Harmer
testified.
“Yang put her in a headlock and dragged her back into the van, where she was raped
repeatedly, Harmer said.
“‘It was a free-for-all,’ Harmer testified.
“One man threatened to ‘cut and burn her,’ and another put a gun barrel to the back of her
head when they released her, Harmer said.”9
Kansas City, Missouri. An Ethiopian immigrant shot two white coworkers — killing one and
critically injuring the other — at his workplace, then turned the gun on himself. At his
residence, police found a three-page, signed note he had written in which he railed at “black
blood sucker supreme white people” for oppressing him and black people in general.10
New York City. In a Midtown office building, a white woman was assaulted, raped, and anally
raped by a black man who called her racist names during the attack. Police refused to label it
a hate crime.11
Alexandria, Virginia. A black man walking through a neighborhood went over to a white
eight-year-old boy playing in his great-grandparents’ front yard and slit the child’s throat,
killing him. A witness says that the attacker shouted racial epithets during the attack, and the
main suspect in the case owns anti-white hate literature and had written a note about killing
white children. He had been previously arrested for attacking an unarmed white stranger with
a hammer. (During the attack, he called his victim “Whitey.”)12
This particular case provides a perfect example of the terrible way that anti-white hate
crimes are handled. First, the investigators decided not to tell police officers about the racial
aspects of the case, even while the police were conducting a manhunt to find the boy’s killer.
When this was revealed by the Washington Post, city council member Joyce Woodson
defended this withholding of information from the cops on the front line. “What they did was
proper. We already live in a racially charged world.” The Democratic mayor of Alexandria
implied his agreement: “Efforts to sensationalize this investigation will only hurt this
investigation.”13
To make things even stranger, the FBI offered to send agents and a fugitive task force to
help with the manhunt, but the local police rejected the offer. They also refused the help of the
FBI’s profilers, forensics experts, and others.14
Eventually, the police arrested a suspect who was reportedly tied to the scene by DNA
evidence. In another bizarre move, the Justice Department — which had acknowledged that it
was monitoring the case — declined to prosecute the killing as a hate crime. The
government’s prosecutor in the case cannot charge the victim with a hate crime. “There’s no
applicable hate crimes law in Virginia,” he explained.15
An editorial in the Washington Times pointedly commented on the deafening silence
surrounding the brutal child-murder: “Has anyone seen Jesse Jackson around lately? Kweisi
Mfume? Al Sharpton? For persons whose political antennae are ordinarily so sensitive that
they can pick up racial tremors a thousand miles away, they seem to have overlooked a
possible hate crime right here in the vicinity of the nation’s capital.”
Even though all of the above incidents occurred in the last ten years, anti-white hate crimes
are not new. The Village Voice writes of “the wave of random street killings that terrorized
San Francisco in 1973. The ‘Zebra killers’ struck without warning, murdering whites at night.
Most victims were shot. One was raped, another beheaded. Four young black Muslims were
arrested in 1974 and charged with 14 murders, seven assaults, one rape, and an attempted
kidnapping. The Zebra killers were convicted in 1976.”16
The Exceptions That Prove the Rule
On extremely rare occasions a vicious black-on-white hate crime does make the national
news. This was the case with the Central Park jogger and Colin Ferguson. Just why these two
violent acts of hatred bubbled up into mass consciousness — while others that are at least as
heinous have been ignored — is not clear. Nevertheless, it is instructive to examine them
because, though they received wide attention, they were still treated differently than their
white-on-black counterparts.
The Central Park jogger, you’ll recall, was a white woman who was gang raped and beaten
almost to death by a gang of black and Hispanic teenagers in 1989. This incident introduced
the term “wilding” to the nation. As Nicholas Stix described it: “The boys dragged her 200
yards to a secluded place, where they fractured her skull with a plastic-wrapped, four-foot
lead pipe, and some large rocks. The boys ripped the Jogger’s clothes off of her, tying her
hands behind her back with her sweatshirt, gagging her, and taking turns beating, stomping,
and raping the unconscious woman, as 75 per cent of her blood oozed into the Central Park
grass. They left her, with bruises, welts, and wounds literally from head to toe, for dead.”17
Despite the fact that physical evidence, eye witnesses, and video-taped
confessions by the attackers in their parents’ presence all pointed to the young
men’s guilt, protestors outside the courtroom referred to the trial as a
“lynching.”
The assault was officially declared not to be a hate crime, and some influential black media
and commentators — including Al Sharpton and two of New York’s African-American
newspapers — declared that prosecuting the attackers was an act of racism. Some even
questioned whether the attack really happened. Despite the fact that physical evidence,
eyewitnesses, and videotaped confessions by the attackers in their parents’ presence all
pointed to the young men’s guilt, protestors outside the courtroom referred to the trial as a
“lynching.”18
Four years later, a black man named Colin Ferguson opened fire inside a commuter train in
Long Island. Six people died and nineteen were injured. “Police recovered from Ferguson’s
pocket a handwritten note titled, ‘Reasons for This.’ It expressed hatred towards whites,
Asians, and ‘Uncle Tom blacks,’ and stated that Nassau County, Long Island was chosen as
‘the venue’ because of its predominantly white population.”19 How did politicians and
commentators respond to this racially motivated bloodbath? President Clinton ignored the
racial aspects, instead using the incident as an excuse to once again call for tighter gun control
laws. Commentators either denied that it was a hate crime or admitted that it was but then tied
themselves in knots to explain it away. The Dallas Morning News interviewed a sociologist
who “conceded that Ferguson picked his victims on the basis of race, but did not think this
justified the hate crime label.”20
A scholarly book on hate crimes (discussed more below) notes: “When the Reverend Louis
Farrakhan, Nation of Islam leader, mentioned Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad mass
murderer, at a rally in New York City, the audience cheered. In a speech before an audience
of 2,000 at Howard University, Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammed drew loud
applause when he stated, ‘I love Colin Ferguson, who killed all those white folks on the
train.’”21
The Overall Numbers
When presented with these horrifying violent acts committed against whites for racial
reasons, some people respond with the argument that these occurrences must be flukes.
They’re just isolated incidents, this line of reasoning goes; surely the overall statistics show that
whites attack blacks much more often than blacks attack whites.
This is a “straw man” argument: Even if it were true, it would still not affect the fundamental
point that anti-black hate crimes receive national coverage and trigger political denunciations,
while anti-white crimes are ignored. Besides, isn’t the media all about reporting flukes? As
they say in the news business, “Dog bites man” is not a story, but “Man bites dog” is. Or, to
use another example, an airplane landing safely is not news — an airplane crashing is. So if
these instances of anti-white violence were incredibly rare, that would be even more of a
justification for covering them, not less. But these instances aren’t rare. The statistics show
this.
The book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics is a revelatory study of the
phenomena. It was coauthored by James B. Jacobs, who is the director of the Center for
Research in Crime and Justice at New York University and a professor of law at the NYU
School of Law, and Kimberly Potter, an attorney who was formerly a research fellow at the
Center for Research in Crime and Justice. Published by Oxford University Press as part of
their Studies in Crime and Public Policy series, its credibility is as impeccable as possible.
The loudly promoted “hate crime epidemic” in America is an illusion.
Jacobs and Potter examine many of the myths and problems surrounding the idea of hate
crimes, showing, among other things, that the loudly promoted “hate crime epidemic” in
America is an illusion. Hate crimes have never been more than a tiny fraction of overall violent
crime, and the numbers have actually been holding steady or decreasing in recent years.22
The authors also reveal the surprising statistics regarding interracial crime. It turns out that
80 percent of violent crimes involve an attacker and victim of the same race. “For the 20
percent of violent crimes that are interracial, 15 percent involve black offenders and white
victims; 2 percent involve white offenders and black victims; and 3 percent involve other
combinations.”23
These statistics include all instances of interracial violent crime, not just those labeled “hate
crimes.” To see the rates of anti-white and anti-black violence that have been categorized as
hate crimes, one only needs to take a cursory look at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports
specifically on hate crime to see that blacks commit them at a higher rate than whites.24
According to the US Census Bureau’s most recent projection (for Sept. 1, 2000), 82.2
percent of the US population is white, while 12.8 percent is black. If Hispanics are excluded
from both counts, then the numbers are 71.4 percent white and 12.2 percent black.25
In the most recent year for which FBI data are available (1998), we see that there were
2,084 anti-black hate crimes committed by whites, and 567 anti-white hate crimes committed
by blacks. Though the absolute number of anti-black crimes is 3.6 times as high as anti-white
crimes, keep in mind that there are almost six times as many whites as blacks in the US. To
get a true picture, we need to look at the proportional rates.
Eighty percent of violent crimes involve an attacker and victim of the same
race.
If we divide each population by the number of crimes committed by individuals in that
population, we see that there was one anti-black attack for every 94,436 white people, but
one anti-white attack for every 59,172 black people. Thus, the rate of black-perpetrated hate
crimes against whites is approximately 1.6 times higher than the rate of white-perpetrated hate
crimes against blacks.
Looking at hate crimes involving death and rape tells an even starker story. In 1998 five
white people were killed in hate crimes, while three black people were killed in the same
period. During that year, four women of each race were raped as a result of racial hatred. If
these incidents were occurring between the races at equal rates based on their populations,
we’d expect to see six times as many blacks killed and raped by whites as the opposite. Yet
we see an equal number of rapes and almost twice as many anti-white slayings.
How can we ever hope to bridge the racial divide if we won’t even look at the
hard facts of racism?
The Final Analysis
Although these publicly available but long-ignored facts are incendiary, the purpose of this
article is certainly not to stir up even more racial animosity. There’s already too much as it is.
But how can we ever hope to bridge the racial divide if we won’t even look at the hard facts
of racism? Is anything good accomplished when one type of hate crime receives nationwide
attention, while another type of hate crime — which occurs at higher rates — is swept under
the rug?
It’s obvious that the media, politicians, and civil rights groups have an agenda: They want to
keep us ignorant of the realities of race relations. They present us with the completely untrue
view that only white people commit hate crimes, or, if it must be admitted that blacks also
commit hate crimes, they are seen as isolated incidents, bizarre anomalies that somehow don’t
qualify as hate crimes.
The reality of the situation is that we’re all attacking each other. A look at the FBI’s hate
crime statistics will pry the scales from your eyes. Besides the figures already mentioned,
you’ll see that Native Americans and whites are attacking each other in equal numbers, blacks
are attacking Asians, Asians are attacking Jews, multi-racial groups are attacking blacks, and
on and on.
The issue of violent racial hatred is much more complex, universal, and
disturbing than the simple-minded white-on-black paradigm that is universally
touted.
People are even committing hate crimes against members of the same race. In 1998, for
example, the FBI logged 123 hate crimes committed by whites against other whites, 64 by
blacks against blacks, and a few by Asians against Asians and Native Americans against
Native Americans. The reason for these apparently bizarre phenomena is that the “races” are
not as monolithic as we commonly assume. They are divided into various ethnicities,
nationalities, and other subdivisions, and these groups often hate each other.26 So it’s not
unheard of to have hate crimes between people of British and Italian descent (both considered
white), between African Americans and Haitian Americans (both black), between people of
Japanese and Korean descent (both Asian), or between members of different Native
American tribes.
Clearly, the issue of violent racial hatred is much more complex, universal, and disturbing
than the simple-minded white-on-black paradigm that is universally touted. We need to
accept this fact as individuals, then pressure the media, politicians, and other opinion-makers
to accept it, too, and start telling the sticky truth about the situation.
Endnotes
1.Perazzo, John. (1999). The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned
American Race Relations. Briarcliff Manor, NY: World Studies Books, p. 58.
2.. Womble, Shannon. (1999). “2 jailed in killing motivated by race.” Florida
Times-Union, Sept. 4.
3.Op cit., Perazzo, p. 61, referencing: unattributed (1992). “3 blacks sentenced in ‘90
racial attack.” Chicago Tribune, May 20.
4.Ibid., p. 59, referencing: Barnacle, Mike. (1991). “A double standard for race
crimes?” Asbury Park Press, March 7.
5.Ibid., referencing: Knight-Ridder News. (1991). “AWOL Marine in Indiana admits
seven racial killings, sources say.” Miami Herald, Feb. 2.
6.Ibid., referencing: unsigned. (1991). “The killing class.” Miami Herald, Feb. 24;
Gehrke, Donna. (1992). “ ‘I felt power’ while slaying 6 people, former Yaweh ‘death
angel’ testifies.” Miami Herald, Jan. 30.
7.Op cit., Perazzo, p. 173, referencing: Edwards, Wayne. (1994). “Three strikes?”
Destiny, Feb.
8.Unsigned. (2000). “Tiffany Long: Too white to be a victim.” FrontPage Magazine,
Feb. 29. www.frontpagemag.com.
9.McCullen, Kevin. (1999). “Rape suspects were seeking white woman.” Denver Rocky
Mountain News, Sept. 30.
10.Associated Press. (1999). “Kansas City airport shooting victims identified.” Jefferson
City News Tribune, Nov. 22.
11.Weiss, Murray, et al. (1999). “Cops fume over lousy video of 6th Ave. rapist.” New
York Post, Dec. 22.
12.Davis, Patricia. (2000). “Manhunt in Alexandria for killer of 8-year-old.” Washington
Post, April 20; Drake, John & Ellen Sorokin (2000a). “Stabbing probers kept race a
secret.” Washington Post, July 12; unsigned. (2000). “The hate crime that wasn’t.”
Washington Times, July 12.
13.Op cit., Drake & Sorokin (2000a); Sorokin, Ellen & John Drake. (2000b). “Boy’s
stabbing draws attention about race.” Washington Times, July 13.
14.Op cit., Drake & Sorokin (2000a).
15.Rubush, Scott. (2000). “Black hate on trial.” FrontPage Magazine, Oct. 26.
16.Noel, Peter. (1999). “Bring me the head.” Village Voice, Feb. 3-9.
17.Stix, Nicholas. (2000). “Remembering the Central Park jogger.” FrontPage
Magazine, July 12.
18.Jacobs, James B. & Kimberly Potter. (1998). Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and
Identity Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 140-2.
19.Ibid., p. 139.
20.Ibid.
21.Ibid.
22.Ibid., pp. 45-64, especially pp. 63-4.
23.Ibid., pp. 16-17.
24.The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports are online at fbi.gov
25.US Census Bureau. “Resident Population Estimates of the United States by Sex, Race,
and Hispanic Origin: April 1, 1990 to July 1, 1999, with Short-Term Projection to
September 1, 2000.” census.gov
26.Op cit., Jacobs & Potter, pp. 18-9, Perlmutter, Philip. (1999). Legacy of Hate: A
Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America. Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe. |
