Racist Hate Crimes, and How You Encourage Them
According to the FBI’s 2010 Hate Crime Statistic Report, there were 3,949 victims of racially motivated hate crimes in which 70% of offenders had an anti-black bias, 18% anti-white bias, 6% anti-multiple race bias, 5% anti-Asian/Pacific Islander bias, and 1% anti-American Indian bias. Below, we highlight five relatively recent racially motivated hate crimes that received national attention.
National attention.
You know, we absolutely get that. These are heinous crimes. The public absolutely, positively, and without question needs to know that these things are happening — to be aware, in order to protect themselves; to be shocked and angered, enough to reject them and demand that they stop. Countering violent extremism is not just about radical Islam. Countering violent extremism includes stopping any group or individual who uses violence to achieve their goals. Make no mistake — the racists in these cases are violent extremists.
The questions for us, both as citizens and as homeland security professionals, are 1) what is our role, and 2) in what ways can we help mitigate these occurrences?
Our homeland security role is easy enough to address — prevent, protect, and prosecute, when we can. But, in considering the issue, another matter has come to our attention as a society: our tendency to encourage the very behavior we most want to deter.
Perhaps we need to think differently.
What follows are a few examples of racially motivated crimes to frame the discussion:
5. The Charleston Shooting — June, 2015
On June 5th, 2015, a Bible study group met at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Thirteen people attended, including a young white man. While the other participants began praying, he stood up, pulled out a gun, and aimed it at the oldest parishioner, 87-year-old Susie Jackson. After her nephew, Tywanza Sanders, pleaded with the assailant not to shoot Susie, the attacker said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Tywanza dove in front of the gun and was shot. The attacker immediately began to shoot the other parishioners. Two escaped by playing dead, and one was purposefully left alive to report what and why the attacker said he “had to” do it.
4. The Oak Creek Shooting — August, 2012
On August 5, 2012, parishioners were entering a local Sikh temple for Sunday worship in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. A 40 year-old armed man walked inside the temple and started shooting. Many of the worshipers ran for shelter and locked themselves into bathrooms and prayer halls, where they made phone calls and sent text messages for help. The attacker killed Paramjit Kaur, Satwant Singh Kaleka, Prakash Sing, Sita Singh, Ranjit Singh, and Suveg Sing. The assailant was shot in the stomach during a shoot-out with the police who arrived on the scene, and he later took his own life. The man was a neo-Nazi with ties to the Hammerskins, a white supremacist group, and a founder of multiple bands specializing in producing music with messages about racial superiority and white power.
3. The Murder of James Craig Anderson — June, 2011
On June 26, 2011 a group of young white men and women were drinking and partying in the small town of Puckett, Mississippi. One of this party convinced everyone to leave Puckett for the sole purpose of finding African-Americans to attack. These assailants traveled to nearby Jackson, a city with a population of over 75% black citizens, and pulled into a motel where they found James Craig Anderson looking for his keys. The group proceeded to beat him and rob him, but did not stop there. One of the drivers drove his pickup truck over James, causing fatal injuries — all because James was African-American.
2. The Dragging Death of James Byrd, Jr. — June, 1998
On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, 49, was walking home from visiting his parents’ house in Jasper, Texas. On the way, James accepted an offer of a ride from three white men in a pickup truck. Instead of taking Mr. Byrd home, however, the three attackers took Byrd to a remote road, beat and urinated on him, then chained him by his ankles to the truck. The assailants dragged him for more than three miles. Through the ordeal, Byrd remained conscious and only succumbed when his right arm and head were severed, after hitting the edge of a sewage drain culvert. The remains of James’ body were left in front of a small African-American church on Huff Creek Road.
1. The Lynching of Michael Donald — March, 1981
In Mobile, Alabama, on March 21st, 1981, Michael Donald was walking home when two members of the Ku Klux Klan spotted him. They pulled over to ask him for directions to a nightclub, then forced him inside the car at gunpoint. The assailants then took him to a secluded area, beat him with a log, and attempted to strangle him with a rope. After that failed, they cut Michael’s throat and hung him from a tree across the street from the home of the second-highest ranking official in Alabama of the United Klans of America (who, upset over a mistrial in a case in which a black man was accused of killing a white police officer, had said, “If a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man”). Because the Klan members hung him from a tree, his murder is often referred to as the last recorded lynching in the United States. Michael was just 19 years old, and died only because of the color of his skin.
The reader may notice something —
Some readers may feel disgusted. But is there anything else? Perhaps a little disappointed?
Who were the attackers? What’s their story? We answered the general who, what, where, when and how, but seemingly left out a lot of the why. Journalists, in the hours and days and weeks that follow these kinds of horrific events, often inundate the airwaves with details that make us believe we can understand the why. We want to know what motivates these people to do these terrible things. We need to know who these perpetrators are. If we just know more, maybe we can explain why this happened.
We only need to understand these things about these people — they are racists, they are terrorists, and they are motivated by attention. What we should be more worried about is that we are giving them what they wanted in the first place — we need to stop giving them glory and fame; we need to stop sensationalizing them; we need to stop giving them their audience.
This isn’t new. As citizens and homeland security professionals, and as consumers of media, we need to stop focusing on the criminals. We need to stop giving them what they want, and we need to stop giving others like them a path to action. Punish, yes. Reject and ostracize, absolutely. But glorify?
Controlling the rhetoric is important in countering violent extremism, and we can do so by not bringing attention to the perpetrators, but to the victims. And here, we should do so with respect for privacy and a deference to those victims and their families. Countering violent extremism requires a change in society and a recognition that these beliefs and actions can not and will not be praised or accepted by repetition, even as we reject these crimes out of hand.
We glorify the assailants by drawing attention to them. We magnify the problem instead of focusing on the solution. And the solution lies not in a focus on the atrocity, but in the emphasis on compassion and humanity for the victims. Anger has its place, but must be secondary to awareness.
The scrutiny of the horrific lends to a visceral response, and this is precisely the response that extremists want. They want our fear. They want to incite rage to justify their violence and hatred in the guise of self-protection. So long as we give them a voice, then there will be those who hear their message of hate.
When we grieve for the victims and decry the needless tragedies of these racist crimes, we remember the innocents, and we reject hatred.
Let’s also reject the ones who hate by refusing to name them. The only why we need understand is that they are racists, terrorists, and are full of hate.
What do you think? Should details of these crimes and the perpetrators be released? How much information is necessary for the public to be informed?
Feel free to leave your thoughts or suggestions in the comment section.
