While the majority of the country celebrates the election of our first black President, hate crimes such as cross burnings, assaults, black figures hung from nooses and racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars are on the rise. A store in Maine even started a pool where customers could wager a dollar on a date when Obama would be killed.
The sudden increase in racial hate crimes comes on the heels of a recently released FBI report showing that the total number of reported hate crimes involving race and religion actually declined slightly in the United States in 2007. The same report, however, revealed that hate crimes involving sexual orientation are increasing. Crimes against Hispanics also increased for the fourth year in a row. The vast majority of perpetrators in both these crimes were white males.
The term “hate crime” didn’t enter the nation’s vocabulary until the 1980s, when emerging hate groups like the Skinheads launched a wave of bias-related crime. However, the FBI began investigating what we now call hate crimes back in 1922 when they opened their first Ku Klux Klan case.
At the time, the Klan had grown so powerful that Louisiana Governor John M. Parker claimed it effectively controlled the northern half of the state and had kidnapped, tortured, and killed two people and threatened many more. Parker petitioned President Harding to act under the constitutional guarantee that the federal government would protect the states from domestic violence. In 1924, Edward Young Clarke, an advertising executive in the state of Louisiana and Imperial Kleagle of the Klan, pled guilty in federal court to violating the Mann Act. Clarke had been caught taking his mistress across state lines.
The FBI reports are entirely statistical and the bureau offers no explanation for the changes in data, nor does it compare statistics from year to year because the number of law enforcement agencies participating in the data-collection program varies annually. Therefore, one could posit that the increase in crimes against blacks is an aberration rather than a trend, similar to the wave of anti-Muslim violence that swept the country after 9-11. The increase in crimes against gays might be driven in part by the anti-gay rhetoric we hear from some political candidates and church leaders involved in the heated debate over gay marriage. In a similar fashion, the contentious debate over illegal immigration might be driving the increase in crimes against Hispanics. Finding an acceptable resolution to these issues might lead to a decrease in hate crimes.
Regardless of its causes, the Anti-Defamation League reports that nearly one hate crime occurs every hour of every day of the year in the United States. So while we can be proud of the fact that the country took a giant step forward with the election of our first black President, violent bigotry and hatred is, unfortunately, still alive in the United States.