U.S. Struggle Against Hate Crimes Is Unending Effort
Washington â€" Before he was assassinated in 1968, African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Hatred paralyzes life … confuses life … darkens life.” Since then the American people and their government have dedicated themselves to battling bias and the violence it often engenders.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Washington — Before he was assassinated in 1968, African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Hatred paralyzes life … confuses life … darkens life.” Since then the American people and their government have dedicated themselves to battling bias and the violence it often engenders.
Federal law now defines a hate crime as bias that is acted upon in a direct, harmful way against a person or property the offender intentionally selects based on race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability or sexual orientation.
In the United States, racial bias against African Americans remains the most frequently reported reason for hate crimes, which can range from vandalism to physical assault, and in extreme cases murder.
Attorney General Eric Holder touched on the problem in June when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering new hate crime legislation. Holder, the first African American to hold the position of U.S. attorney general, said the bill was important because “hate crimes victimize not only individuals, but entire communities.”
Holder told lawmakers, “Hate crimes statistics reported to the FBI by state and local law enforcement agencies demonstrate that we have a significant hate crimes problem in this country. Over the past decade, approximately half of the hate crime incidents reported in the United States were racially motivated.”
At the same time, Holder said, “many other victim classes are targeted for hate crimes. For example, during the last decade, religiously motivated incidents have generally accounted for the second highest number of hate crime incidents, followed closely by sexual orientation bias incidents.”
Recent statistics also indicate that hate crimes against people of Hispanic national origin have increased four years in a row, he said.
Holder told lawmakers the federal government has “a strong interest in protecting people from violent crimes motivated by such bias and bigotry.”
In its most recent report of hate crime statistics, the FBI noted that hate crimes for 2008 were slightly up over the previous year: 7,783 incidents with 9,691 victims — including individuals, businesses and institutions — with 4,943 crimes based on race.
Most states have laws against hate crimes, and in 2004 Congress provided funding for anti-hate crime training to state and local law enforcement agencies. Nongovernmental organizations like the U.S.-based International Association of Chiefs of Police ( IACP ) also host conferences and provide written guidance on the issue.
On October 28, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, named in part for James Byrd Jr., an African-American man who in 1998 was dragged to death on a three-mile section of country road in rural Texas.
The new act is the first expansion of federal civil rights laws since the mid-1990s. It adds several new categories of biases based on gender, disability and sexual orientation. The law was co-named for Matthew Shepard, a young man who was killed in Wyoming in 1998. During his murderer’s trial, witnesses said Shepard was targeted because he was homosexual. Over the past 10 years, the FBI reported more than 12,000 hate crimes based on sexual orientation.
At a signing ceremony at the White House attended by Byrd’s and Shepard’s family members, Obama called the bill another step in the continuing struggle to protect human rights. “We must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones, but to break spirits — not only to inflict harm, but to instill fear.”
Following the attack on the United States by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, there were concerns that U.S. Muslims would be victims of bias and revenge attacks based on their ethnicity and religion.
President Obama, whose father was a Muslim, stressed the importance of the Muslim community in the United States to an audience in Cairo June 4. “Let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion or station in life, all of us share common aspirations — to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities and our God,” he said.
Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations ( CAIR ), a leading U.S. Muslim advocacy organization, told America.gov that while attacks on Muslims and vandalism of mosques have occurred, “whenever we’ve brought a bias incident to the attention of law enforcement authorities, whether at the local or state level, we generally get a good response.”
CAIR on December 3 released an annual report, Seeking Full Inclusion ( PDF, 3MB ), that not only deals with hate crimes against Muslims in America but also cases of bias and discrimination. “We get several thousand reports of discrimination — work place issues and in the schools, things like that — each year, but actual cases of hate crimes — physical violence — tends to be a small category,” Hooper said.
Nonviolent examples of bias in the report that are not in the hate crime category, Hooper said, are things like “someone fired because they wanted to wear a headscarf at work; a kid who was harassed at school because he was Muslim; airport and border profiling incidents [that isolate Muslims for extra security scrutiny]; delay of citizenship application based on national origin — those kinds of issues.”
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