By AL CALLOWAY
Local law enforcement agencies reported 6,121 hate crimes across America in 2016. According to an FBI report, there were “867 post-election hate incidents” last year. African Americans were victims of at least half of all hate crimes related to race. However, the agency acknowledges that theirs is not an accurate report because only 11.6 percent of local law enforcement departments reported hate crimes to the FBI last year. No requirement exists for them to do so.
South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, reported less than 35 hate crimes each for 2016, as did (blue state) Delaware. Common sense dictates that those five southern former slave states just don’t want the world to know how deep seated racial attitudes are practiced openly in that region of America; but we all know the heart of “Trump country.”
While picking on the south with its violent history of so-called race relations may be bad sport, not focusing on say Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana, for example, would, indeed, be foul. That entire state is historically mean on black people. There will be no true statistics on incidents of racially motivated hate crimes in Indiana. I wonder what they are from Pennsylvania to Nebraska.
That there exists no successful campaign of national pressure on law enforcement regimes to provide such necessary details is small wonder. I suspect fear as the reason. White Americans respect and revere law enforcement regimes while blacks and other people of color try to stay out of reach. Hate crimes perpetrated against people of color by white law enforcement personnel and the judicial system is universal, unpunished/unproven and openly allowed.
Civil rights officials and workers also shy away from law enforcement regimes; including the FBI whose history has been openly so-called racist – actually white supremacist through its long time first director, J. Edger Hoover. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) not only fear for themselves, members of their families and friends being thoroughly investigated, very quietly, for attempting to exact equity from law enforcement and the judicial system, but also of being career pressured by lobbyists, Party officials and other political operatives.
American colleges and universities reported 107 racial hate crimes to the FBI in 2016. Unfortunately there are hate crimes against black kids starting in kindergarten, but these racial inequities are called discipline issues instead. Black students are suspended more than whites for the same infractions. A Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance study reveals “that discipline disparities are evident in kindergarten, reach a peak in grades six and seven, and continue to persist throughout high school.”
The Washington Post published an analysis in 2016 that revealed “black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.” Despite being only 13 percent of the nation’s population, African Americans “account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police.” White people begin learning on their father’s knee and at their mother’s breast that non-white people are not as good and that blacks are worse.
Educational systems, church and a basically segregated social life reinforce and exacerbate this belief, and, as a cop, school teacher, job supervisor or minister, a white person is more inclined to act out this learned behavior in some negative manner toward an African American and/or other people of color. The white cop was supposed to shoot a black man suspected of wrongdoing. White America approves it. Therefore, it cannot be a “racially motivated hate crime.”
So, according to a project report by The Guardian, at least 258 black people were killed by police in 2016 – thirty-nine were unarmed! Nine of these black people died in jail and another four were killed by police stun guns. “But the majority of black people killed by police were fatally shot.”
African American men comprise only 6 percent of the nation’s population, but they were “34 percent of the unarmed people killed in 2016” by police, according to the Washington Post. So the FBI is absolutely correct, hate crimes, especially race motivated hate crimes, certainly rose in 2016.
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