This video pretty much speaks for itself. 

Recently as part of a 680 Billion Dollar National Defense Authorization Bill, President Obama recently signed into law an extension to already existing Federal Hate Crimes Laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity in the definition of Hate Crimes.

Given this occasion I thought it was a good time to take a look at hate crimes in the United States. There's a lot of misinformation out there about Hate Crimes. People insinuate that the laws exist only to protect certain privileged groups and anecdotal evidence is used to suggest enormous secretly hidden problems that the media "ignores".

We should always be wary about using anecdotes to draw broad conclusions especially when it comes to hate crimes. For example, we ought not think that because some psychopath beats someone up for wearing a red hat that there is some overwhelming epidemic of violence against people who like red hats in this country.

With regards to hate crimes, fortunately we don't have to resort to anecdotes to understand the state of criminal activities motivated by bias and prejudice. We actually have the statistics. The federal government has been compiling numbers on it for years. We even have detailed statistics about hate crimes involving sexual orientation even though there were no protections in the law for those groups until recently. So we have a lot of data. We can look at it and draw real meaningful conclusions.

A word about how the data is compiled. The numbers come from police departments reporting hate crimes to the federal government. The standard they use is not loose. Police departments don't contrary to some rumors immediate conclude that whenever a white person commits a crime against a black person or vice versa that it is a hate crime.  Rather, the police investigate the crimes and try to determine the motivation of the person committing the crime. They report it as a hate crime only when they have good evidence that the crime was motivated by a bias against a particular group. Often this is not hard to determine, since the perpetrator admits it quite willingly. Other times it depends on witness reports and the victims testimony about the things the person said while committing the crimes. Likewise other possible motivations are examined and the associations of both perpetrator and victim.  In short it's done through normal good police investigative work. To suggest that these reports are incorrect is to suggest a systemic problem with the integrity, honesty, or effectiveness of police departments across the country.  That may be true, but you better have some good evidence of that.

On the other hand there's no question that these statistics don't represent the entirety of the phenomena. Like with all crimes, sometimes they are simply not reported. In particular if you do not feel that there is any chance you can get justice for crimes committed against you, you are naturally less likely to bother to report it. We will have to see, for example, if adding protections for sexual orientation will cause more people who are victimized for their orientation to report the incidents.  Nevertheless it's hard to imagine that the numbers are not in most cases at least close to proportional to the scale of the problems.

The last important precursor to this analysis is to say that of course hate crimes are not in any way the full total of discrimination and bias in this country.  They do tell us something about relative attitudes but taken by themselves they form an incomplete picture of the prejudices that drive our every day lives. Many much more subtle biases influence interactions between groups that never reach the level of crimes or cannot be proven to be crimes.

Now, without further ado let me begin my analysis of the hate crimes statistics. For you to check my numbers you can go here and look at the hate crimes statistics:  http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

For simplicity I mostly only looked at the last 4 years of compiled statistics, from 2004-2007. I summed the data from these four years to get a more representative sample. I used the offenses counts, as is most commonly used, which is close but slightly different from the incidents counts.

In the four years from 2004-2007, there were 35,469 Hate Crimes Offenses reported, roughly 9,000 a year.

Racial Hate Crimes
1. Judging from the statistics those who say race discrimination is still prevalent are absolutely correct. Indeed by the statistics racial hate crimes are by far the most common. 19,015 hate crimes were racially motivated, 53.61%  of the total.  That's substantially more than hate crimes motivated by religious bias, sexual orientation bias, ethnicity bias, or disability bias.  To be fair, we usually THINK of ethnicity bias as the same thing as racial bias. Usually we talk about "hispanic" as a race but in this study it's considered a part of ethnicity and national origin.  When you add those two you get 67.24% of all hate crimes offenses over the four years are motivated by race, ethnicity, or national origin.

2. Claims that there are a lot of hate crimes committed against people who are white because of their race are absolutely right. 20.05% (3,812) of all racially motivated hate crimes offenses are based on anti-white bias. And 10.75% of ALL hate crimes are motivated by anti-white bias.

3. However, claims that there are a lot of hate crimes committed against people who are black because their race are ALSO absolutely right. In fact, anti-black bias is by FAR the largest. It dwarfs anti-white bias by a factor of more than 3.  And it's over 4.5 times as high as anti-hispanic motivated hate crimes. 12,892 anti-black motivated hate crimes were commited over the 4 years, 67.8% of racially motivated hate crimes and 35.35% of all reported hate crimes offenses.

4. The claim that people of mixed races are subjected to more hate crimes because they are mixed than members of one or the other of the races are false.  Only 1,040 reported cases over the four years were hate crimes motivated by an anti-mixed bias. That's about 2.93% of all the hate crimes offenses. That doesn't mean being mixed will mean you are at low risk of being subjected to racially motivated hate. It's just that the amount of it will probably depend more on which of your parents races you are most identified with.

5. Racial hate crimes motivated by anti-asian and anti-native american bias are much smaller phenomena. Less than 3% of all the crimes were anti-asian motivated and less than 1% were anti-Native American motivated. This probably is mostly indicative of the smaller percentage of the population these groups represent.  By 2006 estimates, 4.4% of the populate is Asian and 0.68% of the population is Native American as compared to 74% White only and 13.4% Black only. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_demographics#cite_note-32

Religious Hate Crimes
1. People who say there is a lot of hateful persecution of peoples because of their religion in the United State are very correct. Relgious hate crimes represent the second largest group after racial hate crimes. 5,868 hate crimes were reportedly due to anti-religious bias. 16.54% of the total. Still far less than racially motivated hate crimes but definitely not insubstantial.

2. However, those who suggest that christians are the most persecuted groups are absolutely incorrect.  Only 486 reported hate crimes were motivated by Anti-Catholic or Anti-Protestant religious sentiment. 1.37% of the total. Relative to the number of people in the country in those religions that's a really tiny number.

3. BUT, those who say atheists and agnostics are highly persecuted are ALSO incorrect. Only 26 hate crimes were reported as anti-atheist or anti-agnostic across the four years. Roughly 0.07% of all reported hate crimes.

4. Although anti-Islamic bias motivated hate crimes is only slightly higher than anti-christian bias motivated hate crimes, the number of such crimes HAS grown dramatically since 9/11. In 2007 there were 133 incidents, in 2006, 191. Over the past four years there were 663 incidents 1.87% of the total and 11.3% of all religious motivated incidents.  However, compare that to past years. In 1995 there were only 39 offenses out 9,895.  In 2000 there were 33 offenses out of 9,413. And in 2001 there were 546 offenses out of 11,430 total. So the graph of that is a pretty steady line (0.35%-0.41%) followed by a huge spike up to 4.78%, then a drop back down and stabilizing at a point still 4 times higher than it was originally (approx. 1.87%). (An interesting aside is how hate crimes overall increased dramatically in 2001 as an obvious consequence of anger over 9/11)

5. Beliefs that anti-semitism is alive and well are absolutely correct. By far the largest of all groups who reported hate crimes due to anti-religious bias over the last four years were those who reported an Anti-Jewish bias. 3,940 offenses. It's the second highest group after blacks with 11.11% of all hate crimes and 67.4% of all religious based hate crimes.

Sexual Orientation Hate Crimes
1. The fact that there is a lot of hate perpetrated  against people because of their sexual orientation is undeniable. At 5,452 offenses, 15.37% of the total sexual orientation bias motivates almost as many hate crimes as religious bias and is the third highest broad category over the last four years.

2. Those who make the claim that gay men suffer a disproportionately large amount of that hate are clearly completely correct. 3,313 offenses over the last four years were reportedly fueled by Anti-MALE Homosexual bias alone. That's 9.34% of all incidents and 60.77% of sexual orientation based hate crimes.  That does not include a separate 1,180 offenses which were reported as general anti-homosexual bias many of which of course were also perpetrated against male homosexuals. In contrast specific anti-female homosexual bias fueled only 757 (2.13%) of incidents. Though of course some of those general anti-homosexual bias also were targeted against women.

3. Claims of a large phenomena of Anti-heterosexual backlash by the gay community are HIGHLY exaggerated. Over the last four years anti-heterosexual hate crimes made up only 113 incidents, less than a tenth of even just the generalized anti-homosexual incidents. It's only 0.32% of all hate crimes reported. That's more than anti-atheist hate crimes but substantially less than any other category except for anti-bisexual bias which makes up only 0.25% of all offenses. Anti-heterosexual hate crimes make up 2.07% of all hate crimes based on sexual orientation. So that means although those crimes exist, it's vastly dwarfed by the numbers of hate crimes perpetrated because of hatred of members of the LGBT community.
  
Ethnicity Hate Crimes
1. Anti-hispanic hate crimes are substantial and steadily growing but are not as large as one might expect given what is often perceived as anti-hispanic rhetoric involved in anti-illegal immigrant movements. Overall 2,816 offenses were reported as due to anti-hispanic bias. While that's MORE than the total incidents reported for negative sentiment against all other ethnicity or national origins COMBINED (2018) it's considerbly LESS than anti-white, anti-jewish, and anti-male homosexual offenses. It's 7.94% of all offenses over the last 4 years of data gathered.

Mysteriously Missing Categories
Hate Crimes statistics are not perfect but it's interesting to note that there are certain categories that simply do not show up at all in statistics.  Most notably is that there are no Gender based statistics at all. I find it hard to believe that there aren't people who are violently attacked because of an inherent bias in the perpetrator against their specific gender, especially women. While, I can understand that it might be hard to determine in some cases whether someone has an inherent bias against women or for that matter men, but surely some of these other categories are equally difficult to ascertain. It would be nice if we had those numbers to look at.

And of course akin to gender there are no categorizations for Anti-transgendered bias. There are plenty of examples in the media of people being abused for being transgendered. I find it hard to believe that these incidents are simply never reported. More likely there is no rule requiring gathering of gender or gender identity hate crimes statistics so these categories are left out.

Conclusions
So if we were to be tongue and cheek and look at these numbers as if it were a horse race. You might get an account something like this:



Obviously I'm joking :)

Straight comparisons like I've been making in this document are never the best thing in the world. Especially when I'm not really factoring in relative population sizes nor even looking at all the data but a small four year segment.

But more importantly, sometimes comparative reasoning can cause us to forget the absolute significance of every single incident. To be fair ALL hate crimes are terrible things and we should not tolerate any perpetrated against any group. Deciding you want to hurt or steal from someone or destroy someone's property because you don't like the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their religion, or their country of origin is inherently a sick and deplorable thing to do. Even though they are comparatively small numbers, every time anyone is victimized because they are an atheist or an agnostic or because they are straight or bi is still just as much of a tragedy as when someone is victimized because they were white or black or Jewish. 

That being said, studying these statistics CAN give us a sense of relative perspective. That's a very important thing to have and in a lot of debates I see perspective is quickly lost in our fervor to assign blame and express our outrage. Knowing the scale of the problem at least as measured by bias-motivated crime can give us a much better sense of where to exert our efforts and can help us to not be misled by misleading anecdotes or false cries of extreme disproportionate persecution.

If someone proclaims that white people in America suffer a substantial amount of violence and crimes perpetrated on them because they are white, agree with them. It's true. It's irrefutable. But if someone proclaims that we live in an era where white people are as a group by and large overwhelmingly oppressed by this society or THE most oppressed group, be skeptical. Despite being in the vast majority of the population, they are not the greatest victims of hate crimes, nor are they even in second place. And in particular there are more than three times as many anti-black crimes of hate perpetrated each year as anti-white.

Likewise if someone proclaims that people are sometimes victimized because they are Christians or because they are Atheists, don't doubt it. Both phenomena really do happen in the United States. However, if someone proclaims that either being Christian OR being atheist makes them an obvious target for overwhelming amounts of religously or anti-religiously motivated violence, be doubtful. Anti-Christian bias represents a relatively small amount of overall hate crimes each year and anti-Atheist bias represents a seemingly minuscule amount. If any group should be complaining about religious persecution in America it should be followers of the Jewish faith.

And of course along the same vein if someone complains that they saw violence perpetrated against heterosexuals by gay activists in retribution for their expressing their belief that gay people should not be married, accept it. Anti-heterosexual bias does motivate hate crimes. But if someone tries to make that a call to action or to use it to smear homosexuals altogether as a violent or dangerously biased and hateful group, be both skeptical and doubtful. Indeed, tell them they are being silly. Hate crimes perpetrated because of hatred for LGBT individuals is almost 50 times more frequent than hate crimes committed due to anti-heterosexual bias.

A little perspective can go a long way.

It's far too easy when you see a travesty or when a tragic injustice is perpetrated against you or someone you know, to think that that injustice is representative of the overwhelming pattern of the world. You think well I was attacked because of my race or gender or religion or orientation, I never even imagined that could happen to me, therefore, it must be happening all over the place. It must not only be prevalent. IT must be THE most common phenomenon. What's more you have a tendency to start to look for other cases that validate your perception. Every other injustice perpetrated against your group stands out in stark relief to you. It seems like the whole world is against you and your kind and you look around and it seems like nobody is willing to recognize it. It seems like nobody is willing to DO anything about it.  And so we get outraged. We get feel afraid and alone and that makes us angry and disgusted at society as a whole.

We need to calm down and take a step back though. Our own experiences are not the only experiences. Sure lots of groups are victims of hate, but so are lots of others.  Rather than dwelling on how screwed up that my group happens to be persecuted by this or that other group, maybe we ought to be more united in our anger at the very idea of crimes based on hate. We ought to fight not to protect us, meaning the groups we happen to through accident of birth be associated with, but to protect US, meaning everyone from the scourges of unthinking irrational hate.
 
Hate Crimes legislation exist to try and discourage and prosecute ALL incidents of hate crimes. It's not, contrary to what some believe a measure to try and oppress White people or Christians or Heterosexuals or whatever. It's not a vindictive plan to gain revenge against any one group. It's an attempt to prevent the prevalence of the very idea of crimes based on hatred. It's to say that we as a society find those acts UNACCEPTABLE. No matter who they are done to.

I totally understand objections to such laws because of possible constitutional double jeopardy concerns, but I hope that even so we can all agree that reducing the number of all of these kinds crimes is an admirable goal that we should strive for as a society. And certainly it was very unfair for hate crimes laws to exist that recognize hate crimes on the grounds of race and religion but decidedly don't recognize hate crimes on the grounds of sexual orientation. Not when over 15% of all incidents are in fact orientation based. That's an absurdly unfair situation. Whether or not hates crimes legislation ought itself exist or be necessary, surely now, at least they are a bit more fair.

In any case if you reject hate crimes laws on principle, that's fine. But don't disavow or miss-characterize the problem. We need to as a society do something about people who let their prejudice drive them to victimize others. It's not an easy problem to solve but I think it's an overwhelmingly important one to try to solve. And part of reaching that solution depends on our getting good accurate data about the nature of the problem so we can try to solve it. Hence it's really important to take a minute every once in a while to take a good hard look at hate crimes statistics and try to learn as much as we can from them.

A very creative form of protest.

Over the last two weeks the two biggest news stories on Mainstream News Networks were:
1. Balloon Boy   and
2. The Obama Administration's critique of Fox News

I found these two stories fascinating in that they have served to reveal in stark clarity how absolutely terrible mainstream media in our country happens to be.

The Obama Administration's critique of Fox News did achieve what the White House wanted to achieve. It highlighted huge problems the Fox News Channel and Fox News programs in particular have with being balanced in particular with regards to the Obama Administration. But what they didn't expect was how the spotlight on Fox News just brought into stark focus how really incredibly bad all the OTHER news networks are ALSO.

What's the point of criticizing Fox News for putting Glenn Beck on the air when CNN airs Lou Dobbs? What's the meaning of complaining about Fox News crossing the line from reporting the news to CREATING the news by promoting tea parties adn the 9/12 movement, when a few weeks later MSNBC crosses the same line when Keith Olbermann promotes free Health Care Clinics for the explicit political purpose of pushing certain Democratic senators into supporting a public option?

Don't get me wrong. I don't defend Fox News. I think they are beyond the pail.  They have no shame. They're twice as bad as the next worst network. They deserve every once of criticism the Obama administration official leveled against them.

But they should have followed it up with an equally blistering critique of the media, especially the television media, in general. Of course they can't do that, because a White House with no media access is a White House that has no power to influence public opinion at all. No sane administration would risk alienating the mainstream media, however bad they happen to be. Even the critique of just Fox has been answered by numerous figures across the spectrum of the media coming out defend them from "unfair" Presidential influence. It's the classic "Leave our Industry Alone!"

Balloon Boy is even more illustrative. The fact that this was a major national story at all reveals the pettiness of our news coverage. The fact that news networks repeatedly came back to this story revealing every tiny little detail as if it were the most important thing in the world basically shows how little perspective Media has. They're just selling emotional porn. Ratings matter more to them then substance.

And indeed the very fact that the Father in this scandal thought that he could by perpetrating this scam score a reality TV show sort of shows how ridiculous television has become. The honest truth is, we have reality television shows no less ridiculous than the show he proposed. Indeed our serious television often borders on that level of ridiculousness. The fact that the Balloon Boy was made for a moment the darling son of all of America just shows how in fact likely it was that had this not in fact been a scam, Balloon Boy's family could have become a new reality TV phenomenon.  And to be perfectly truthful I'm not yet convinced that family won't be able to leverage this controversy into the lifetime fame they desire. They might be able to. People will watch. Networks will make money. That's all it takes.

So that's the media as it stands today.

In the mean time....

• Quietly 13,000 more troops were sent to Afghanistan
• Obama continues to wrestle with the decision of whether or not to send up to 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan
• International Climate Action Day begins and the world prepares for the Copenhagen Talks which may very well determine the future of Life on Earth
• A National Equality March was held having upward to 200,000 people. President Obama gave a significant speech the night before promising commitment to gay rights.
• Congress debates revoking the Health Insurance Industry's antitrust exemption
• The Obama Administration implements rules cutting executive pay by about 50% in all directly bailed out firms that haven't given the money back
• The Foreclosure Rate in America hit an all time high at the same time banks reported record profits. DOW Jones tops 10,000
  
• Tensions between Iran and the US grow as six revolutionary guard members were killed and Iran blamed US and British intelligence for their death
• A new former Goldman Sachs executive was named to a top post in the SEC
• The UN Human Rights Council endorsed the Goldstone Report on Gaza, a report highly critical of Israeli actions
• The President of Afghanistan finally agreed to hold run off elections because of the voting irregularities and corruption marring the previous election.
• Support for the Public Option for Health Care increased to 57% in the US
• The Obama administration announced it will not go after, investigate, or prosecute medical marijuana users in states where that is legal provided they are in compliance with the laws of those states
• the New York Times announced that it is eliminating 100 News Room positions
• US officials started warning that withdraw from Iraq might not occur according to previously announced schedules
• Iran accepted an agreement transferring its uranium enrichment abroad making it impossible for them to et a nuclear weapon if inspectors are able to do their job.
• Japan considers scaling back its military ties to the United States
• President Obama made his first visit to New Orleans and gave a speech.
• House and Senate have been voting on whether to allow Gitmo prisoners to be tried or held in the US
• It was announced that Social Security recipients will not receive cost of living increases in the year 2010 due to the economy
• House and Senate have been working on new reforms for Wallstreet.
• And of course work continues endlessly on Health Care Reform. All bills are out of committee and being consolidated for vote on the floor.
• Fears rise that the US Treasury Bonds might be downgraded from their previous triple A rating
  

That's just SOME of what's been happening over the last two weeks. Not all. And it's just stuff I've been able to find out about with my limited point of view as an American. People in other countries probably could tell you tons of other things happening all over the world that are far more important than Balloon Boy and some random off the cuff comments by a White House flunky.

But even just any of these stories would have been better expenditures of time and energy than what we got. We were instead inundated with pointlessness.

And that's just the teleivision news. I don't have to tell you how mediocre most teleivision shows are. How ridiculous most movies are. How pathetic most newspapers and magazines have become. How increasingly shallow so many novels are becoming.

It seems to me that virtually anything peddled by the major media companies toward what they think the masses want to see, read, or hear is virtually worthless.

Today the best media around is coming out of alternative sources. If you completely stopped consuming any media owned and paid for by a major media company I don't think you would be missing a damn thing.

I have a new guest article on Gay Persecution in Iraq up on Queerish. Feel free to read and comment.

And yes, I DID have the audacity to REC my OWN entry. Deal!

http://queerish.xanga.com/714588990/guest-post-gay-persecution-in-iraq/