Hate crimes on the rise

While everyone gasps and goes HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN

and or we must deep within ourselves to understand

Do me a favor take a moment sit with yourselves SERIOUSLY.

And tell me when in the history of the United States something like this hasn’t happened.

Not in terms of racism but seriously in terms of this kind of violence and disrespect for POC life. Name one week

ONE

when

this hasn’t happened

— BlackAmazon on the crime against Megan Williams

Given the history of hate crimes in the United States, the history that we, as a nation, are only now beginning to address with the arrests of people like James Ford Seale, no, this crime is not special or unique. If we cannot talk about our history, honestly and with an eye on preventing it from repeating itself, then it’s going to do just that.

It’s not a pretty history. It’s a history of lynchings, from Native Americans to blacks to Chinese immigrants. It’s a history of genocidal wars, slavery, forced sterilization, imprisonment in asylums, and discriminatory laws. It’s a history of unspeakable crimes committed against people of color, immigrants, and social “undesirables,” against women, against people of other faiths.

And because we won’t face it head on, every few years, the cycle rears its head.

Eight years ago, two brothers were arrested for fire-bombing three synagogues in Sacramento, Calif. They were also charged with killing a gay couple. That same year, Joseph Ileto, a Filipino American, was shot by a white man in Los Angeles because “he looked Asian or maybe Hispanic”; two other Asian Americans, Won Joon Yoon of Indiana and Naoki Kamijima of Illinois, were also shot because of their ethnicity. One year before that, James Byrd Jr., a black man, was dragged to his death by three white men. Matthew Sheperd was beaten to death that same year because he was gay.

Nearly ten years, and here we are again.

Hate crimes are on the rise once more. XicanoPwr has an entry up discussing this new trend, outlining several recent hate crime cases, including graffiti attacks and a trend of using nooses to intimidate. There is history we have not dealt with behind that.

XP talks about a case where two teens attacked a group of deaf people; he writes about a case where several youths attacked Asian American fishermen, one of whom drowned.

He’s not the only one speaking up. Kai has an entry up about Rene Perez, who was allegedly killed by a police officer. At Pam’s House Blend, there’s an entry up about a transwoman who was brutally beaten by a teenager; the judge decided against hate crime charges because he felt that the teen was “also a victim.”

Other recent cases:

• The case of the Jena Six.
• Satendar Singh, an immigrant of East Indian descent, was killed after being taunted with racist and anti-gay slurs. [Source]
• The house of a black family was vandalized and graffitied and their property stolen. [Source]
• The Islamic Center of the East Bay, in California, was burnt in an apparent arson attack. [Source]
• Josie Smith-Malave, a lesbian and former “Top Chef” contestant, was beaten while her attackers called her anti-gay slurs. She and her friends had been asked to leave a restaurant because her attackers were calling them names and spitting at them. [Source]
• Seven young black lesbians were attacked by a man who tried to choke one woman and ripped hair from the head of another. They were helped by two men. Their attacker was injured in the fight, and four of the women were sentenced to prison for defending themselves. [Source]
• Marie Stephanie Martinez was beaten bloody on an MTA bus in New York for “looking Chinese.” When she asked the driver for help, he told her to ask a priest, presumably because she was wearing her school uniform. [Source]
• David Ritcheson, a Mexican-American teen who was beaten and sodomized with an umbrella pole at a party in 2006, committed suicide. [Source]

I know there are many other hate crimes that have taken place over the past two years.

It’s time to talk about them. By letting hate crimes be treated as individual crimes, with only the most shocking getting national attention, nothing will be solved. These crimes must be put in the context of a trend, and they must be put in the context of U.S. society. They are senseless crimes, if you don’t know the history behind them, the society which drives them.

As long as white supremacy, male supremacy and homophobia are ingrained in the fabric of U.S. society, and as long as people in this country are taught that Muslims are evil, people with disabilities are inferior and to be mocked, and immigrants are lawbreakers who want taxpayers to take care of them, we will never be able to stop hate crimes from happening.

As long as schools do not teach about our history of Jim Crow laws, genocide against Native Americans, attacks on Chinese and Mexican immigrants — and more importantly, that they were driven by societal forces, that they still play a role in modern society and were not simply isolated, outdated events — we will never be able to stop hate crimes from happening.

As long as the media continues to ignore all but the most sensational of crimes, leaving the average (white or straight or cisgendered or able-bodied or all of the above) American with no context to place those crimes in, we will never be able to stop hate crimes from happening.

As long as hate crimes cannot be tried as hate crimes because the punishments are far less severe than trying them simply as plain kidnapping and torture cases, we will never be able to stop hate crimes.

Even if we do change things so that the above is no longer true, hate crimes may happen. At this point, some forms of hate are so embedded in U.S. society that it could take decades, if not centuries, to eradicate them completely.

But we have to try.

Because we can’t live like this anymore.

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