The Demographics of Hate
Source: SpeakOut.com http://www.speakout.com/Monday, January 15, 2001
The Demographics of Hate
By Stuart Buck
As I flipped the television remote this morning before work, my eye was caught by a series of written messages on the screen. The messages — which were read aloud by various disembodied voices — described hate crimes from across the country. Interspersed throughout the hate crime descriptions was a banner reading, “Hate crimes begin with discrimination,” and then a message urging all the youth of America to contact Congress and President-elect to support new hate crimes laws.
Then I remembered. Today was the much-ballyhooed day on which MTV planned to show — without commercials — over 17 straight hours of programming on hate crimes. (Ah, for the days when MTV actually played music videos!) An MTV vice-president boasted on CNN earlier this week that MTV was giving up $2 million in ad revenues to air the hate crime special.
But this extravaganza, while no doubt well-intentioned, is in reality nothing more than a propaganda campaign. I say this because, first, MTV attempts to play on young people’s emotions about crimes that are indeed awful, and then unthinkingly presents hate crime laws as the automatic solution. To make matters worse, the blurbs read aloud on MTV were not representative of the real demographics of hate crimes.
During the time I watched, 9 out of 10 cases involving blacks and whites featured whites as the attackers and blacks as the victims. But the real statistics — which are readily available online — show that MTV’s portrayal is misleading.
Given the difference in white and black populations in this country, hate crimes committed by blacks against whites should make up about one-sixth the number of hate crimes committed by whites against blacks. But in 1998 — the most recent year for which FBI statistics are available — there were actually more whites murdered in “hate” crimes than there were blacks, and the number of white victims is between a fourth and a third of the number of black victims.
And that’s just for hate crimes — if you look at interracial violent crime in general (that is, crimes where the police don’t check the box to classify it officially as motivated by “hate”), about 75% on average is black-on-white crime, while 10% is white-on-black.
MTV, however, does not bother itself with presenting a full picture of the statistical facts. It prefers to base its argument wholly on emotional stories and anecdotal evidence. It is therefore not surprising that MTV fails to acknowledge any of the reasons why hate crimes laws are a bad idea.
The first problem with hate crime laws is that in many cases, they are pointless. Consider the Byrd dragging death in Texas and the Matthew Shepard killing in Wyoming — two of the cases that are most often cited by hate crimes supporters (including MTV’s website). As for the Byrd death, the NAACP recently ran a now-infamous television ad criticizing George Bush for not signing a new hate crimes bill after Byrd’s death. In the commercial, Byrd’s daughter said plaintively that when Bush refused to sign the bill, it felt like her father was “killed all over again.”
But out of the three men involved in Byrd’s death, two got the death penalty and one got a life sentence. And as for Matthew Shepard’s killers, they avoided the death penalty only by plea-bargaining down to a life sentence. How could any hate crimes bill possibly increase those penalties? Should we mandate the death penalty for such cases? Draw and quarter the killers or burn them at the stake? My point here is that it is shameful that civil rights groups have exploited the Byrd and Shepard tragedies — which no hate crimes law could conceivably have prevented — for their own political gain.
On the other hand, in many cases involving lesser crimes, hate crimes laws definitely do increase penalties — and in a way can penalize the free exercise of speech. Consider the Florida hate crimes law. If a white person commits battery (a misdemeanor) against a black person, he could get up to a year in prison (under section 775.082 of Florida law). But if the white person uses a racial slur while committing the identical battery, then the offense could be punished under Florida’s hate crimes law as a felony — which means a sentence of up to five years.
So, even though the underlying crime is the same, the criminal can see his sentence multiplied by five times just for using speech that shows a racial motivation. Of course, people who use racial slurs while committing battery are reprehensible; that’s unquestionable. But our country has a commitment to free speech that is undermined when someone’s prison sentence can be quintupled just for using certain words.
Finally, there is just no reason to think that hate crimes are any worse than other types of crimes.
As James Jacobs (a New York University law professor) and Kimberly Potter asked in their insightful book on hate crimes, “Is prejudice more morally reprehensible than other criminal motivations like greed, power, lust, spite, desire to dominate, and pure sadism?” I have never seen any convincing reason to think that the answer to that question should be yes. All crime is committed from some evil motivation — if criminals had nice and happy thoughts towards others, they wouldn’t be criminals. The question is do we want to get into the morass of punishing people for their attitudes and feelings, rather than for their actions?
MTV shows no sign that it has considered these arguments. Which is why it should stick to music videos.
Stuart Buck is a recent honors graduate of Harvard Law School.
