hate crime

A poster depicting Ahmaud Arbery is seen outside the Glynn County Courthouse while Greg McMichael, his son Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan are tried over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, in Brunswick, Ga., November 23, 2021. REUTERS/Marco Bello

A judge sentenced Travis McMichael to life in prison on Aug. 8 for committing federal hate crimes in the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man shot while jogging through a mostly white Georgia neighborhood in a case that probed issues of racist violence and vigilantism in the United States.

A woman holds a sign outside the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Ga., on Nov. 24, 2021 after the jury reached a guilty verdict in the trial of the men charged with the February 2020 death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo

The three white men convicted of chasing down and murdering a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, as he was out jogging in their suburban Georgia community, were found guilty on Tuesday of committing federal hate crimes and other offenses in the 2020 killing.

Josiah R. Daniels 9-09-2021

Valarie Kaur. Photo by Amber Castro; design by Mitchell Atencio.

On Sept. 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man, was killed while he was planting flowers at the gas station he owned in Mesa, Ariz., becoming the first victim of post-9/11 hate crimes. For then-college student Valarie Kaur, the murder of “Balbir Uncle”— as he is known to Kaur and others in the Sikh community — was a pivotal moment.

Jamar A. Boyd II 4-18-2019

The Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Opelousas, Louisiana, U.S. April 4, 2019 is pictured after a fire in this picture obtained from social media. Picture taken April 4, 2019. Courtesy Louisiana Office Of State Fire Marshal/Handout via REUTERS

The stark contrast in media coverage and social concern reveals the deep and isolated silos which humanity can and chooses to abide within, magnifying the complex avenues of empathy and sympathy while examining the enactment of independent agencies to ensure certain spaces and structures are protected or resurrected.

Alicia T. Crosby 2-01-2019

2017 BET Awards - Los Angeles, Calif., - Jussie Smollett. REUTERS/Danny Moloshok

To claim that this attack was motivated by a singular form of bigotry is false. Such a claim is also violent and contributes to the culture that silences and erases the complicated reality of compounded oppression experienced by black LGBTQ persons every day. Hate is rarely simple and the intersectionality — or dynamic forms of subjugation individuals face because of their marginalized identities — black same-gender loving people face is at work here.

In an effort to help our family grieve the loss of our beloved Vickie Lee Jones, a preacher told us that it was God’s will that a white man named Gregory Alan Bush shot her to death in the parking lot of a Kroger grocery store outside of Louisville, Ky. because, as a witnesses implied, she was black.

It was not.

"Wall of Hope" 2010 Vigil for Marcelo Lucero. Image courtesy of Long Island Wins. 

On Nov. 8, 2008, Marcelo Lucero, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador working at a dry cleaning store, was attacked by seven teenagers from the local high school in Patchogue, Long Island, and stabbed to death. His attack, according to testimony, was part of a weekend “sport” in which these teenagers routinely targeted and attacked brown-skinned people.

Robert Hirschfield 10-26-2018

IN HIS INTRODUCTION to American Hate, Arjun Singh Sethi warns readers: “The pages that follow are not for the faint of heart, but neither is this moment.”

The hate crime survivors he spotlights speak with the stunned, searching voices of aggrieved neighbors: Syrian Muslims, Sikhs, Lebanese Christians, African Americans, Southeast Asians, Jews, and Native Americans. Sethi, a 37-year-old Sikh lawyer from Washington, D.C., shatters the complacent notion that hate crimes in the U.S. target only Muslims or unlucky Sikhs mistaken for Muslims.

Sethi’s book is evidence of the current civic plague of top-down moral dysfunction. President Trump, he writes, while “exercising the worst form of bully pulpit,” has “emboldened, empowered, enabled, facilitated, and legitimatized the very worst in America: racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and anti-immigrant hostility.”

Joyce Hollyday 7-30-2018

THE DEDICATION this spring of a memorial in Montgomery, Ala., to the more than 4,400 African Americans who were lynched in this country between the Civil War and World War II has brought renewed national attention to a historical outrage. Melanie Morrison’s Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham reminds us that not all such acts of terrorism and brutality were carried out by white mobs under trees and the cover of darkness. Some were perpetrated in courtrooms in broad daylight.

This meticulously researched book skillfully weaves glimpses of Morrison’s family history into a riveting account of a horrific injustice. On Aug. 4, 1931, three young white women were attacked on a secluded ridge outside Birmingham, Ala. The only survivor, 18-year-old Nell Williams, related that she, her sister, and their friend had been held captive for four hours and “shot by a Negro.” During the largest search party in the county’s history, armed white vigilantes roamed the streets, black businesses were set on fire, African-American men were dragged off trains and out of their beds, with dozens detained, and at least three were murdered.

the Web Editors 6-19-2017

Image via LaunchGood page

The attack happened early on Sunday near the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque — the largest mosque in the northern Virginia area with 10 days left in the holy month of Ramadan. The victim, identified by the mosque and relatives as Nabra Hassanen, and several friends were walking outside the mosque when they got into a dispute with a motorist in the community of Sterling, the Fairfax County Police Department said in a statement.

Image via Kaitlin Barker Davis 

I barely slept the night of the stabbing. It was a hot night, and I could hear the train tracks through our open windows. The last time I slept (or didn’t sleep) like that was election night. It was freezing, the windows closed, but the same nauseating dread kept my head buzzing, my jaw locked, my eyes open. Except that on election night it was the fear of the world I would wake up to that kept me awake. Now we know exactly what that world looks like.

Jera Brown 3-28-2017

Image via lobstar28/Flickr

In the wake of these threats, faith groups in Chicago have grown more intentional about coming together in solidarity — something many Jewish and Christian leaders alike credit to their religious teachings and their understanding of what it means to care for one's neighbor.

the Web Editors 3-23-2017

The suspect, James Harris Jackson, told police he traveled to New York with the intent to attack black men, according to the New York Times. The Times quoted Assistant Chief William Aubry describing Jackson as having "harbored a hatred of black men for more than a decade." Officials have expressed desire to classify the charge to a hate crime.

Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Rajdeep Singh Jolly with the Sikh Coalition, and Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) (from left to right) urge the Trump administration to treat hate violence seriously.

The shooting of two Indian men in Kansas is one of the most recent examples of an increase in racially motivated violence in the U.S., and the Trump administration must rigorously investigate and prosecute the perpetrators, a group of Democratic members of Congress and South Asian-American advocates said Friday at a rally outside the Capitol.

Their bill would allot an additional $20 million to improve security at these centers — whether they are Jewish or affiliated with another faith — through an existing Department of Homeland Security grant program.

The funds are not designated for synagogues, mosques, or churches, though attacks against houses of worship and religiously affiliated cemeteries have spiked in recent months — from the burning of mosques to a bullet shot through an Indiana synagogue.

Layton E. Williams 3-02-2017

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that these latest crimes bring the total number of trans women murdered in 2017 to seven. That is a higher number than at this point in 2016, a year that saw trans deaths on the rise: Twenty-seven transgender people were reported murdered in 2016, more than any previous year. 

Dhanya Addanki 3-01-2017

In Indian American communities, we usually believe that being a certain kind of immigrant can save us. If we dress properly, no one can call us foreign. If we’re documented, no one can question our legal status. If we are highly educated, no one can accuse us of being lazy immigrants. If we (especially women) don’t go to bars, no one can accuse us of bad behavior.

We’ve convinced ourselves that if we melt into what we call American culture — into white culture — we can get by without getting killed.

The two men targeted by a racist and violent white terrorist were the quintessential “good immigrants.” But their stories of success — working at Garmin, receiving Masters degrees from the U.S. — did not protect them from hate. Economic status or education do not matter in the face of an extremist who equates skin color with terrorism.

 

Dhanya Addanki 2-01-2017

Image via JP Keenan/ Sojourners 

Deeply tied to Singh’s spirit are his thoughts about justice and equality. They are not only ideals of the Sikh faith and intertwined in his spiritual practice, but a natural state of being for Singh — especially since he started his Captain America performance art.

 

Kimberly Winston 6-21-2016

Image via REUTERS/Hannah McKay/RNS

Swastikas found in a children’s playground in London are the latest sign of anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe.

The hand-drawn swastikas appeared on four consecutive days, June 14-17, in a park in the Stamford Hill neighborhood, The Guardian newspaper reported June 20. A home for British Jewish veterans is nearby.

Michael Burke 6-17-2016

Dylann Roof. Image via REUTERS/Jason Miczek/RNS

It’s been one year since nine black parishioners were gunned down in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, murders that then-21-year-old Dylann Roof — who is white — is accused of committing. Last July, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a 33-count indictment against Roof that charged him with federal hate crimes for the June 17 attack, alleging that he sought to ignite racial tensions across the United States with the massacre. Friends of Roof have said that he wanted to start a race war. His trial is set for Nov. 7; prosecutors will seek the death penalty.