No Hate Crimes?

On the more mainstream and moderate White nationalist sites such as American Renaissance, the general tone of the pieces and in the comments is that there really is no such thing as White racism in the US anymore.

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The usual response is to say that these people are just a bunch of lying racists.

I will, however, say that there is some truth to these accusations. Racism by Whites is dramatically exaggerated in the US, and every little comment or scribble is inspected for the horrible crime. Hispanics and Blacks in particular are far too wont to yell racism over every little thing, in many cases over mostly or completely innocent comments.

Entire subjects that do not necessarily have anything to do with racism are walled off and forbidden from discussion. On the other hand, non-Whites get to bash away at Whites for all of their racial crimes, past, present and future, while Whites are supposed to sit there and take it, groveling, like guilty supplicants. There is a presumption that non-Whites are incapable of racism and that Whites are automatically filled with it.

This is all pretty much nonsense, but it’s a product of the Left in the US and West that started this whole crazy conversation about 40 years ago. They’ve been quite successful selling this nonsense to the public.

On the other hand, there surely is racism in the US. I don’t think much of the Southern Poverty Leadership Center, but they do have an interesting list of racist incidents in the US for the first three months of 2008. It seems pretty incredible the amount of this stuff that is going on, or is it?

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You will note that simple name-calling is apparently not listed, and is not a crime. Some of the stuff on that list seem a bit of a reach. In the course of a fight, or altercation, racial slurs are uttered. Now we have a hate crime.

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{snip} Unfortunately, in a free society people get to call each other names, and in the course of fights, people will just call each other any slur that comes to their minds that seems to apply to the person they are fighting.

For instance, in the past ten years, I did call a Black man a nigger once. On the other hand, I’m going to say I’m not a racist.

He ran a recycling place and I used to take my bottles up there. He got mad at me when I did not separate my browns from my greens from my clears. I forget what happened, but a shouting match ensued. This is not normal behavior for me—I’m actually a quiet guy and I don’t get into it much with people. Well, in the course of this argument, I called him a nigger. Not once, but a few times.

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I wonder how often this sort of thing goes on? In the course of fights and shouting matches, angry people will say stuff they would not ordinarily say. Not out of racism or bigotry, but because in a fight, you use any ammo you’ve got.

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On the White Nationalist boards, there is a lot of talk about how most assaults by Blacks against Whites are accompanied by racial slurs. Typically, the police deny that a hate crime occurred. The White Nationalists have an interesting point, and if White assaults combined with slurs get hate crime attachments, it’s about time to start slamming a lot of Blacks with the same stuff.

I guess the assumption is that the Black criminal just wanted to attack the person or rob them just to be a criminal, and that the racist stuff was secondary, and therefore the attack was not primarily bias-motivated, it was primarily dirty criminal motivated. Perhaps that is so, but fair is fair, and there does appear to be a double-standard here.

There were 104 incidents over a 93 day period in the first three months of 2008. That’s a little over one a day, and most all of these incidents are pretty serious. A 2005 report by the US government found that there were 191,000 hate crimes in that year. That’s 600 a day! That’s 24 an hour. One every two or three minutes.

I wonder what standard they were using to judge what is a hate crime? The same as in the list? If so, there’s still a big problem here in the US. If they are using everything down to my little argument above, the report is pretty meaningless. Someone might want to get ahold of that report and see what’s really in it.

White nationalists say that in a multicultural society, these sort of incidents are to be expected and are in fact normal. Why? Because a certain amount of racial hostility is to be expected in such a society. Are they right? If not, why not?

The appropriate response to this issue is the Middle Way, as the Taoists say. Not to overemphasize racism and exaggerate it out of all sanity, and not, on the other hand, to say that it barely even exists anymore.

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