History of Hate Crimes

History of Hate Crimes

The focus of this blog is aimed towards hate crimes, as well as their causes and the ideology rooted behind those causes. It seems that the action of committing a hate crime is where hatred and loathing comes to a head. In future posts, I will be examining why these feelings have driven people to commit such atrocities, as well as the circumstances surrounding this type of crime.

Violence incited by hate and the belief that whites were superior to other races was not considered "crime" in the United States until the end of the Civil War. Although some outline of what constituted a hate crime was erected after the Civil War, it was not until the 1960s that legislation was actually carried out. Before the civil rights movement, these acts of violence and harassment were virtually ungoverned and went unpunished. Hate-Crime legislation went into effect in 1968 as part of the Civil Rights Act. This federal statute outlawed “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone who is engaged in six specified protected activities, by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin. The main flaw with this newly enacted statute was that any case concerning hate crimes had to go through the U.S. Attorney General. This caused many hate crimes to go unreported, or uninvestigated because of the amount of time and effort it would take to get the case to the attorney general. Hate crimes are not limited to just acts against others of different races. The Matthew Shepard Act, which passed in 2009, included gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability to the criteria for what can be considered a hate crime.

According to Wikipedia.org, there are 45 states as well as the District of Colombia that have statutes which have criminalized hate related crimes. 31 states as well as the District of Columbia have included civil cause of action in addition to these statutes, and 27 states and D.C. collect their hate crime statistics.

This history is conclusive to the issues that the ever-changing population of the United States of America has encountered. This is relevant to the white power movement because of their goal to segregate as much of the population as possible in order to hinder miscegenation and multiculturalism. Hate crimes are one way for the white nationalist movement to spread fear and promote their ideals and their goals of keeping the white race “pure” and free from interracial mixing. I feel that the rest of the blog prompts will be interesting to research and correlate to my topic of focus.