On February 10, 2015, three college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were shot dead. Deah Barakat was a 23-year-old student at the University of North Carolina School of Dentistry. His wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, was 21 years old and had planned to enroll in the dentistry school this fall. Her 19-year-old sister was a student at North Carolina State University. All three of them were Muslim. Two days later, a mosque in Houston burned down. An accelerant, gasoline, was present, suggesting the fire’s cause was arson. Four days later, the Islamic School of Rhode Island in Warwick was vandalized. The entrance to the school was sprayed with the words “Pigs” and “Now this is a hate crime,” along with offensive references to Muhammad.
These events occurred within the span of just one week, and all were targeted at just one community: the Muslim one. According to the FBI, a hate crime is categorized as a “traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.” Each of these incidents is an example of murder, arson or vandalism, and all of them have an added element of bias: They were aimed at members of a particular religious group. They were all aimed at Muslims. Yet none of these incidents have been definitively labeled hate crimes.
In fact, many people, including authorities investigating these incidents (the UNC shooting stands out as a particularly salient example), have been reluctant to name these crimes hate crimes. This is not new. At both the federal and state level, “proving a hate crime is a high burden,” according to Kami Chavis Simmons, the director of the criminal justice program at Wake Forest University. Without obvious bias, most criminal acts motivated by hatred and prejudice go untried as hate crimes.
We have been deeply reluctant to label acts of violence towards people in marginalized communities as “hate crimes” despite the fact that there often seems to be enough evidence of bias to constitute a hate crime. The current standard of bias required is hard for officials to prove. Overt and repeated evidence of intense hatred demonstrated towards a particular group is often necessary to overcome the legal hurdles. The 2014 Kansas City shootings, for example, were easily proven a hate crime because Frazier Glenn Cross, the perpetrator, had a long track record of white-supremacist group involvement. When acts of violence are repeatedly wrought upon often-marginalized communities, it is clear that prejudice is the perpetrator’s main motivation, even if they lack a clear record of activities and speech that denote previous bias.
By targeting only the most overt instances of well-documented bias as hate crimes, we overlook the reality of the society we live in — on the whole, our society does not actively promote legally-sanctioned segregation or discrimination towards minority communities, but we are still living in a society that is laden with pernicious prejudice, hostility and targeted violence that serve to create paralyzing fear in particular communities. This is a much more discreet form of bias — by no means on the same scale as what was seen in the Jim Crow era or even during the Civil Rights movement, but it is no less deleterious. Therefore, our legal system ought account for it.
This public and legal mentality that only the most extreme and repeated forms of bias can be categorized as hate crimes is damaging to the already-skewed notions of what discrimination, biases and prejudice look like in our society today.
But perhaps more damaging is the fact that even when these discreet forms of discrimination turn violent, we are still reluctant to admit that they were motivated by prejudiced hate. Instead, we deflect the motivations to something else, like a parking dispute. Attitudes like these entrench societal unwillingness to admit the existence of racial, religious and gender-based prejudice.
This lack of acknowledgement surrounding hate crimes pervades other minority communities as well. Of the crimes against minority communities that are tried as hate crimes, 66 percent of hate crimes in 2012 were anti-black, and 59 percent of hate crimes that were motivated by ethnic bias were aimed at Hispanics. Yet even fewer of these criminal charges actually result in hate crime convictions. For example, from 2002-2012 Texas officials reported that roughly 200 crimes per year were motivated by hate, but only 10 of these cases resulted in hate crime convictions.
The LGBTQ community lauded the 2009 passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded federal law against hate crimes to include bias-motivated hate crimes based on a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. Despite the introduction of this legislation, however, the number of criminal acts considered hate-motivated against the community has remained steady.
The murder of Aniya “Ray Ray” Parker, a 47-year-old black transgender woman, who was fatally shot after three men attacked her in East Hollywood, was reported as a “robbery gone terribly sideways” by police officials and local media, but Parker’s purse was left behind, even after she was shot dead. Few major news outlets even picked up the murder as a news story, let alone as the story of a hate crime. Other crimes and threats against members of the LGBTQ community like CeCe McDonald and Sondra Scarber have experienced similar media and law enforcement dismissiveness, downplaying the hate-driven aspects of crimes committed against them.
Hate crimes against women also remain notoriously uncategorized as hate crimes, even when there is well-documented evidence of misogynistic and vengeful hatred directed towards women, as was the case with Elliot Rodgers, who murdered six students. The main targets were women in a sorority at UCSB, because he perceived it as “unfair” that he was romantically unsuccessful.
The high standards of evidence for hate crimes seem to necessitate that the criminal be some sort of caricature of an extreme racist, an extreme sexist, an extreme anti-Semite or Islamophobe — someone who is hateful to the core, who screams it out loud and meticulously documents it through social media, private journals or political activism.
These questions and debates are not just about Craig Stephen Hicks being harshly punished for the murder of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha and Razan Abu-Salha. They’re about coming to terms with the prejudices that we still have in the United States today — as a government, as a society and as individuals — and coming to terms with the consequences those prejudices carry.
Only 41 states in the United States have an enhanced hate crime sentencing for criminals. North Carolina is not one of these states. That all states do not have this enhanced sentencing is a testament to the larger story of prejudice denial in the United States. We continually refuse to admit that there is systemic and personal prejudice towards minority communities and marginalized communities in the United States that motivate — both overtly and covertly — day-to-day discrimination against these groups.