The Other War on Terror
how safe are we inside our borders?
2008-02-25
By Brian Gilmore

 “When a person is targeted merely for being a member of a "despised" group (because of race, sexual orientation, religion or citizenship), that is terrorism. Therefore, the black man who is dragged to his death and the gay man who is lashed to a fence and tortured are no less victims of terrorism than the American citizens who perished during 9-11.”
Connie Corzilius Spasser, Augusta, Ga.
Augusta Chronicle - April 15, 2006
Letter to the Editor

In late September 2007, the Democratic controlled Congress attached a hate crimes bill to a defense appropriations authorization in hopes of baiting President Bush into extending hate crimes regulation and enforcement by the federal government. The bill, among other things, would “bolster the ability of federal, state and local authorities to investigate and prosecute hate crimes based on race, ethnic background, religion, gender, sexual orientation and disability.”

Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts fashioned the bill’s passage with a statement about the nation’s commitment against all terrorism including homegrown hate violence. "At a time that we are fighting terrorism abroad,” Kennedy urged ”we are going to fight terrorism, hatred and bigotry here at home."

On December 28, 2007 during the holiday break, President Bush vetoed the appropriations bill effectively killing the hate crimes bill for now.

Most of us do not think much about “domestic terrorism” or acts of racially motivated violence committed by Americans in America.  It is not something that is regularly discussed in post-9-11 America.

Dr. Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Minnesota states that over 60 percent of all terrorist acts committed in the U.S. since 1980 were committed by Americans and not someone or some group from a foreign country. But Levin adds another very important caveat to these statistics: most hate crimes are not committed by organized groups like the Ku Klux Klan, skinhead organizations, or white nationalist collectives.

The Klan and other groups, according to Levin, only commit about 5 percent of all hate crimes; the remaining incidents are committed by “dabblers,” individuals who seem unlikely to commit hate crimes.  These might be bored teenagers who “want to feel like big shots” according to Levin and think “hate and violence are pretty hot.” Their victim is usually a stranger (85 percent of the time, it is), or someone who doesn’t look like them.

Levin’s statistics are very interesting. But it also offers a paradox.

When most of us think of hate crimes, our vision is from the 1976 CBS television film, “Attack on Terror.” That film is a fictional account of the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi during “Freedom Summer in 1964.” The Ku Klux Klan has always been linked to that crime confirming a history most Black Americans know well of terror by groups and not individuals.

However, in Professor Levin’s world, it is not the Klan or some skinhead group we should fear; it is some lonely, adrift teenager or young person like Eric Harris, one of the Columbine High School killers or Seung Hui Cho, the mentally ill Virginia Tech assassin.

Cornel West, the public intellectual, college professor, and occasional spoken word artist, recently perpetuated the myth that Levin is exposing. West called the Ku Klux Klan an “American terrorist organization” in a sermon at Rankin Chapel on the campus of Howard University suggesting that the Klan is the source of terrorism on a large scale when according to Levin, this is not true. 

For a moment, the Jena, Louisiana noose incident that came to light last year got everyone’s attention that racial hatred, the fuel for terrorist acts, is still alive. Yet again, there is little evidence that a group was responsible for any of the racial problems in Jena.

The nooses in Jena were, of course, followed by a series of copycat nooses (there have been 70 according to Orlando Sentinel columnist, Darryl E. Owens). The University of Maryland, Illinois, North Carolina, and South Carolina all report noose incidents but no there were no acts of violence against any African-Americans.

But more interestingly, in Maine, last October, a white man, Kendrick Sawyer, 75, made a statement to his doctor to the effect that he would shoot “any and all black persons” attending any NAACP chapter meetings in the city of Bangor. Maine, the nation’s “whitest state,” is usually not the setting for such open racial threats. The threat was taken seriously and the NAACP cancelled its annual Kwanzaa celebration as a result of Sawyer’s statement. Local officials obtained a restraining order on Sawyer just in case.

According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, race crimes are still very prevalent in the U.S. with over 7,000 recorded in 2005. Nearly 70 percent of racial hate crimes were committed against African-Americans. Crimes against Latinos have surged as have crimes against individuals of Middle Eastern descent. Of course, these hate crimes are likewise compromised by the fact that existing hate crimes laws still suffer from gaps in enforcement.
 
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports hundreds of hate groups operating across the United States in most states. Texas has 55 such groups; Florida has 49. This includes sectors of the Ku Klux Klan, white nationalist groups, and skinhead organizations.
 
But again, Levin’s hypothesis seems to hold up when you examine the incidents committed each year. While groups are playing a role in these incidents, the acts of violence tend to be committed by individuals.
 
Perhaps, Senator Kennedy’s hate crime bill should devote much of his attention to trying to educate the public at large on diversity and how to recognize when an individual is a prime candidate to become a perpetrator of a hate crime. 

Brian Gilmore is an attorney and a writer based in Washington, D.C.