Hate Crime - History

History

The term "hate crime" did not really begin to be used until after World War II and the end of most major government-sanctioned racial cleansing, but the term is often used retrospectively about persecutions earlier than that. Examples include pogroms against Jews and the Armenian genocide.

Concern about hate crimes has become increasingly prominent among policymakers in many nations and at all levels of government in recent years. There have been many examples throughout modern-day Europe by groups who harass and threaten many different racial groups. In the United States, racial and religious biases have inspired most hate crimes.

Hate crimes have a history longer than the US itself. The verb lynching is derived from Charles Lynch, an 18th-century Virginia planter known for leading vigilante actions against Tories including tarring and feathering and hanging. Lynching now thus means execution outside of "ordinary justice" and is associated with weak or nonexistent police authority, like in the Old West, and racism.

As Europeans began to colonize the world from the 16th century onward, indigenous peoples in the colonized areas, such as the Native Americans increasingly became the targets of bias-motivated intimidation and violence. During the past two centuries, some of the more typical examples of hate crimes in the U.S. include lynchings of African Americans, cross burnings to drive black families from predominantly white neighborhoods, assaults on white people traveling in predominantly black neighborhoods, assaults on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, the painting of swastikas on Jewish synagogues and xenophobic responses to a variety of minority ethnic groups.

Examples like the murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom and the Wichita Massacre tend not to be classified as "hate crimes" by U.S. investigative officials, but they have meanwhile been described as "hate crimes against whites by blacks" by Conservative commentators such as David Horowitz (a conservative author and academic) and Michelle Malkin (a commentator for the Fox News channel and a prolific conservative author). The district attorneys in both these cases have specifically stated that while these incidents were indeed horrible, and had tremendous impacts on the communities affected by them, neither displayed evidence of being black-on-white racism, either upon initial or more in-depth review.