Hate Crime Analysis

Hate Crime Analysis

Introduction

Hate crime against the African American population is a five hundred year old vice. Since the slave traders moved millions of African captives and prisoners to cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane plantations in America, the African American people have been subjected to intense violence, prejudice, oppression, and other racially motivated hate crimes. This essay explores certain aspects of this vice such as the descriptive motivations, case examples, state laws criminalizing such hate crimes, and data collection strategies for research into the same.

Analysis

Hate crimes against the African American people are purely racist. Certain attitudes and even scholarly misdirection in the middle Ages created a misconception that the White race was superior while others were inferior (Desmond, Papachristos, & Kirk, 2016). Therefore, Africans and African Americans were deemed unsuitable for integration, employment, and even respect based on their skin color.

Tens of millions of cases demonstrate the hate crimes meted out against the African American race. The millions of African and African American slaves mistreated and subjected to forced labor, rape, imprisonment, and even torture all provide case studies. Much later, the same demographic was denied civil rights to education, participation in democracy and voting, as well as access to social amenities (Desmond, Papachristos, & Kirk, 2016). Those that resisted were beaten, shot, or imprisoned. Recently, White police officers in the United States seem keen to shoot African Americans in more cases of hate crime.

Several states in the United States have created new or modified laws that criminalize various hate crimes such as racially motivated violence. The 1968 Statute signed by President Lyndon Johnson criminalized use of force or other methods to interfere with, or harass any person because of their race, skin color, religion, or national origin. Similarly, the Church Arson Prevention Act was signed in 1996 criminalizing the destruction of churches and other religious premises based on religious or ethnic-based beliefs (Brax & Munthe, 2014). In 2009, President Obama signed another statute called the M. Shepherd and J. Byrd Hate Crime Prevention Act. It criminalized any activities that relied on jurisdiction loopholes such as police brutality.

Collecting data usable in measuring the victimization of African Americans would occur through direct interviews with consent. There are many victims of civil rights injustices still alive. Additionally, many victims of racially motivated hate crimes exist due to police brutality, racially motivated violence, and racial harassment at the places of work.

The direct interview, with the respondents’ consent, is one of the most reliable data collection methods. It suffers from little researcher bias and has the opportunity for error identification and correction because it involved interacting with real human beings. In addition, it is quite cheap when the affected demography consists of millions of African Americans eager for justice against their perpetrators.

From the large group of criminological theories that explain crimes, specifically hate crimes, two stand out in explaining the motivation behind hate crimes perpetrated against African Americans. The first one is the psychological criminology theory and the second one is the social construction theory (Krohn & Ward, 2015). Psychological theories of crime that explain hate crimes against the African American population state include cognitive aspects of human development where he engages in vices that benefit his existence thus modeling his existence. White people who subscribe to racism have benefitted directly or indirectly from oppressing African Americans, thus their cognitive development embraces the vice as necessary or even right.

Similarly, social construction theory defined racism against African Americans according to its perpetrators. These criminals have existed in environments that did not consider the vice as a crime due to economic, religious, or social reasons as was the case in the Southern States. Therefore, they continue to redefine these hate crimes in a manner that does not criminalize them, rather, labels them as part of the society.

References

Brax, D., & Munthe, C. (2014). The Philosophical Aspects of Hate Crime and Hate Crime Legislation. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 30(10), 1687-1695. doi:10.1177/0886260514555374

Desmond, M., Papachristos, A. V., & Kirk, D. S. (2016). Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community. American Sociological Review, 81(5), 857-876. doi:10.1177/0003122416663494

Krohn, M., & Ward, J. T. (2015). Integrating Criminological Theories. The Handbook of Criminological Theory, 318-335. doi:10.1002/9781118512449.ch17