Many blacks seem to think anyone who is opposed to affirmative actionor welfare is, at heart, an arsonist and cannot offer sincerecondolences when a black church burns.
Hate crimes” — those motivated in whole or in part by the victim’srace, religion, handicap, or erotic orientation — are thought to be avery serious problem in America. The federal government and many stateshave laws that increase penalties for perpetrators, and Congressrequires the FBI every year to compile a national record of all suchcrimes. They are often widely reported, and non-white victims of crimesof racial bias receive much attention and sympathy.
Few people realize that many reports ofracially-motivated crimes are faked by the “victim.’ There is nogovernment agency that counts hoaxes, so it is impossible to know whatpercentage of “hate crimes” are fake, but the number must be large. Thefirst serious investigation of hoaxes was Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America, written in 1995 by Laird Wilcox. It is a classic, and is still in print.
As Mr. Wilcox explains, it is easy to understand why non-whites stagefake hate crimes: They are showered with sympathy. “Racism’ isAmerica’s most storied evil, and any bona fide victim is sure to bepetted and fêted. The more acts of “racism” non-whites can cast in thefaces of whites, the more privileges they can demand. Reports of“racism” can also be very useful when hate crime legislation must bepushed through, or when a university needs to be pressured to hire moreblacks or set up a Hispanic student center.
Although the benefits for victims of “racism” are immediate andobvious, an astonishing number of the hoaxed are unable to understandwhat happened. Likely as not, the authorities that rush to the aid ofthe “victim” say they cannot imagine what could motivate anyone to fakean incident. It is the very people who offer the rewards who fail tounderstand why hoaxes are rewarding. This reflects a strange form ofblindness: the belief that racial motives of non-whites are always pureand noble, and that only whites can do wrong for racial reasons
What follows is a small collection ofhoaxes reported in the years since Mr. Wilcox’s study. We undoubtedlymissed many that were reported, and yet others were no doubtundiscovered or unreported. An unknown number of hoaxes are counted bythe FBI as genuine hate crimes, but there is little official interestin correcting the record.
There are racial hoaxes overseas. Europeansare just as ready as Americans to lionize “victims,” and have beenrewarded with their share of fakers. This is a problem that will not goaway until whites stop making heroes out of “victims,” and punishfakers as severely as they punish genuine perpetrators.
This report concludes with a summary of theblack-church-arson saga of 1996, which is probably the largest-scalefake of its kind in American history.