MAJOR KUDOS to our administrators (particularly Chaitan) for fixing this post, recovering the comments and making the universe just a bit more whole
; they fixed my screwup.
The FBI recently released its latest statistical roundup of hate crimes throughout the United States. These stats are maintained as a result of a congressional mandate and provide an interesting time series analysis of crime against specific races and / or religions – 
Statistics released today by the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that 7,722 criminal incidents involving 9,080 offenses were reported in 2006 as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, or physical or mental disability. Published by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Hate Crime Statistics, 2006, includes data from hate crime reports submitted by law enforcement agencies throughout the nation.…Analysis of the 7,720 single-bias incidents by bias motivation showed that 51.8 percent were motivated by a racial bias, 18.9 percent were motivated by a religious bias, 15.5 percent were triggered by a sexual-orientation bias, and 12.7 percent of the incidents were motivated by an ethnicity/national origin bias.
Because racially- and religiously-motivated crimes are frequent topics on Sepia Mutiny, I thought it would be intersting to do some number crunching to make the stats available for future discourse….
Alas, it’s never quite that simple…
As with any attempt to gleam Truth from Stats, there are always methodological considerations. In an issue many of us first noticed when bubbling in our identities on SAT forms, when it comes to many stats, Desis aren’t a recognized category. For the FBI, racially we’re classified as “Asians” and religiously, while Islam is separately tallied, Hindus & Sikhs fall into the classic “other” (and Desi Christians? Desi Muslims? heh… ). The Hindu American Foundation has taken up this issue in a petition / recommendation to the FBI to amend it’s record keeping –
..the coalition recommended that the FBI include at a minimum, the “Anti-Other Ethnicity/National Origin” line to include a line that specifies “Anti-Arab,” the “Religion” section to include a line for “Anti-Sikh” and “Anti-Hindu,”
So, while anti-desi crime is obscured by bucketization, the broad trendlines are still pretty interesting to take a gander at. First, let’s look at the breakdown of hate crimes by race for the past 8 years –
Depending on how literally you want to read these stats, hate crimes against Desi’s actually go down marginally post 9/11. One interesting quirk here is that crimes against “Arab” origin folks are tallied not as “racially-motivated” but rather as “ethnic origin” motivated (along with anti-Hispanic crime) and thus in a different table altogether. So, perhaps instances of Desi-mistaken-for-Arab may have fallen into that bucket –
“Other” clearly had a bad year in 2001 although there’s reversion back to the pre-9/11 mean (perhaps the epitome of “cold comfort”)…. If you take a look at hate crimes sorted by religion, the “Post-9/11” effect on Muslims is even more dramatic –
Crimes against Muslims leap dramatically from 2000 to 2001 and remain several times the pre-9/11 average afterwards. Interestingly, these crimes are still a fraction of reported anti-Jewish crime – especially given roughly similar-sized Muslim and Jewish populations in the US. Crimes against “other religions” (which the FBI dutifully notes also includes Buddhists and Taoists) actually decrease from 2000 –> 2001 and remain within the pre-9/11 trendline.
What does it all mean? I’ll let you guys sort it out…
[for your reading pleasure, my Excel file is hatecrimes.xls (30 KB) and the FBI’s original numbers can be found here]
[Admin Note: This post has been recovered and comments from today’s post have been merged. A helpful hint for newcomers who may be confused. 😉 ]
“What does it all mean? I’ll let you guys sort it out…”
C’mon man… you the ‘blogger’. Give us your perspective and we will argue about it.
I wonder if groups like ADL (Anti-Defamation League) would encourage hate crime reports from Jews. Without that, they’re out of work. I mention this in the context of the consistently high number of hate crime reports from Jews and also with Indian groups looking up to Jewish groups as role models (this was related to lobbying) – perhaps we should take their successful models and better them?
The apostrophe is wrongly used in the post title. Please remove it.
The biggest problem with using FBI hate crime data to talk about “who’s oppressed more” is that it counts offenses like vandalism and “intimidation”. This data is therefore heavily reliant on people affirmatively choosing to report such incidents to the police.
As such, religious and ethnic groups that encourage their members to collect and report this information to authorities will be more represented in the stats. So a strong educational campaign, sympathetic public figures, and a well-funded informational (and potentially legal) infrastructure will significantly impact these numbers. I would argue that at least some portion of the high representation of hate crimes against Jewish people in these statistics is due to strong organizations like ADL.
Of course there’s a chicken-and-egg thing going on here. You could make the argument that ADL is successful because it’s directly responding to very serious, continuing discrimination. That view is borne out by the growth in Islamic organizations intended to combat discrimination after 9/11 — CAIR has grown enormously, for example. Of course, there is virtually no such organization for Hindus, or even Desis as a group. I would argue that this group is heavily undercounted as a result (the fact that Desis are not even counted as a distinct group, and that Hindus are shoved into the general “Other” group along with Satanists, Wiccans, etc, etc… speaks powerfully to that).
Just think it through: if you wake up one day and find some offensive graffiti on your garage, what would you do? Who would you call? If you live in a large American city, there may be some anti-discrimination organizations that could help you, but that doesn’t help many Desis. The organizations are also not widely known, and sectionalist impulses within the American Desi community may prevent people from reaching out to them. You could call the cops, but that would mean leaving it up for some time, and you know that investigating graffiti will not be a high police priority. Most likely, you would wash it off, stew for a while, and move on. And another “hate crime” goes unreported.
Having said all that, I freely admit it’s possible that the sort of “hierarchy of American minority oppression” the stats suggest may be true. I can believe that the absolute number of crimes against Jewish people and Hispanic people absolutely overwhelms the number of crimes against Muslims/Hindus and/or Desis. But I think the FBI’s data is fatally flawed as a tool to really get at that distribution. It’s not nearly sophisticated enough.
The report has some very serious problems. It says that only 1 Hate crime was committed in Alabama and 0 in Missisippi compared to 739 in Michigan and 74 in Maine. We all know that Alabama and Missisippi have no minorities and no racial animus!
Jews v. Muslims: This stat is not all that surprising. Your local FBI office has to register a crime as a hate crime. The FBI agents dont register crimes as hate crimes usually unless the crime is very serious. In typical cases you need an organization to follow up with the FBI before it gets reported as such. Also Muslims (a lot them immigrants) might be unwilling to report such crimes anyway as is typical in immigrant communities.
Race of the offenders:
By Race An analysis of available race data for the 7,330 known hate crime offenders revealed that:
58.6 percent were white. 20.6 percent were black. 5.7 percent were groups made up of individuals of various races (multiple races, group). 1.1 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander. 1.0 percent of known offenders were American Indian/Alaskan Native. 12.9 percent were unknown.
Vinod, I’ve commented on apostrophe use in your articles in the past as well; there is no reason why the plural of desi should be desi’s.
Adding to the chorus of apostrophites.
?
Shodan, just be thankful that the Baha’i sect wasn’t discussed on the thread.
Racism against South Asians is an interesting topic. I’ve lived in a couple countries due to my fathers job, US, UK, Germany, Malaysia and Saudi. I now live USA permanently. When I visit my relatives in India the topic racism often come up. Have you ever experienced racism, and so? Usually I try to argue that racism in India is allot more prevalent than in the west, but they can’t see their own racism towards religious minorities etc. But that is really not very surprising, Indians are hardly alone when it comes to that. There was a very funny Sopranos episode about Cristopher Columbus, and thos mobster went on against defaming Italians while using harsh language against native Indians. It’s just normal really.
No the interesting part as I see it, is why South Asians (or rather Indians) are so perceptive when it comes to racism in the west, even a comment to a Sikh cab driver in London make prime time news in India. This at the same time as Saudi Arabia executes 15 Indian nationals yearly, and Malaysia has apartheid laws for REAL. As we speak 26 ethnic Indians are being charged with murder only because they attended a demonstration against discriminatory laws against ethnic Indians in Malysia. To my surprise this news is not nearly as big as the Sikh cabdriver in London or the doctor that was held for terrorism charges in Australia. Not in Indian newspapers and not on this blog. I ask my self. How come?
If you want something done, ask a woman. Having said that, done, done and done.
Unless you find more. I’m kinda swamped right now with other things, so I didn’t read his post/just scanned it. 🙂
For the seventy-fourth time–
a) we are not a newspaper. we are a blog. nothing more.
b) if we don’t have time, we can’t post about it.
The minute one of you bonus-rich I-bankers wants to pay me to sit at home and blog all day, I’ll be your Sepia Monkey. Then the stories which EVERYONE feels are being slighted merely because they weren’t posted on a blog (???) will be covered. Until then? If you can, please accept what’s possible. We do our best.
We don’t even have time to proofread! Look at Vinod’s posting and running! 😉
It’s the shock factor, not so shocking if it happens in the Arab countries or Malaysia etc.. but it is shocking if it happens in the UK, US, Australia etc.. just my guess.
Vinod, as was mentioned previously, there are huge institutional barriers to reporting. Hate crimes against religious minorities (“other”) increased by nearly 300% between 2001-2002 and then began to scale down again. How much of this was because of a drop, and how much had to do with confounding (too many different groups categorized as “other”), and how much had to do with underreporting or language barriers? It gets tricky. Also, given the high level of correlation between perceived ethnicity and religion/race, it’s hard to disambiguate in hate crimes stats. The other difficult aspect is that to be qualified as a hate crime there’s actually a relatively narrow definition, so many “bias incidents” (which are not actually hate crimes) are not captured in the survey.
I also think that there is a problem with classification of people under different races/ethnicities. For example, I got a speeding ticket a few months back and the police man put down my race as white. I was looking up information on this Bangladeshi dude and his race on a speeding ticket is put down as ‘black’. So here you have two desis who very well might have been victims of race bias and one would show up in the records as white and one as black. There is no standardization and a lot depends on the perception of the person who is writing down the report.
ANNA
It was just a reflection, not a complaint. Why are Indians more occupied with racism in the west and less with racism in the arab world and South East Asia. How come?
Not How come you do not write about it. It wouldn’t have made any difference if you hade wrote about, I would still have asked the same question, although leaving Sepia Mutiny out of it.
are you in a special line of debauchery work? or is speeding ticket info open to the public?
Here’s a Slate article on what information the police can access about anyone. (birth info, credit report, etc.)
are you in a special line of debauchery work? or is speeding ticket info open to the public?
Its open to the public. Go to the Clerk of Court’s website for your County and look up this information under public access or case file or case status online.
yikes! I hope places of employment take no such interest in these matters.
Today five more Indians where charged with murder, wich makes a total of 31 persons. All of them participated in a demonstration to protest against reservation quotas on jobs for Malays, and that Tamil speaking schools get less funding than Malayspeaking school. The Malay governents asnwers to those protest are, that Indians in Malaysia are better off in Malaysia than in India, and charging 31 with murder because one policeman was injured during the riots. This is nothing less than South African apartheid.
Sanjay, maybe we are concerned with U.S. issues because this is a DESI-AMERICAN blog? I know that, as an American, while I am concerned about global issues my bias is certainly towards issues that threaten democracy at home.
Camille
Well there where a lot of coverage concerning Australia. Again, it was not a question concerning the priorities of this blog, but a comment about how desis percieve racism in general.
4 Also Muslims (a lot them immigrants) might be unwilling to report such crimes anyway as is typical in immigrant communities.
Ditto for hate crimes against latinos. I can’t wait to see the stats for 2007 when this year is over.
Sanjay, maybe this is because of the demographics of the commenters on the site. There are more commenters from the U.S./UK/Australia than from Malaysia, in my experience 🙂 Not that that makes an alternate view unimportant, just less represented. I have a feeling people perceive racism similarly (although fundamentally differently since racism varies by its social context and history), but that there is not the same level of direct experience or exposure.
I am not so sure about this catagorizaition. I think it has more to do with time (as in bandwidth), knowledge and passion of the bloggers. There have been enough posts about things that have very little to do with US and absolutely nothing to do with democracy.
Sanjay, while you can harp about and request a post about your favourite topic, I don’t think you can browbeat bloggers into posting about a particular topic.
It was just a reflection, not a complaint. Why are Indians more occupied with racism in the west and less with racism in the arab world and South East Asia. How come?
It easier to get mad if the person who did it was white. Last week a sikh cab driver was attacked in Seattle. The person who attacked him was hispanic. So the outrage for that attack is not the same if it was if the person was white who did it.
Things that go on in the arab and South East Asia are alot worse then anything in the west in the year 2007.
sulabh
Goddamit, I’m not trying to force anyone to do this or that. I am just asking why priorities is they way they are. Clueless gave an example of a relating phenomena. Why didn’t the incident in Seattle get as much attention as the incident in London? I think that i interesting.
Camille
Yes of course, that might be the reason. But I’m not sure since it’s a phenomena you see in India as well.
That view is definitely held by some people… recently Isiah Thomas, the Knicks coach said this:
The big story in the NFL is that during the end of the Ravens-Pats game, when the Refs were doing everything in there power to help the Pats win. One of the Ravens players Samari Rolle who is black stood up to the Refs, and one of the Refs called him “BOY”. The ref who called him this was also black. Could you image if the ref who said this was white. Al Sharpten,Jesse Jackson and HMF would be on every channel and we would never hear the end of this.
when you say that the level of outrage was unequal in cases involving white and non-white assailants, are you referring to a particular metric measuring said outrage? Are you adding up hits on news.google for support? Or are you making a baseless, blanket assertion about the ‘typical’ reaction to hate crimes where a desi is the victim and the assailant is white?
Also there is no region on earth called “The Arab.” I presume you are referring to the Arabian peninsula?
There’s a saying in the insurance industry, “It is what it is.”
Why does it bother you? Don’t you understand the historical resonances of using that terminology? SO why does it itch you so much?
There was a topic last year here on this website about sikh being attacked by his neighbor in Califronia, and at 1st nobody the race of the person who attacked him. So people started making comments about the attacker being white. But when it came out the attacker was black, the comments changed.
What does that have to do with your comments about the different resonances of calling a black man ‘boy’? Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Clueless,
Your comments probably grate on sensebilities on quite a few on this blog, but I quite enjoy this straight talk. 🙂 I hope you never get banned 🙂
Just like all the other straight-talkers.
how charming.
Y’all act like it happens all the time. It doesn’t. 🙂
As for Clueless, you’re not the only one here who appreciates him.
Godwin’s law by commnet #34. That was fast. 😉
comment. grr.
I generally don’t agree with Clueless, but I don’t think “progressive” narratives of hate crimes and their causes allow for the perp to also be a Person of Color (PoC).
You forgot this at the end of your list:
If people want to post about a particular story that’s what the news tab is for. You can even comment there.
I think they do, but we (on SM) often debate over whether this is emblematic of “racism” or of racial violence. It sounds like splitting hairs, but the number of 100+ post threads on that issue spring up each time. I think people take objection to the idea that hate violence happens on an equal playing field or with equal probability of harm.
how does godwin’s law make my comparisons invalid? People who say things, unvarnished by reason, logic and substantiation are often branded “straight-talkers” because their message is easy to understand i.e., “Immigrants are bad” or “Jews are evil and are wrecking our country.” and it runs counter to what they perceive as the dominant narrative or accepted wisdom. Such ‘straight-talkers’ deserve neither credit or praise for the content of their message nor the manner in which it was delivered.
I’m sure the next time Hotair opens up commenter registration again, you’ll have a chance to join in the ‘straight-talking’ over there.
I am not trying to bait, but Clueless, were you the person who said you favored Lou Dobbs’ approach to immigration in the U.S.?
It is time to negotiate. Are you willing to just sit at home? How many $$ a day?
just to clarify – not an IBanker although I wish I could be on the floor trading.
44 was in jest 😉
I’d have to say i’m fairly disappointed by your glib response. If you bother going through the links I provided (a broad spectrum of both current and past public figures/commentators who fancy themselves ‘straight-talkers) you might find a quibble with his characterization of my comment as an example of Godwin’s Law. Jared Taylor, Steve Sailer, Tom Tancredo and David Duke are not definitely not National Socialists but they are racists who feel the need to masquerade as ‘reasonable folk’ who ‘speak the truth’.
if you wish me to get even more obscure references, I venture that your time is better spent in this fruitless enterprise than mine.
coverage about Australia – where ?
While I certainly do believe that discrimination from the majority (in US the white community) is very different from discrimination from other communities in aspects of harmfulness, it is in countries like Malaysia and Saudi Arabia a matter of the major ethnic group against a minority. Maybe this interests me more because I am an indian who moved to America rather than an Indian-American.
melbourne desi
The Indian doctor who was related to the british terrorists. I said, that story got a lot more coverage in Indian media than the current story about 31 Indians being held for murder charges in Kuala Lumpur because they attended a demonstration against discriminatory laws in Maysia such as quotas for Malays in job and less funds for schools with Indian kids. That goes for the reaction among most Indians, this blog as well. I asked the question why is that? I find it interesting.