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. 😉 ]
Seems like an interesting debate about what constitutes ‘hate’ and whether such things can only exist between minority and majority.
Al_Chutiya @ 14 and 17, this happened to me too, and it seems like a pretty easy way to cheat the data. Once I actually asked an officer to change my ticket so it read ‘Asian/Pac Islander’ instead of ‘white.’ I’m not that light-skinned. He refused, arguing that “You’re not black, are you?” I was young and scared and ended up signing the ticket. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if it was a way of balancing the scales. Each desi pulled over (there were a few in my suburb) balances a DWB and makes the county cops look less biased. Has anyone else experienced this? Seems like the reporting aspect of this data (and almost any statistics) come in question in cases like this. What if I reported a hate crime and they marked me down as Jewish? Going back to the inter-minority question, what if a group of homophobic russians attack a desi? Is that still race-based? What about rape? Does that constitute a hate crime?
Sanjay — Maybe because the “indians” in Malaysia migrated generations ago. In the case of the Chitty Tamils, they arrived prior to 1511. That’s a long time ago. (It shows how bankrupt the Malaysian Bumiputra policy is. Chitty Tamils are consider not to be “sons of the soil”, even after 500 years!)
Persecution and violence agaisnt “indian” communities in Guyana and Fiji also get less attention. The Australian doctor was a real Indian citizen — Indians are going to get more upset about the mistreatment of a fellow citizen over the mistreatment of distant co-ethnics.
It bothers me too and I hope there is post on this soon, I just did not understand why you directed your outrage at this blog. Most of the posts on this blog are top notch with respect to content and language, this means bloggers have to spend time in composing a post, I have not seen a single half ar*e attempt yet. So give them a break, that’s all.
And Clueless:
See. Some sensebilities grate easily. 😉
It’s not a sensibility. It’s a sensitivity to dubious truth-claims and the consequences of accepting them without question.
example: “Sulabh’s apparent refusal to engage with MM’s points means that he is responsible for the rampaging cancer devastating the Tasmanian Devil population.”
Straight talk–out of the barrel and originating at the hip 😉
Ikram
There was also the case about the Sikh cabdriver to who’m om ethnic slurs was directed. The interesting thing about the Indian doctor in Australia though is that if a similar case in India had come up he would probably have spent a significantly longer time in custody.
Sulabh As I told you, it wasn’t anger, rather curiosity.
Muralimannered, why are you so quick to get outraged (and seems like a pattern with you recently – is everything OK?), when none is intended by the comment? I was making an observation. As for you being disappointed by my response, that’s your prerogative – I have no control over other people’s thoughts/emotions. shrug Peace out.
I hadn’t heard of the Sikh Cabdriver — was it a big story in India? Elite Indians have an unusual attachment to London. Was it big in the US-Desi community? Americans identify more with the UK than Saudi.
Anyway — Indians in Saudi are very different from persons of Indian ancestry in Guyana, T&T, Fiji, Malyasia or Indonesia. In the same vein, mistreatment of persons of Chinese-ancestry in Indonesia had no immediate reaction from the Gvt of China. Mistreatment of a few Chinese masseuses in Islamabad led to an international incident.
That’s not outrage. Outrage is when i make throw-away comments like yours and then ‘peace out’ before I explain my glibness. If nothing was intended I don’t see why you had to type it at all and it’s not incumbent on me to divine what exactly your motivations were.
if someone leaves a comment along the lines of , “this prior comment is just another example of a ludicrous tendency to rope in the Nazis and make the author look bad”
and then a subsequent commenter says, “Oh, haha, it didn’t take too long for aforementioned commenter to take part in this ludicrous trend. hahahah”
what am i supposed to assume?
I’m grateful for your attention to my general well-being but it has no bearing on this discussion nor any influence on the tone of my comments.
Hitler was glib.
muralimannered, just so that you know, Amitabh Bachchan’s angry-young-man-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder is passé.
I can make an observation, can’t I? If it’s not incumbent on you to divine my motivations, then you can give benefit-of-doubt instead of assuming. Go eat some mishti doi or a sweet – it’ll cool you down. 🙂
I’m no fan of Big B and don’t have any heroes I care to emulate that you’ve heard of, but i’ll have to disabuse you of this notion that I’m angry and have a chip on my shoulder. I have very strong opinions about many issues–that doesn’t mean that I’m angry but that I care to investigate issues below the surface and I care to articulate my views on said issues so that my line of reasoning can recognized easily. Can you point to these chips and anger? I never said that you can’t make an observation, after all, that is what open commenting is all about–i did say, however, that if you appear to agree with Vikram can you please do us all the favor of explaining why. So what did you mean, exactly?
Apparently that doesn’t apply to the wild leaps of logic in your own post… For your own sake I hope you aren’t scheduled for any drug tests in the near future. 😉
Wild leaps, eh? Sounds like another glib-and-run to me. Do try, Dikram dear, to avoid the inevitable x-ray when applying for your next job–it could reveal the unfortunate consequences of an obsession with glass bottles.
Muralimannered, Ikram, Amit: Settle this the honorable desi way…. mixed classical indian dance fighting.
<
blockquote> Wild leaps, eh? Sounds like another glib-and-run to me. Do try, Dikram dear, to avoid the inevitable x-ray when applying for your next job–it could reveal the unfortunate consequences of an obsession with glass bottles.
<
blockquote>
The picture from your family album is … disturbing to put it mildly. But then again, you must hear that a lot. Ok, I’ll you play with yourself on this thread… have fun.
muralimannered:
I mean no personal offense with this comment. Your posts as of late have been particularly and unnecessarily confrontational in tone, and this discourages posters like myself from joining the discussion for fear of being dragged into such an encounter, and general dislike for the atmosphere you create. Look at this:
“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?” <- Reactionary, kneejerk assertion. You could easily have asked for evidence without making the claim seem invalid from the get go. Instead, you barge into the discussion in a crass manner, using hyperbolic adjectives (you don’t provide evidence to the contrary, which means these adjectives are indeed extreme) and an antagonistic tone.
“I am just asking why priorities is they way they are.” <- Your question was clearly loaded, and carefully adding this neat little preemptive statement (I am just)at the end of your post does not make it any less confrontational.
There’s a saying in the insurance industry, “It is what it is.” <- I certainly hope this is not the case for your recent posting style.
You then go on, in post 34, to make a comparison between the poster and several other people you have designated “straight talkers”, all of whom happen to be irrational extremists of one sort or another. I mean, come on, you are comparing the person’s rhetoric to that of Hitler after reading only a few paragraphs of their writing, which is extreme in itself, but leaves out the fact that the poster was not deliberately deceiving anyone with rhetoric as Hitler (and some of the other “straight talkers”) did, merely stating their opinion, unsupported as it may have been. You could easily have just called the person a “straight talker” and used less ridiculous examples, but you chose those specifically, which creates an inarguably implicit connection between that poster and those people. If that isn’t blatant and baseless antagonism, I do not know what is.
I am not taking sides in the actual debate, and I don’t really have anything against your opinions, but this is something that I feel needs to be brought to your attention.
muralimannered:
I mean no personal offense with this comment. Your posts as of late have been particularly and unnecessarily confrontational in tone, and this discourages posters like myself from joining the discussion for fear of being dragged into such an encounter, and general dislike for the atmosphere you create. Look at this:
“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?”
Reactionary, kneejerk assertion. You could easily have asked for evidence without making the claim seem invalid from the get go. Instead, you barge into the discussion in a crass manner, using hyperbolic adjectives (you don’t provide evidence to the contrary, which means these adjectives are indeed extreme) and an antagonistic tone.
“I am just asking why priorities is they way they are.”
Your question was clearly loaded, and carefully adding this neat little preemptive statement (I am just)at the end of your post does not make it any less confrontational.
There’s a saying in the insurance industry, “It is what it is.”
I certainly hope this is not the case for your recent posting style.
You then go on, in post 34, to make a comparison between the poster and several other people you have designated “straight talkers”, all of whom happen to be irrational extremists of one sort or another. I mean, come on, you are comparing the person’s rhetoric to that of Hitler after reading only a few paragraphs of their writing, which is extreme in itself, but leaves out the fact that the poster was not deliberately deceiving anyone with rhetoric as Hitler (and some of the other “straight talkers”) did, merely stating their opinion, unsupported as it may have been. You could easily have just called the person a “straight talker” and used less ridiculous examples, but you chose those specifically, which creates an inarguably implicit connection between that poster and those people. If that isn’t blatant and baseless antagonism, I do not know what is.
I am not taking sides in the actual debate, and I don’t really have anything against your opinions, but this is something that I feel needs to be brought to your attention.
Like this?
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 🙂
I agree with you
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 🙂
Thanks Anna
As for Clueless, you’re not the only one here who appreciates him.
Thanks Anna
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).
It’s all right to disagree with me.
And c’mon folks, there’s no need to pile on Sanjay. It was fairly clear to me from his first comment (#9) that his focus was not on this blog’s coverage, but rather on the general stories that the media publicizes (I believe he clarified that in another comment too). And I think the reality is that the established story line of oppression tinged by racism catches more fire in the popular imagination than brown-on-brown cruelty.
Although there is no reason to use that a reason to lessen the severity of incidents in US/Europe (which some other commenters seem to desire, at least as the subtext), or not examine them, especially given the otherwise high standards of liberty and freedom that the west claims to aspire to.
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.?
Yes I have said I agree with alot of what Lou Dobbs said about immigration.
Heat. Kitchen. Leave. cue violins
Now if you’re simply concerned that your argument won’t stand up to criticism, then you’ve simply not developed skin thick enough for discourse with other adults. That’s very sad and I hope you develop the extreme fortitude required to argue/discuss issues with online representations of people you can neither see nor hear.
See the fence. Know the fence. Become one with the fence. The fence is your friend.
did you actually read what he wrote? If I wrote, “All xxx people engender a different response from the desi community when they do the same thing as YYY people” and didn’t back up my statement with some sort of substantiation, then my statement would rightly be excoriated by other commenters. Why? Because it’s wrong and no reasonable person could back up such an assertion. I’m terribly sorry that I can’t be as eloquent as Rahul in my take-downs of obviously moronic comments but that’s not a sign of fault in reasoning or style–that’s the way I write and i could give fuck all if you or anybody else thinks it to be excessive.
but obviously (using the reasoning of Amit, Vikram etc.) the length of your comment and the feeling that ‘inarguably’ accompanied it (anger, jealousy..) suggest that you’re carrying around a bag of Doritos on your shoulder, while browsing a family album filled with medical oddities and practicing your “Angry Big B” impression.
complete and utter tosh.
Guess what genius, I forgot to block-quote that question—but guess who actually wrote it????????
but i hear straw men and red herrings need confronting.
Umm…no. The intent is to settle a dispute, not to excite me (inspite of all the best efforts of the Indian Film Censor board).
Hey, all, let’s have a time out and let the mutiny be mutinous again.
Sanjay, I misunderstood your first post, but was happy to read the subsequent clarifications and reflections.
murali, Amit, et al. — you all are usually so kind/reasonable, is this really the place to pick a fight? Things have clearly become blown out of proportion.
Let’s return to the topic at hand — hate crime stats, reporting, and challenges.
How many South Asians move to Saudi Arabia with an expectation of liberal, fair standards of treatment regardless of race and religion? If you’re going to talk the talk about being a pluralistic multicultural society that gives opportunities to anyone willing to work hard for them, you kind of have to walk the walk too…
Also it’s a little sad how far afield this topic has gotten. Is “white people are, like, the REAL oppressed group because people assume that the racist idiots they read about are white” really relevant to this discussion. Does every discussion on race have to devolve into this?
That’s what i was objecting to when i criticized Clueless’ comment. It’s not what’s at issue here.
yes, i usually am. Until people start accusing me of being an unwell, raging drug-addict. That is where civil discourse ends and endless arguments begin, no?
And dance fighting.
Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the hate crime discussion!
I am curious about the hate crime by religion – in this day and age, who is going around attacking Jewish people, in the US of all places, and that too in such large numbers? Is there a difference in the nature of the crimes between different religions? For instance, are Jewish victims of hate crimes being subjected to property defacement more than they are to violent crime? I guess I’m just surprised that there’s still so much anti-Semitism.
Don’t like Big B? No problem. I got another one (2:55 onwards). Mmmmm payasam!! 🙂
Camille, who’s fighting? Not moi. 🙂
Addendum to #81 – I did read the FBI summary PDFs, but I could not find two-factor breakups in the time I read them. Both personal and property crimes are included, but not the relative distributions of each with race/religion etc. I’d be interested to know, for instance, whether I should expect to get beaten up or have my car vandalized (just an example, not that either is going to happen).
Whoever it is, I wouldn’t ask Debbie Schlussel, Norman Podhoretz or Phyllis chesler for the answer. It does seem to me that your impression is correct–synagogues and community centers are much easier and more visible and available targets of anti-semitic rage than private citizens. A can of spray-paint requires little from the vandal except timing and the ability to spell crude antisemitic slurs.
resentment is a great motivating factor for bigots. The malay affirmative action program, bought into this thread by sanjay, also fits into this category. a state-sponsered hate-crime, if you will.
pingpong, I think Jewish community groups do a much better job of reporting hate violence, but in my own (anecdotal) experience saw a lot of vandalism against Jewish buildings, community centers, and synagogues. I remember a string of synagogue arsons around 2001-2002 in northern California, and while an undergrad the campus Hillel was vandalized twice, and neo-Nazi graffiti was sprayed all over one of our lecture halls. For those of us who live near large Jewish populations, I think we forget that it is not easy being Jewish in a lot of parts of the country.
But what is racial, religious or sexual bias, that is what we need to decide. Their have been many instances of people falsely claiming to be victims of bias.
Recently there was a news in Times of India about a professor of Indian origin based in UK who made millions by filing false litigations against universities. He would apply for a job with any university in UK, even though he was totally unqualified and when he was denied the job he would claim that it was due to racial bias.
So these days you can never be sure that the person who is claming a bias is speaking the truth. Most of them are fakes.
Yes, one case of egregious fraud proves that anyone who claims they experienced any sort of prejudice are lying. And the FBI just eats it all up.
ugh, poor grammar. re-do:
Jew v. Muslim hate crimes stats are very interesting.
The hate crime stats against Jews are not all that surprising. Manju is correct that resentment is a powerful motivator when it comes to Anti-semitism in the US. Also the bigotry against Jewish people is more organizational compared to the free lancing yahoos who commit hate crimes against Muslims in the US. Most hate crimes against Muslims in the US are actually not committed by white supremacists.
I think the FBI/local police departments are still formalizing and trying to understand the nature of hate crimes against Muslims. If someone fires at a mosque and does not get caught, it is not deemed a hate crime and maybe it should not be anyway but the categorization of such an incident differs from community to community.
As hate crimes against Blacks and Jews have a much longer history, there is a better understanding of when its a hate crime. For example, broken window plus a swakstika on the door at a synagogue is automatically and correctly deemed to be a hate crime because everybody understands the significance of a swastika.
So these days you can never be sure that the person who is claming a bias is speaking the truth. Most of them are fakes.
Any evidence to support your incredible assertion?
Just out of curiosity, are people concerned with hate crimes, as opposed to crimes in general, because (1) they’re inherently “worse,” in an individual sense (i.e., to the victims), (2) they’re easier to deter (maybe in-group violence is harder to deter, when/if it occurs) or (3) it’s more dangerous for the society, because it may, if unchecked, touch of communal violence.
I buy (3). One could buy more than one of these, of course.
“touch off,” I meant, not touch of.
props to v-man for posting data.
I am a silly ass if I interpreted this wrong… indeed I am but based on Vinod’s Excel file (hatecrimes.xls) what I read is that white people experience more hate crimes than any other racialized group with the exception of black people in America? Am I reading this right? Can someone clarify this please and if I misread then ridicule me to the point where I only live by facades as a result of really low self-esteem?
white people experiencing hate crimes in Amerikkka more than any other racialized group with the exception of black people? Ummm… I think I had too much to smoke….
OK, I looked at Vinod’s Excel file, and I scaled the numbers for race-based hate crimes for 2000 by the actual proportion of each of the races in the population. And of course I ignored reporting bias as well as registering bias – there’s no way to tackle that, but that must be noted.
I find that, if the total number of hate crimes were still the same, but occurred randomly, so that their distribution by race matched the percentage of that race in the population: then Whites would have experienced 3,257 instead of 875; blacks would have experienced 533 instead of 2,884; Native Americans would experience 39 instead of 57; and Asians (including desis) would have experienced 156 instead of 281; and ‘Other’s would have experienced 239 instead of 240. So the ‘Other’ category experience race-based hate crimes in proportion to their population weight, but Whites do so at about a quarter of the expected rate, Blacks do so nearly five-and-a-half times the expected rate, Native Americans at about one-and-half times, and Asians at about one-and-three-quarter times.
As I looked at how the figures changed with time, I find that the crimes on Native Americans first increased and then are back in 2006 to roughly what they were in 2000, the crimes on Whites and Blacks are stable in absolute numbers, but the crimes on Asians have decreased quite significantly, so that in 2006 they are closer to the population percentage (181 actual versus 174 expected in 2006, vs 281 actual and 156 expected in 2000). Note here that the proportion of Asians in the population grew from about 3.6% to about 4.3% between 2000 and 2006, with Asian Indians growing fastest within the category. Of course, the total number of reported crimes in 2006 is about 8% less than in 2000.
These are rough calculations, and the 2006 numbers are based on estimates, and of course we are ignoring biases, etc. And 2.6% of the population claimed more than one race in 2000, I ignored that.
Well Chachaji, why not employ the same methods of analysis you employed with the “Victim” stats to see who it is that actualy COMMITS the majority of “Hate Crimes”. Using your methods we would see that Whites are really the least racist of all groups and that minorities are considerably more prone to “Hate”. (Some more than others). Here in the UK, taking the ultimate in “Hate” crimes (Inter racial homicide) we find that whites are 90 times more likely to be killed by a black than they are to kill one theirselves, for “Asians” it is “Only” 30 TIMES nore likely. Why not grow up? Not everyone will like us but suffering unkindness in a shop or taxi is nowhere near as “Racist” as being murdered.
“white people experiencing hate crimes in Amerikkka more than any other racialized group with the exception of black people? Ummm… I think I had too much to smoke….”
You have obviously never been a white person in a large urban area (most of the east coast, upper mid-west and LA). And as you are brown, you probably have little insight into attitudes and dynamics of the past 50 years. Everybody here seems to think the United States is still Alabama, 1930. All due respect, and I do understand your priorities, but you really need to think out of your brown bags. Not only are the black on white crimes more numerous than the other way around, but they are nastier. They range from vile verbal harrassment to rape, assault, murder and attempted murder. I have countless stories personal and friends, and few incidents were reported or if reported, not necessarily as “hate crimes.” Just crimes where the victim was white and perps just happened to black. Of course race had nothing to do with it.
yes, we browns constantly aspire to white skin but are cruelly blocked by the tyranny of melanin. Or did you mean “been with.” It’s kinda hard for browns to spontaneously change their genetic make-up.
And as you are brown, you probably have little insight into attitudes and dynamics of the past 50 years.
I knew it! my 24 years of living stateside really amount to 0 when it comes to ‘understanding attitudes and dynamics.’ Woe is me and my unchanging skin color which somehow precludes understanding of racial dynamics of the country in which i was raised.
I better run to the local desi grocery store and grab some Fair n’ Lovely–it’s better than a college degree and a quarter-century of experience!!