While the rise in hate crimes against Muslims has been receiving attention from anti-racist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the newly released FBI hate crime statistics for 2016 also reveal there’s been an increase in hate crimes against whites.
The FBI’s hate crime numbers are broken down into “incidents” and “offenses.” The FBI explains that there can be numerous “offenses” within a single “incident.”
According to the FBI’s hate crime statistics, there were 720 hate crime incidents and 876 hate crime offenses against white people in 2016, compared to 613 incidents and 734 offenses in 2016. The FBI’s overview on race-based offenses claims that 20.7 percent of the racially-motived offenses in 2016 were against whites.
CNN’s analysis of the FBI’s hate crime data claims the number of hate crimes against whites increased by 17 percent in 2017. In fact, CNN noticed the increase in hate crimes against whites was so dramatic in 2016 that it even included a reference to it in their headline: “Hate crimes rose in 2016 - especially against Muslims and whites.”
While there were 720 anti-white incidents in 2016, there were 307 anti-Muslim hate crimes. This means that although the outrage about the growing hateful menace has been largely followed on actions against Muslims, there were twice as many incidents against whites.
In fact, Muslims were not even the most targeted religion. There were 684 anti-Jewish incidents in 2016 and 834 anti-Jewish offenses.
When it comes to the perpetrators of hate crimes, a plurality (46.3 percent) were white. However, the FBI also notes that 26.1 percent of the hate crime perpetrators were black. Considering the U.S. Census approximated in 2016 that blacks were 13.3 percent of the population, their presence on the hate crime list is disproportionate. This is especially true since the FBI notes 18.1 percent of the offenders’ races were unknown.
While it is unknown if blacks committed the anti-white hate crimes, there is a history of anti-black racial hate crime hoaxes committed by blacks. In many of those cases, however, hate crime charges are not levied against the perpetrators because of their race.
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(Image source: Scott Davidson, via Flickr)