Hate crime hoaxes

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views September 10, 2001]

The most outrageous feature of "hate crime" laws, that have been passed in several states and municipalities, is the implication that members of particular groups are more important when it comes to legal redress than other citizens.

Another rarely mentioned feature is the temptation that such laws offer to the devious to invent "crimes" that never happened. The most recently reported case took place in Linden, Texas, in August, where a black woman claimed that two white men jumped her on the street, beat her, robbed her, and carved the letters "KKK" into her chest. As reported by the Arizona Republic, investigators of the Cass County sheriff's office found so many inconsistencies in the woman's story that she finally admitted fabricating it. (Shades of Tawana Brawley.)

In recent years, there have been many such concocted and embellished tales. Laird Wilcox was the first to systematically recount such hoaxes, which often have different motives attached. He maintains that the media often limits its coverage of falsified "hate crimes." Following is an excerpt from Wilcox's Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America:

In recent years "anti-racists" have proclaimed that virtually every behavior and institution in our society is covertly racist. Anti-racism has become a small industry in the United States. Entire career fields are built around defining and combating "racism" in one form or another. As individual problems are solved and offensive behaviors disappear, the definition of racism is broadened again and again to include more and more behaviors, hence we have the problem of "increasing" bigotry and intolerance. I suspect the last thing many professional anti-racists want is a truly race-neutral society. They have developed a vested interest in the continuation of the problem, a kind of "co-dependency" relationship, if you will.

It's no great surprise that a bright, socially-conscious individual would realize quite on his or her own that there's nothing like some racist graffiti or some other "hate crime" to invigorate the militants, and what the hell, it's for a good cause--right? Americans are not known for their ability to defer gratification for long, hence the racist or anti-Semitic hoax. It's as easy as apple pie.

Consider a college campus boiling with racial and gender sensitivity, with courses in victimization, organizations for victims, a constant barrage of victim-victimization propaganda--but no immediate and palpable victims. "Anti-racist" vigilantes with no racists (or misogynists and homophobes) to hang had better get busy and make some, and as we see, they often do.

What I see happening with hoaxes is a kind of "market" process: the frequency of hoaxes increases with their utility in accomplishing desired ends. When the "market" or payoff for victimization goes up, the temptation to create victimization where none exists is very strong and the temptation to exaggerate minor cases of alleged victimization is even stronger.

Conversely, as the number of hoaxes increases (assuming they are reported) a greater skepticism toward unproven and marginal victimization claims will probably increase as well, and hoaxes will become less effective. It's pretty much a matter of supply and demand.

In Crying Wolf, besides detailing particular cases, Laird Wilcox discusses aspects of a social environment that abets racial and anti-Semitic hoaxes. He is also author of The Watchdogs: A Close Look at Anti-racist 'Watchdog' Groups. See Editorial Research Service

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