I feel the same way as the OP.
It just isn’t fair to the rest of us males who aren’t part of a protected minority and are victims of an assault.
Some of us I’m sure have faced violence as a result of “being different” Remember the school bullies? Perhaps we weren’t macho enough. But only if we can claim we were gay can we get our tormenter a more severe sentence.
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know if the laws are the same everywhere, but my understanding is that nobody gets charged with a hate crime if there is no other crime committed. Hate crime charges are only added to other crimes. So if that’s correct, the racism itself is not criminalized.
Well said, Polycarp. The criminal justice system takes intent into consideration all the time. Accidents are treated differently than deliberate acts. Premeditated crimes are treated differently than crimes committed in a moment of passion. Crimes against law enforcment officials are treated differently than crimes against normal citizens.
A crime intended to harass or intimidate an entire class of citizens is worse than a crime directed at an individual. And, as such, it should be punished more harshly.
In the latter example, the perpetrator would get a harsher punishment than simple assault, because the charges would be assault and robbery. Any example you pick will be unique, so I don’t think it makes sense to analyze it in terms of “Is X worse than Y?”
Bullshit. Plenty of minorities have been charged with hate crimes against White people. In fact, I would be surprised to see any legislation that precludes minorities from being charged with hate crimes against a member of the majority. Here is one site (among countless others) that have links to articles regarding minorities charged with hate crimes against White people.
Nonsense. See above.
Really? Any reason that you didn’t just say it clearly straight White males?
Got a cite that you have to be a member of a protected class?
Just to kill this before it gets started, of the 5,020 victims of racially motivated hate crime in 2006, 21.0 percent were victims of an anti-white bias.
So, as soon as Congress passes that law, men will be able to get their tormentors a more severe federal sentence too.
CMC +fnord!
Just cause I got it and I think you’ll appreciate it, The Global Rich List
I have thought about this topic in the past from time to time but never been able to get an easy answer.
On the one hand, hate crimes are (or should be defined as) crimes motivated primarily by hate for the victim’s group rather than the victim as a person, and which and can reasonably be construed as intended to intimidate/threaten the group as a whole. Certainly punishment should fit the magnitude of the crime, and I think it’s fairly clear that this crime is of a higher magnitude than a crime motivated by greed or some personal dispute or whatever. Hate crime is a form of terrorism. As such a serious crime, it should only be applied to those cases where there is *strong *evidence that the crime truly was motivated by hate and intended to threaten the community at large (i.e. just because a criminal made racist comments in the past, and attacked that particular group doesn’t make the crime itself a hate crime. But if the crime was clearly motivated by hate and intended to intimidate, as in the murder of MLK, certainly it should be treated as a more severe crime.)
On the other hand, the purpose of imprisonment should be at least partially be to rehabilitate the prisoner, otherwise we’d might as well keep them locked up for life. If we tack on extra years to a sentence beyond what we feel is necessary to rehabilitate the prisoner simply to make ourselves feel good about being tough on crime, and therefore release someone less-than optimally rehabilitated, we’re kind of shooting ourself in the foot. But then again, if we sentence based purely on some notion of optimal rehabilitation, we will not be discouraging the crime itself as much.
Really though, as far as I know there’s very little rehabilitation going on in American prisons anyway, more of a crime college, so I say that until we’re willing to make a serious attempt at rehabilitation, we might as well keep hate-criminals off the streets as long as possible.
So to summarize, hate crimes improve the punishment, deterrence and separation purposes of imprisonment, but probably undermine the notion of rehabilitation, but then we’ve pretty much given up on that anyway.
And that’s the problem. Whites are often gratuitously accused of racism not only by non-whites but by many white liberals, as the recent rape hysteria at Duke University rape shows. If a white guy gets into a fight with a black guy and uses the “n” word in anger, he may find years added to his sentence for committing a hate crime. But if the guy he’s fighting uses words like “cracker” or “honky,” most likely nothing will be added to his sentence at all. The standards by which they’re judged won’t be the same; the white guy will be found guilty of “hate” much more quickly and easily than the black guy. There are no clear, universally accepted standards for judging what a hate crime is. I suspect many hate crimes against whites aren’t categorized as hate crimes simply because the victims are white.
Not to dodge your question, which is a valid one, but what kind of fight is this guy getting into that he is being thrown in jail for years? Perhaps his choice of epithets is not his biggest problem. 
Yes, people might be more willing to suspect white people of racism - that wasn’t the whole story at Duke, but it was part of it - and the lack of a clearly defined standard of hate is an issue. If you’re going to say that white people are getting singled out, though, some kind of evidence would be good.
Upon what do you base this comment? Okay, you’ve created a hypothetical where something happens because you said it happens, but do you have evidence it actually occurs?
I think brickbacon’s post show that people do indeed get punished for anti-white bias.
I think white people, like everyone else, sometimes see prejudice against them even when there’s no evidence of it.
The Jena affair, the phony Duke rape scandal and the Tawana Brawley hoax are all examples of how whites can suddenly find themselves accused of “hate crimes” on the basis of little or no evidence.
(shrug) I didn’t say that no one ever gets punished for hate crimes against whites.
True, but whites are obviously much more vulnerable than non-whites to unfounded accusations of racism.
I’m only vaguely familiar with the Tawana Brawley case, as it happened when I was 5. (It looks to me like the whole thing was crap.)
While people were called racist in the Duke and Jena cases, nobody was charged with a hate crime. In fact, in the Jena case, no white people were arrested at all, and the racism charges came from the way school officials and law enforcement overlooked something that arguably was a hate crime.
White people aren’t a minority. In that sense, yes, white people are more vulnerable to being accused of racism because, for obvious reasons, they are less likely to be victims of it. From the standpoint of legal hate crimes, though, I don’t see any evidence to support what you’re saying.
And VCO3 keeps saying he’s turned over a new leaf.
No one was charged with a hate crime in the Tawana Brawley case. In fact, the case was so shoddy that the grand jury refused to charge anyone with anything at all.
How, exactly, do you legally prove that he hates Japanese people? What is the legal definition of race hatred? What scale or degree do you use and at what point exactly does this certain abstract level of hatred (combined with violence) make you chargeable with a hate crime?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions…
Sorry, maybe I just haven’t been keeping up with the news, but I thought the Jena “affair” was clearly an example of a racially charged crime. Nooses hanging from a tree in an obvious nod to lynching is certainly a hate crime.
On a quick review, I can’t find anything about white people being found guilty of hate crimes that there was no evidence for. A hate crime charge, like all other charges, does require evidence to prosecute it. As for being simply accused of hate crimes, well, I’ll admit that those kinds of things do happen. However, unless the accusations pan out in litigation, I don’t see what might be the problem besides negative publicity.
In a legal sense, everyone is equally vulnerable to being accused of a hate crime. However, I take it to mean that in our society a white person is more likely to be “victimized” by this allegation because minorities are more likely to “play the race card.” Perhaps that expectation, in both directions, is yet another unfortunate stereotype we need to work on.
I think you’re missing Polycarp’s point. The legal system makes these kinds of judgments all the time. How exactly do you prove that a man killed his wife because of his extreme jealously over her recently discovered infidelity? What level of jealousy is necessary?
We prove these things based on evidence, like any other crime. And a jury decides whether or not they find that evidence convincing in the case of guilt and a judge decides in the case of sentencing.
Obviously? What are you basing that on?
I agree with you completely, and as a liberal, I find it terribly embarrassing and distressing that my side of the aisle is responsible for this crap, along with universities trying to control speech, etc. It grinds my ass.
As for closest thing to a thought crime. though… I dunno. I could debate you about that, although now that I consider it, you’re probably right. I just happen to think that busting people for THINKING that they are going to meet a 13 year old for sex when no 13 year old actually exists is pretty much a thought crime and it pisses me off. (Look at it this way: if a 19 year old girl told you that she was 13 and looked it, and you fucked her, should you be busted? Fundamentally the same thing as the “to Catch a Predator” bullshit.)
Well said, and I hope someday we will have laws against hate groups. Meaning those groups whose primary reason for being is to hate other groups of people.
Such as…?