False.
Hate Crime Hoaxes Are More Common Than You Think
A political scientist found that fewer than 1 in 3 of 346 such allegations was genuine.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hate-crime-hoaxes-are-more-common-than-you-think-11561503352
Hate Crime Hoaxes Are Real. But So Are Hate Crimes.
Fake hate crimes are definitely a reality. Wilfred Reilly, associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University, documents more than 400 such hoaxes in the past four years in his upcoming book,
Hate Crime Hoax. In a recent
USA Today column, Reilly writes that two other researchers have compiled separate, though partly overlapping, lists of more than 300 incidents each. (Reilly, who is African-American, is unabashedly partisan in his approach; his book, published by the conservative Regnery outfit, is subtitled “How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War.”) To Reilly and other conservative pundits, this amounts to nothing less than a hate-crime hoax epidemic.
The liberal counterargument is that fake hate crimes are a tiny fraction of all reported hate crimes, of which the FBI records 6,000-7,000 annually and which seem to have been
on the rise in recent years. If Reilly’s count is accurate, and even if we add another 200 incidents from the other two lists he mentions, that would still mean about 2 percent of hate-crime reports turn out to be fabricated. Clearly, progressives say, our main concern should not be with hoaxes but with real hate crimes—and our default position should be to believe people who say they have been victimized by bigots.
America is too big, too populous, and too diverse for hate-related violence to be an either-or situation.
www.thebulwark.com
As Racial Hoaxes Go, Jussie Smollett’s Case Is a Strange One
While Smollett’s case is bizarre on its own terms, unfounded criminal accusations across racial lines have a long history in the United States. The overwhelming majority of these cases have involved white accusers implicating black people, and the consequences have often been grievous. A false claim of rape by a white woman against a black man led to the Rosewood massacre in Florida in 1923; similar allegations in Alabama in 1931 touched off the Scottsboro Boys case, which led to years of trials, retrials, appellate-court decisions, and a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. This history also includes the white Mississippi woman who told her husband in 1955 that Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old, had flirted with her. After her husband and his half brother kidnapped, beat, and shot Till and drowned him in a river, she told a still taller tale, testifying in court that he had physically assaulted her.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve analyzed more than 100 racial-hoax cases, beginning with the 1987 case of Tawana Brawley, an African American teen who falsely said that several white men had raped her. My book
The Color of Crime covers 92 such cases.
Approximately two-thirds of hoax perpetrators are white. White accusers are more likely to say they were victims of a random act of violence by a make-believe black offender. Black people who create hoaxes are more likely to say they were victims of a hate crime by an imaginary white perpetrator.
Many other accusers have tapped into our unconscious beliefs about the nexus between race and crime.
www.theatlantic.com
www.newsweek.com
