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HATE CRIMES

June 14, 1998

The barbaric torture and murder of James Byrd Jr. by three white men—Shawn A. Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John W. King—in the tiny Texas town of Jasper has become a summertime feast for an insatiable American media, but it is a meal that consists largely of spectacle. On June 7, 1998, Berry, King, and Brewer offered Mr. Byrd a ride home. Instead, they shackled Mr. Byrd’s feet to a chain and dragged him behind their truck for miles.⁷

The vigor with which the latest race murder is being covered is strikingly contrasted with the lackluster coverage of a similar case from over a year ago in Virginia, where a young Black man, in the company of a few white drinking buddies, was beaten, burned, and as he took too long to die, decapitated with an ax.

Why is one story a national firestorm, and another a local curiosity? Why is one an unquestioned hate crime, and the other merely a case of “boys being boys,” or a bad mix of liquor and bad company?

This is so because the media said it was so, and because the local police told them this.

When is a hate crime a hate crime? When it is a crime of hate, or when the police say it is? And if the cops are to be the arbiters of what is, or isn’t, a hate crime, who will judge the cops without bias?

In late April 1998, New Jersey state troopers pumped over 11 shots into a van occupied by four Black and Hispanic students who were on their way to basketball tryouts at Central University in North Carolina, seriously wounding three of the four young men. Thanks to the infamous “racial profiling” program of the New Jersey State Police, the four never made it to tryouts that day because they were found guilty of the unwritten crime of DWB—Driving While Black. Despite a rain of lies alleging that the basketball players were speeding, attempted to run the cops down, and so on, it soon became clear that the boys had done nothing—nothing except exist. Ain’t each of the 11 bullet holes evidence of a hate crime?

In Chicago a man named Carl Hardiman was shot and wounded by a city cop for refusing to drop his “weapon”—a cell phone. Ain’t that a hate crime?

New York Black Panther Shep McDaniel was brutally beaten by six cops in the Bronx as he attempted to peacefully monitor and note an altercation between police and two women. New York’s finest shouted, “He’s a crazy, fucking, nigger!” as they punched, kicked, stomped, and cuffed McDaniel. A jury later acquitted McDaniel of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. Was not his beating, brutalization, trumped-up arrest and bogus prosecution a hate crime?

On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a home in a residential Black neighborhood where 11 men, women, and children—members of the naturalist MOVE group—were incinerated and dismembered by cops. The sole adult survivor, Ramona Africa, was prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison for seven years. Ain’t that a hate crime?

In many ways, Black America remains captive to its feverish, hateful history in a land that daily mocks the claim to being “the home of the free.” We have become conditioned by corporate mis-leaders who make a spectacle out of occasional acts of racial hatred, while ignoring the structural ones that degrade the everyday life of millions of Americans.

Why do we pay attention to the retail acts of anti-Black violence, while ignoring the wholesale? Far more dangerous than the white-robed KKK is the legalized malice of the black-robed judiciary. Far more destructive than the Aryan Nation are the local, armed, and uniformed police who are legal agents of an ancient, deadly hatred.