Bandaid Bigotry A hate crime is an illegal act motivated by bigotry towards one or more of the various protected classes recognized by the American government. A hate crime conviction comes with much more stringent sentencing than crimes of a more banal source. Why have this labeling of some crimes as worse than others? Well, in a word: history. America has a long history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and every other prejudice in the book. This experience with horror has ingrained the American populace with either a vague sort of shame or, more rarely, a deep denial of the truth of things. So, when we hear of someone getting stabbed in an alley we say “well that’s just the way things go.” But when the victim is black and the person holding the knife had a swastika tattooed on their neck, then the usual response …show more content…
Perhaps those people who commit a hate crime don’t actually “oppose the goals of the United States” and aren’t actually “traitors to its ideals” (Dodge). Perhaps they have a clearer picture of what America really stands for than anyone else. If a man has a thousand examples, can he really be called a lone gunman? And amongst all that, hate crime legislation has not done much to stem the tide. Incidents of single-bias hate crimes that have been reported to the FBI (and isn’t it so ironic that they’re the ones keeping tabs on this kind of thing) have held steady at around 6,000 a year for the past decade (Hate Crime). If we are supposedly so much better now than back then, why hasn’t that number dropped with every new example made of the skinny white twenty somethings with bad teeth and worse hair? Why do the cries of dying gay and bisexual men in Chechnya, Russia fall on deaf ears? Why are people more upset about grammar-nazis than the literal Third Reich Revivalists marching in Charlottesville streets? Bigotry never died, it just got