Hate Crimes Essay

Hate crime has been around for many years and is something that affects many people around the world. Even to this day, it is a daily occurrence, and you would think that society has evolved past this. Just recently the case 303 Creative v. Elenis gave businesses the green light to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community, which was absurd because the whole case was based on fabricated information. A hate crime is when someone is targeted based on or perceived race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, and so on. There are various factors of hate crimes like white culture, white supremacist ideology, colonization, and slavery just to name a few as these topics are covered there might be a common denominator.

Let us break it down the hate part is when someone or a group has a bias against a group or a person of specific characteristics like race, color, sexual orientation, gender, and so on. The crime aspect of hate crime is “often a violent crime, such as assault, murder, arson, vandalism, or threats to commit such crimes.” The 1964 Federal Civil Rights Law was the first American law that had to do with hate crimes. After in 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was sent which gave greater penalties for violent crimes including hate crimes that were based on race, color, religion, etc. In 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.1 Hate Crimes Prevention Act which expanded on the existing hate crimes laws to include actual or perceived gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability. “Most importantly, the Act dropped the prerequisites in the 1964 Federal Civil Right Law and the 1995 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, both of which required victims to be engaged in one of the six federally protected activities (Cheng et al.,

We as humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical to one another, so why do we treat each other horribly? One of the factors that played into hate crimes being as big as they are now is colonization and slavery. Through this white people set themselves as the superior race and would look down at people of color. White people did not see people of color as equals to them. This ideology was passed down through generations since racism is not something genetic that can be passed down but is something that is taught like someone can not be born a racist but the environment they are raised into their culture is what makes them who they are. “we define culture as the “customs, norms, practices, and social institutions, including psychological processes (Liu et al., 2019).”

According to Liu et al. (2019) in the United States, white culture can be described as a fixed constellation of Western values and beliefs. As they believe in hierarchical power structures meaning they conceptualize race as a matter of power, social identity, and placement instead of conceptualizing it as an individual attribute because humans love to rank each other. The higher you are the more power you will have. In addition, what holds white cultural values together is white people's belief that the “ideological belief that biological and cultural Whiteness is superior” as well as