Monday, September 30, 2013

A recent history of hate-crime hoaxes


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hateRacism and hate are real. Hate crimes do happen — some violent, some just threatening.
But unfortunately, there is no shortage of wannabe heroes — who in most cases have never suffered discrimination — actively undermining the cause by committing fake hate crimes, often with the idea of drawing attention to an issue.
The Daily Caller had a piece this week on a recent and especially pernicious hoax at Oberlin College, perpetrated by an overzealous, outspokenly liberal Obama campaigner and his friend. The two young men terrorized their campus with racist graffiti, flyers, and emails sent from a fake address using the name of the university’s president, at one point placing a flag with a swastika in a campus building. The incidents received national news coverage.
Incredibly, once the hoaxers had been discovered, suspended, and removed from campus, university administrators concealed their knowledge that it had been a hoax, leaving other students (and Americans in general) to fear that their campus was a far more dangerous and hostile place than it actually was.
Fake hate crimes are sometimes politically motivated, designed to get a reaction from people and convince them that hate is a really big problem — this is usually done by liberals, but in at least one prominent case (see below) it was done by a conservative. In other cases, the perps have other motives, such as financial fraud or a need for evidence to bolster a discrimination lawsuit.
Fake hate crimes seem especially common on college campuses, where a reaction is almost guaranteed and where the perps are naive enough about the ways of the world to think they can get away with it.
Here’s a brief and partial recent history of hate-crime hoaxes, culled from various online sources including trendsinhate.com (which contains accounts of several real hate crimes as well) and fakehatecrimes.org:
 

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