When it came to hate crimes, not much changed from 2013 to 2014. It still is the case that most hate crimes have a racial motivation (47% of all hate crimes); religion and sexual orientation tie for second place, being the subject of 19% of all offenses each. Of racial hate crimes most of the targets were African-American (64%).
When it comes to religious-based hate crimes, Jews continue to be the most common targets -- 58% of such attacks targeted Jews (Muslims were the second-most frequent targets at 16%). Interestingly, at least as far as the numbers go the experience of gay men parallels that of Jews almost exactly: 58% of sexual orientation based crimes target them (and again, there were essentially the same number of sexual orientation based hate crimes as there were religious crimes). So, you know, we're in it together.
There is some good news, though: hate crimes overall dipped slightly from 2013. So that's a little heartening, I guess.
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One way of evaluating this data is to consider the likelihood that any individual would be victimized by a hate crime – that is, the absolute number of incidents directed at a group divided by the number of members in the group. Thus, while it sounds bad to say that Jews experienced 58% of religiously-based hate crimes, it sounds vastly worse when you acknowledge that those 58% are targeted at only about 2% of the US population. It’s deplorable that the 1% of the US population that practices Islam would be the target of 16% of religiously-motivated hate crimes, but the data suggests that Jews still have it worse. (Not to run an oppression Olympics or anything.)
For what it's worth, happy holidays....
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