Latinos accounted for two-fifths of the nearly 3.8 million people added to the state’s population between 1980 and 2008…. The share of Arizona’s growth due to Latinos has grown significantly across the last three decades while the growth due to whites has declined…. The percentage of Arizonans who are Latino increased from 16 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 2008. In contrast, the share of the state’s population that is white declined from 75 percent in 1980 to 58 percent in 2008.

He also provides this striking chart, which has major political-economic implications:

As he points out about this chart,

Whites account for over half of the state’s population ages 35 and older and make up at least 80 percent of those in elderly age categories. . . . In contrast, Latinos outnumber whites in the two youngest age groups (0 to 4 and 5 to 9). While the median age of the white population is 43, it is only 26 among Latinos.

This racial-age polarization has significant implications. A majority of active voters and political activists now are still white, while the population that will eventually be that majority of voters and activists is not white, indeed is very substantially Latino. Many Arizona whites have also been the ones so aggressively seeking SB1070-type legislation to reduce the (already significantly declining because of the Bush depression) number of Latinos in the state, with some of them supporting violence against these immigrants in the form of armed groups patrolling the border.

One of the sad ironies in all this is that most of the Mexican immigrants, especially the undocumented, in Arizona actually do much work for whites, to make their middle class lives (houses, restaurants, etc) more affordable and thus to buttress white middle-class affluence. One has to wonder who will do much of this hard and dirty work in Arizona if the immigrants are driven out.

Saenz also notes certain critical larger national and international “boxes” within which the Mexican immigration has taken place:

The families of many Latinos in the state have been there for generations. Furthermore, globalization, the expansion of economies across international borders, and the aging of the populations of developed countries all stimulate the movement of people into places such as Arizona.

Thousands of people have been attending rallies in Paris and 130 other French towns to protest at the government’s policy of deporting Roma people.

A majority of French respondents in polls support the government expulsions and other apparent “cleansing” of these mostly working class residents of France:

About 1,000 Roma (Gypsies) returned to Romania and Bulgaria from France last month, while official figures record that 11,000 Roma were expelled from France last year. The League of Human Rights, which called for the demonstrations, said it wanted to counteract government “xenophobia” and what it described as the systematic abuse of Roma in France.

French President Sarkozy has apparently expanded these high-profile campaigns for political reasons, even against opposition in his presidential cabinet:

Prime Minister Francois Fillon hinted that he disliked the crude links being made between foreigners and crime, while Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he considered resigning over the issue.

There have been violent encounters between the Roma and non-Roma police in some cities:

In mid-July, riots erupted in Grenoble after police shot an alleged armed robber during a shootout. The next day, dozens of French Roma attacked a police station in the small Loire Valley town of Saint Aignan, after police shot dead a French Roma man who had allegedly not stopped at a police checkpoint.

French politicians’ expulsion and other policing actions have seen dissent and criticism from international sources like the Vatican and the United Nations, even the European Commission.

The article largely ignores the large scale racialized discrimination that targets the Roma, something Jessie detailed here. I am not very familiar with these recent French events, or the background. Perhaps some of our viewers can add some savvy comments on the situation in France.

As one African American Muslim leader noted this is not only about religious intolerance, but also about (white) racism:

“We have to be able to decode what’s happening and realize that this is religious intolerance on one hand, and it’s [also] good ol’ red-blooded American racial and ethnic bias on the other hand,” said Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, sitting in his office at the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood Inc. in Harlem.

National polls indicate only a quarter of Americans support of the right of some Americans to construct a Muslim center near the 9/11 site–and presumably, by implication, the first amendment’s promise (extended by the 14th amendment) of (government) noninterference in the “free exercise” of religion in the U.S. There is much ignorance in the general population about the Middle East, Muslims, and the issues around the Muslim center in New York City, for example:

Many in the mainstream media have failed to acknowledge that the proposed building will not simply serve as a mosque but as a fully equipped community center with a swimming pool, culinary school, art studios and other features. Furthermore, another mosque, the Manhattan Mosque, stands only five blocks northeast from the site of Ground Zero; Muslims have been worshiping at this location since a year prior to the World Trade Center’s construction.

So, Muslims have been worshiping there, already, for four decades. I suppose they will have to move with this new wave of US anti-Muslim hysteria? There is yet another ignorance and slighting, as Abdur-Rashid points out, in the local and national discussion—the absence of Black Muslims:

“The first thing we need to do is decode some of the language,” said Abdur-Rashid. “The first language that has to be decoded is “Americans.” That really means “white Americans.” That’s who’s uptight about this. It’s opposition that’s occurring in different parts of the country in reaction to the construction of mosques. It’s not just Park 51 in Lower Manhattan. … It’s in different parts of the country.”

African Americans were for decades the largest Muslim group (think about Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar) in the United States, and they are now the second largest group. Why aren’t they brought in as experts and commentators in the mainstream media dealing with these Muslim issues? It seems just white racist thinking and framing that results in the white-controlled media not bringing themselves to have experienced African American Muslims discussing these current anti-Muslim issues, most especially in New York City, long the home of large Black Muslim groups. (For solid and readable research on Muslim Americans, see here and here.)

Russell Simmons, a hip-hop entrepreneur who chairs the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding is quoted in the article:

“I’m disappointed in everyone, Harry Reid and the rest of the Democrats,” said Simmons. “I’m shocked at the media. There’s ignorance on all sides. Twenty-three percent of this world’s population is Muslim. They’re a peace-loving people. What we’re doing is creating more tension.”

As he points out, “The Muslims” did not attack the US, and this often vicious, highly politicized anti-Mosque “crusade” (indeed, it is like a “crusade”) will only alienate yet again much of the world’s population. Not to mention, it violates the letter or spirit of our own Bill of Rights traditions. Can we afford that as a nation?

( photo credit: joshfassbind.com)

In the U.S., the prevailing narrative about race is that “racial dynamics have been transformed,” first by the Civil Rights Movement and most recently – and finally – by the election of President Barack Obama.   We see this meme repeated again and again by mainstream news media, in popular movies (e.g., “Blind Side” and the entire genre of “white savior” films), and in personal conversation.   There is something in this narrative that speaks to both a human desire for “elevation” and the American quest to be “positive.”

Roger Ebert, film and social critic, explains that he’s never moved to tears by sad moments in movies, just during “moments about goodness.”   Ebert describes the feeling this way:

“What I experience is the welling up of a few tears in my eyes, a certain tightness in my throat, and a feeling of uplift: Yes, there is a good person, doing a good thing. And when the movie is over, I don’t want to talk with anyone. After such movies I notice that many audience members remain in a kind of reverie. Those who break the spell by feeling compelled to say something don’t have an emotional clue.”

This is the feeling that the movie “Blind Side” was supposed to evoke.   Ebert doesn’t mention the Sandra Bullock movie, but touches on race when he goes on to compare that feeling to the way he – and lots of other people – felt in Grant Park the night President Obama was elected.

In an article at Slate.com by Emily Yoffe, “Obama in Your Heart,” she describes a study about “the emotions of uplift” conducted by Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, who had studied physical responses in test subjects who are deeply moved — what psychologists call “elevation.” Yoffe writes:

Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in “positive psychology”–what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.”

Some of this research suggests that elevation is triggered by the stimulus of our vagus nerve.  As Yoffe writes again:

“In his forthcoming book Born To Be Good, Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing ‘a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat’.”

This emerging field of “positive psychology” is proving very popular.  A course in the positive psychology at Harvard is consistently the most popular course on campus, with over 800 students enrolled in it.   Whether or not this is a result of something linked to human biology remains to be determined. Closely tied to the ideas of elevation and positive psychology, is the deeply American notion of “positive thinking.”

In her recent book, Bright-Sided:How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2009) Barbara Ehrenreich writes that :”Americans are a ‘positive’ people. This is our reputation as well as our self-image. We smile a lot and are oft en baffled when people from other cultures do not return the favor.”   The central tenet of this reputation is that positive thinking will make us feel better (physically and emotionally) and this optimism will actually make happy outcomes more likely. In other words, if you expect things to get better, they will.

She goes note that there are some serious downsides to ‘positive thinking,’ including acting as an ideological cover for consumer capitalism and making it impossible to foresee the events of 9/11 (even though there was plenty of evidence of an impending attack).  I’m quoting the following at length because it’s good and she cites a number of sociologists:

While positive thinking has reinforced and found reinforcement in American national pride, it has also entered into a kind of symbiotic relationship with American capitalism. There is no natural, innate affinity between capitalism and positive thinking. In fact, one of the classics of sociology, Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, makes a still impressive case for capitalism’s roots in the grim and punitive outlook of Calvinist Protestantism, which required people to defer gratification and resist all pleasurable temptations in favor of hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

But if early capitalism was inhospitable to positive thinking, “late” capitalism, or consumer capitalism, is far more congenial, depending as it does on the individual’s hunger for more and the firm’s imperative of growth. The consumer culture encourages individuals to want more — cars, larger homes, television sets, cell phones, gadgets of all kinds — and positive thinking is ready at hand to tell them they deserve more and can have it if they really want it and are willing to make the effort to get it. Meanwhile, in a competitive business world, the companies that manufacture these goods and provide the paychecks that purchase them have no alternative but to grow. If you don’t steadily increase market share and profits, you risk being driven out of business or swallowed by a larger enterprise. Perpetual growth, whether of a particular company or an entire economy, is of course an absurdity, but positive thinking makes it seem possible, if not ordained.

In addition, positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy. If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success. As the economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a “victim” and a “whiner.”

In her remarkable book, Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst, sociologist Karen Cerulo recounts a number of ways that the habit of positive thinking, or what she calls optimistic bias, undermined preparedness and invited disaster. She quotes Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsch and Michael Isikoff, for example, in their conclusion that “a whole summer of missed clues, taken together, seemed to presage the terrible September of 2001.”7 There had already been a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993; there were ample warnings, in the summer of 2001, about a possible attack by airplane, and flight schools reported suspicious students like the one who wanted to learn how to “fl y a plane but didn’t care about landing and takeoff .” The fact that no one — the FBI, the INS, Bush, or Rice — heeded these disturbing cues was later attributed to a “failure of imagination.” But actually there was plenty of imagination at work — imagining an invulnerable nation and an ever-booming economy — there was simply no ability or inclination to imagine the worst.”

Ehrenreich’s focus in the rest of the book is about her encounters with this relentless drive toward ‘positive thinking’ after her diagnosis with breast cancer (her critique is a devastating one leveled at the “positive thinking” pink ribbon campaigns).

There’s also relevance in Ehrenreich’s critique of positive thinking for understanding the persistence of racism in the U.S. and our collective reluctance to address it.   Many people – mostly white people – think that the best way to solve racism is to ignore it.   Some black folks think that way, too (e.g. Morgan Freeman).    This view exists across party lines and political affiliations, both liberals and conservatives.    And, in a way, it’s a version of the “positive thinking” that Ehrenreich describes: if you expect things to get better, they will.  Now, just apply that to racism.    End of story.  To do otherwise is to be a “victim” and a “whiner.”

I think that’s a mistake.   Where we err is when we think that the best way to deal with racism is to look only at the bright-side, to study only how we’ve overcome, without a simultaneous critique of the persistence of racism and a thorough analysis of how we go about dismantling it.  Racism will not just “go away” because we wish it would.  And, it won’t go away if we keep producing and consuming images that “elevate” us about the subject.

I will feel elevated when there are enough jobs (even for black teens), and everyone is housed (and there are not predatory lending practices), and there are no differences in health outcomes based on race (including an end to diabetes among Native Americans and low birth weight babies among African American mothers), and there are fewer people locked up (and those who are reflect the racial demographics of the entire nation).  Now that would be a happy ending to the story of American racism.

( photo credit: smlions12 )

GIven that social media companies, like Facebook, are collecting all kinds of other data on us, it doesn’t seem all that surprising that social networks are now interested in either explicitly asking for racial/ethnic identification or figuring it out through data mining.    Is racial or ethnic identity “private” information that we should be concerned about sharing? In my view, racial and ethnic identity in social networks is less an issue of privacy and more about the assumptions in place that make that kind of identification necessary.

The fact is that social networks, like the culture more broadly, discourage racial or ethnic identification. Instead, in the current era of “color blindness” people are told that it’s “not polite” to mention race.

What polite colorblindness covers up, though, is the assumption that everyone’s white until they say otherwise. At a recent blogging conference I attended, an African American woman told the story of being online for years before anyone knew she was black. Why? Because her name is “Heather” and people just assumed she was white.

Does this assumption of whiteness matter? It does if your experience puts you outside white identity and you’re looking for your own likeness in popular culture.

As just one, small example, I’m a big women’s basketball fan of both the college and professional teams. And, I especially love watching a sport where black women excel. But, when it’s “March Madness” (college ball) or the summer during the WNBA season, it’s almost impossible to find mainstream news coverage of my favorite teams because ESPN and my local news outlets are filled with wall-to-wall coverage of the mens’ teams. When I do manage to find a WNBA game on television, it’s always a little startling to see the ads because they’re geared toward a black female audience. When I see those ads, I’m reminded once more how white and male-centric the rest of the culture is.

One of the great things about social networks is that people create their own images and can adjust that skewed, mainstream lens. It’s part of what I enjoy about social networks like Twitter. In these spaces, I can connect with people from racial and ethnic backgrounds that are different than my own who have a different take on the dominant culture. But what I’ve learned online is a lesson that many of us learned offline, too – that racial identity doesn’t necessarily map onto political views or marketing preferences.

(Image from BoingBoing)

Although there’s been some good journalism and good blogging about the Katrina anniversary, I haven’t seen much in the way of a review of the research on the subject.    So, here’s my offering.  This is just some of what I’ve run across, organized very broadly by discipline:

Sociology – The sociology on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath highlights the intersection of race, gender and class.  Sociologists contend that the inequality that existed before prior to the disaster, became intensified and deepened in the aftermath of the storm.   Further, sociologists point out the way that this rupture in the usual “colorblind” ethos that prevails in the U.S. served to strengthen whites’ racial apathy toward blacks, especially those who are economically impoverished.

• Brunsma, D., Overfelt, D., and Picou, J.S. (Eds.).  2007.  The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe. (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield).
• Dyson, M.E. 2006.  Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. (New York: Basic Books).
• Hartman, C.W. and Squires, G.D. (Eds.). 2006.  There is no such thing as a natural disaster:race, class, and Hurricane Katrina. (New York: Routledge).
• Forman, T.A. and A.E. Lewis. 2006. “Racial Apathy and Hurricane Katrina: The Social Anatomy of Prejudice in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” [pdf] Du Bois Review 3 (1): 175-202.

Environmental / Urban Studies – Urban and environmental studies examine the ways that the built environment shaped the disaster and the ways that environmental hazards are concentrated in minority communities.  In addition, those who look at the disaster through an urban studies lens explore the process whereby local economic elites are seeking to make an opportunity of the destruction by monopolizing the planning process and rebuilding the cityscape in a fashion more amenable to the accumulation of capital.

• BondGraham, D. 2007.  “The New Orleans that Race Built: Racism, Disaster, and Urban Spatial Relationships,” Souls 9 (1):4-18.
• Bullard,R.D. and  Wright, B. 2009.  Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press).
• Campanella, R. 2006. Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm. (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies).
• Park, Y. and Miller, J.  2006. “The Social Ecology of Hurricane Katrina:  Re-Writing the Discourse of “Natural” Disasters” Smith College Studies in Social Work 76 (3): 9-24.

Public Health -Psychology-Mental Health – Psychologists along with public health and mental health professionals examine the impact the disaster had on individual mental health.  One study (Galea, et al., 2008) found that women, and those who had suffered significant financial loss following the disaster, were more likely than men or those who didn’t suffer significant financial loss, to experience PTSD after the storm.

• Chen, A. C. Keith, V. M. Leong, K. J. Airriess, C. Li, W. Chung, K. Y. Lee, C. C.  2007. “Hurricane Katrina: prior trauma, poverty and health among Vietnamese-American survivors.” International Nursing Review 54 (4):324-331.
• Krol, D. M. Redlener, M. Shapiro, A. Wajnberg, A.,  2007.  “A Mobile Medical Care Approach Targeting Underserved Populations in post-Hurricane Katrina Mississippi,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 18 (2): 331-340.

• Chen, A. C. Keith, V.,  Airriess, C., Wei, L. and Leong, K. J.  2007. “Economic Vulnerability, Discrimination, and Hurricane Katrina: Health Among Black Katrina Survivors in Eastern New Orleans.”  Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association 13 (5):257-266.
• Galea, S., Tracy, M., Norris, F., Coffey, S.  2008.  Financial and social circumstances and the incidence and course of PTSD in Mississippi during the first two years after Hurricane Katrina.  Journal of Traumatic Stress 21 (4): 357-368.
• Vigil, J.M. Geary, D.C.  2008.   “A Preliminary Investigation of Family Coping Styles and Psychological Well-Being Among Adolescent Survivors of Hurricane Katrina,” Journal of Family Psychology 22 (1):176-180.
• White, I. K. Philpot, T. S. Wylie, K. McGowen, E.  2007.   “Feeling the Pain of My People: Hurricane Katrina, Racial Inequality, and the Psyche of Black America,” Journal of Black Studies 37 (4): 523-538.

Media / Communications – Communications and media scholars focus attention on the ways that the mainstream media framed the disaster for television audiences and newspaper readers.   Study after study demonstrates that, as Tierney et al. demonstrate, “metaphors matter.”   As the image above illustrates, race played an important role in the ways that the stories from the disaster were told.

• Spence, P.R., Lachlan, K.A., Griffin, D. 2007.  “Crisis Communication, Race, and Natural Disasters,” Journal of Black Studies 37 (4): 539-554.
• Tierney, K. Bevc, C. and Kluigowski, E. 2006.  “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604 (1):57-81.

Public Policy – Scholars and analysts that examine the racial impact of the disaster from a policy perspective tend to focus on the failure of governmental, corporate and private agencies to respond to the plight of New Orleans’ black community. Stivers makes a compelling case that racism – “The belief that members of a certain race are inherently inferior – less intelligent, less ambitious – has rationalized discriminatory treatment as fitting, proper, and without evil intent,” – significantly shaped the public policy response following Hurricane Katrina.  Five of the six areas classified as most heavily damaged were neighborhoods with 60-80% poverty, and the population was predominantly black.  Stivers notes how these two facts – racism and the disproportionate impact of the storm on black people – shaped public policy response to the storm, when she writes: “On the one hand, the bureaucrat’s job is to lighten the burden imposed by a capitalist economy that inevitably leaves some people at the bottom; on the other hand, American ideology relies on the belief that people who are at the bottom are there because of some character flaw or inherent inability.”

• Danzinger, S and Danzinger, SK.  2006.  “Poverty, Race and Antipoverty Policy Before and After Hurricane Katrina“[pdf]  DuBois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3:23-36.
• Henkel, K.E., Dovidio, J.F., and Gaertner, S.L. 2006. “Institutional Discrimination, Individual Racism, and Hurricane Katrina,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 6 (1): 99-124.
• Marabel, M. and Clarke, K. (Eds.).  2008. Seeking higher ground:the Hurricane Katrina crisis, race, and public policy reader. (New York: MacMillan).
• Muñiz, Brenda.  2006.  In the eye of the storm: how the government and private response to Hurricane Katrina failed Latinos.[pdf]  Report, National Council of La Raza.
• Stivers, C.   “So Poor and So Black”: Hurricane Katrina, Public Administration, and the Issue of Race,” [pdf] Public Administration Review 67 (1):48-56.

I’m sure there’s good research I’ve overlooked in this brief list.  If I’ve left out some of your research, or some that you know of and use, please add a comment and I’ll update the original post.

Granted, I’m not saying that young whites today are tripping over themselves to join the Klan or anything. But a complete absence of racism? In my presentation titled “‘It’s not on the news, so…’: Ambivalence towards White Supremacy Among White College Students,” I presented evidence about how white college students go out of their way to not see white supremacist activities, while defending their right to exist and even flourish. They seem to feel it necessary to say that white supremacists and their organizations are a serious problem in our society, yet contradict themselves when they call them impotent, ridiculous, limited to the south, etc. This contradiction creates an ambivalence towards these groups, and whether intended or not, this ambivalence towards white supremacy assists in efforts to protect white supremacist speech.

I mentioned a couple of examples from the interviews that I found to be most intriguing. The first was Odella, who told me of an incident involving “good ole southern boys” burning “a black doll” in effigy on the grounds of her high school. She immediately minimized the incident, saying it had been resolved and called it “an isolated event.” Incredibly, later on when discussing the significance of white supremacists and their organizations today, she said:

“I don’t think white supremacy is a serious problem in our society, I know it exists, but um (.) maybe I just don’t see it (.) like maybe in other places it’s more prominent, but…”

After asking her if that incident at her high school constituted white supremacy, she answered “yeah, probably” but said it was “spur of the moment” and that these good ole boys had simply made a bad decision.

The other example came from Troy, who rationalized discriminatory behavior in the pursuit of profit. When he recalled his “training” as a club bouncer he provided extensive details on who he was supposed to keep out of the establishment: baggy jeans, Fubu clothes, and Timbaland boots, and most of all, black skin. Although he seemed to struggle with the racist thinking of his boss at one time, he said “it sounds terrible but it’s kind of like the line from The Godfather ‘It’s business, not personal,’” and saying it’s alright if “they’ve got bills to pay.” He admitted that the whole point of the dress codes those establishments enforce are a way to keep blacks out (“because they can’t just come out and say ‘all right black people [don’t] come in’ so they have to make a dress code and basically they find stuff that applied to [the] black crowd and say ‘you can’t come in wearing that’”).

Although these are just a couple of examples from the research, there were many others that showed young white people are generally ambivalent towards white supremacists and their organizations. I believe that this attitude makes it virtually impossible to get the needed public policies and societal resources to fight these groups and to protect the rights of those they seek to harm. I wish I were as optimistic as Gallagher is about our young white children today, but for now I say wait 10 or 20 years and see where they will be and how they behave.

Brave New Films has also organized an online petition, which you can sign here.

(Image from CSM)

The apparent hate crime attack on Mr. Sharif and the alarming wave of hate crimes against Latinos that Joe wrote about yesterday are connected in a number of ways.   One of the major links is the way that these acts of violence are part of a larger social context that includes rising tide of hate speech targeting Muslims and Latinos.

The research connecting hate speech to hate crimes is mixed.   When it comes to individuals explaining their motivation for hate crimes, there’s actually relatively little research that investigates motivations for hate crimes.  One study that does this finds a range of motivations:  thrill, defensive, mission, and retaliatory motivation (J. McDevitt, J. Levin, and S. Bennett, “Hate Crime Offenders: An Expanded Typology,” Journal of Social Issues, 58 (2):303-318).   In the case of Enright’s attack on Sharif, this appears to be a “mission” hate crime, in which Enright was on a “mission” to attack anyone who was Muslim.   Other research, such as Alexander Tsesis’ book Destructive Messages (NYU Press, 2002), demonstrate how hate speech gives rise to dangerous social movements.

The question really is where did Enright, a film student who was working on a project to promote cross-cultural understanding, get the idea that he should attack someone who was Muslim?  No one knows for sure.   The fact is that after traveling to Afghanistan to work on a film project, Enright returned to New York where there is an ugly display of hate speech downtown about the so-called mosque controversy. Could this have played even a small role in Enright’s violent actions last Tuesday?  It seems more than plausible.

The fact is that the U.S., and even the country’s most diverse city, New York, are becoming more treacherous for people of color.   And yet, this violence gets repaid with loyalty.  Despite the brutal attack on him, the cab driver Mr. Sharif told supporters outside City Hall that he still loves New York.

“This is a city of all colors, races, all religion, everyone. We live here, side by side, peacefully.”

Here is a sampling of these racist attacks:

Early last Saturday in Baltimore, Martin Rayez, 51, was beaten to death with a piece of wood. The man arrested for the crime, Jermaine Holley, 19, allegedly confessed and told police that he “hated Hispanics.” He has been treated in the past for schizophrenia. The killing occurred in East Baltimore, the scene of other recent attacks on Latinos. . . . In June, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in Phoenix said that the murder of a Mexican-American man a month earlier was a hate crime. Gary Thomas Kelley is charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Juan Varela. He also is charged with menacing Varela’s brother with a gun. “Hurry up and go back to Mexico or you’re gonna die,” Kelley shouted at Varela before shooting him in the neck, police said. The dead man was a third-generation, native-born American.

There have also been 11 attacks on Latinos on Staten Island just since April.

The SPLC attributes some of these violent attacks to the hostile climate created by U.S. political officials:

Two of the most outrageous recent examples: Texas Republican Congressmen Louie Gohmert and Debbie Riddle both claimed that pregnant terrorists plan to sneak into America to give birth to future terrorists who will automatically become U.S. citizens and eventually “help destroy our way of life,” as Gohmert put it. Both representatives claimed that former FBI officials divulged the terrorist baby threat to them.

Given that undocumented immigration has declined in recent months, this upsurge in the hostile racial climate, fed by actions such as those of leading Republican officials in Arizona, seems to be intentional. Anti-brown-immigrants seem part of an old right-wing framing of U.S. racial matters.

The human rights report to the United Nations that I mentioned yesterday does not even discuss the thousands of these racially and ethnically motivated crimes that the U.S. has seen in the last decade, including these against Latinos–although it does mention the new hate crimes law and has a brief sentence on anti-gay crimes. The human rights report also has rather general and skewed language on official attacks such as racial profiling:

The United States recognizes that racial or ethnic profiling is not effective law enforcement and is not consistent with our commitment to fairness in our justice system. For many years, concerns about racial profiling arose mainly in the context of motor vehicle or street stops related to enforcement of drug or immigration laws. Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the debate has also included an examination of law enforcement conduct in the context of the country’s effort to combat terrorism. Citizens and civil society have advocated forcefully that efforts by law enforcement to prevent future terrorist attacks must be consistent with the government’s goal to end racial and ethnic profiling.

Even racial profiling is not discussed in its problematic details, with data, but is tied to outside terrorist attacks. There is also no mention in the report of the internal terrorism against thousands of Americans of color.