As the nation wrestled with racial tensions in 2020, hate crimes reported in the country shot up to their highest levels in two decades — including racially motivated hate crimes against white people.
According to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, there were more anti-white hate crimes committed in the U.S. last year, 869, than in any other year since 2000, when 904 anti-white hate crimes were committed.
The news may come as a surprise to some, as much of the mainstream media coverage focuses on racially motivated hate crimes committed against minorities in America, with anti-black and anti-Asian crimes, in particular, taking center stage in the past couple of years.
That coverage tends to focus specifically on hate crimes against minorities carried out by white individuals, as well.
Hate crimes committed by white people against people of color garnered significant media attention in 2020 and spawned massive international movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement in response to George Floyd’s death.
That focus may be for good reason, as black people continued to easily make up the largest share of victims in U.S. hate crime incidents in 2020 — with a reported 2,871 hate crimes being committed against them — and racially motivated hate crimes against Asians rose 73%, in comparison to the prior year, to 279.
But the constant media attention perhaps caused the historic increase in racially motivated hate crimes against white people to get lost in the shuffle.
Christopher Tremoglie, writing for the Washington Examiner, suggested that such “hate crimes tend to go under the radar because the media, politicians, pundits, academicians, and other ‘experts’ tend to play up such stories only when they advance a leftist narrative about the ubiquity and danger of white supremacy.”
Tremoglie went on to suggest that the media’s biased attention toward minority victims and demonization of white people may even have played a role in the increase.
“The Left’s rhetoric has been replete with racialist, and just plain racist, anti-white rhetoric, which has really picked up in the last five years. This includes all the insinuations that whites living today are privileged and thus culpable for racist violence by other whites, both living and long dead,” he wrote, adding, “In that context, the fact that more and more white people are being targeted for violence comes as no surprise. The popular woke message nowadays is that they deserve it.”
The Biden administration has responded to the hate crime crisis by appointing Rachel Rossi “to be the department’s hate-crimes coordinator, and direct[ing] Jim Felte, head of the department’s civil rights division’s criminal section, to oversee an expedited federal review of hate crimes,” CBS News reported.