Amerika

Oh, those horrible Caucasians — we don’t hate them because they’re smart, successful and (sometimes) beautiful. We are morally opposed to them because they’re all racist hater-bigots!

There were 6,604 criminal incidents characterized as hate crimes reported in the United States in 2009, according to an FBI report release Monday.

The incidents involved 7,789 offenses resulting at least in part from bias toward a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin or disability, the report said.

Almost half of the incidents were motivated by racial discrimination, while almost one in five were based on religion. Nearly 19 percent of the crimes were due to a person’s sexual orientation.

Sixty-two percent of the known offenders were white, the report concluded. Almost 19 percent were African-American. – CNN

That sounds just awful. I should be ashamed to be white. Except that if you read the fine print:

Race/ethnicity

The UCR Program uses the following five racial designations in its Hate Crime Statistics Program: White; Black; American Indian/Alaskan Native; Asian/Pacific Islander; and Multiple Races, Group. In addition, the UCR Program uses the ethnic designations of Hispanic and Other Ethnicity/National Origin. – FBI

If you read carefully, you’ll see that for the category race there is no distinction drawn between whites and Hispanics; sometimes, they’ll specific “non-Hispanic whites” to mean Caucasians from Europe.

But it makes for better hate-the-rich headlines if we just blame whites, who make 80% of the country, for over 60% of its hate crimes.