President Joe Biden vowed to bring the country together as a unifying force, but hate crimes are rising.
An FBI hate crime data update showed a sharp rise in hate crimes since the already-violent 2020-21, Biden's first year in office. Led by a sharp rise in attacks related to gender identity and sexual orientation, there was a 35% rise in hate crimes, The Hill reported.
After the FBI reported 8,052 hate crimes in 2020, the FBI updated the 2021 total to 10,840. An original December report had suggested 2021 hate crimes had declined, but it was based on incomplete data from thousands of law enforcement entities nationwide.
A large portion of the hate-crime increase was aimed at gender identity and sexual orientation, as gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities were the second most likely to be a victim of a hate crime and anti-LGB hate crimes increased more than any other group from 2020 to 2021, according to the report.
Anti-LGB hate crimes rose 54% from 2020 (1,110) to 2021 (1,707), involving 1,979 people targeted for their sexual orientation.
With an estimated 10 million identifying as LGB, according to UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, about 1 in 5,000 members of the LGB community was a victim of a hate crime.
Among those with gender dysphoria, including transgender people and gender non-conformists, hate crime rose 29% from 2020 (266) to 2021 (342), albeit still rare.
UCLA's study estimated 1.4 million transgenders in America, meaning the data suggested 1 in 3,571 having been a victim of a hate crime in 2021, according to the report.
But race, ethnicity, or ancestry still remain the No. 1 group among victims of hate crime. There were 6,643 race-based hate crimes in 2021, a 27% increase from 5,227 in 2020 – a year that featured Black Lives Matter and antifa rioting after the death of George Floyd.
As estimated 1 in 12,000 Black people was a victim of hate crime in 2021, according to the data.
White Americans were the second most often targeted group for race-based hate crime, but were the least targeted racial group when considered proportionately to the full population of white Americans, according to the data.
Just 1 in 170,000 white Americans were a victim of a race-based crime, according to the report.
The hate-crime data broken down by race:
- White Americans committed 5,191 hate crimes.
- Black people committed 2,036.
- 1,405 committed by race unknown.
- 793 by Hispanics.
- 404 by those who were multiple races.
Religious hate crime rose 28% from 2020 (1,244) to 2021 (1,510), with Sikhism, Judaism, and Islam the most targeted.
Antisemitic hate crime data found 1 in every 9,200 Jews in the U.S. as a victim of the 817 incidents in 2021, according to the FBI.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.