The Tiger represents courage, daring, justice, and helping others. Traits we should all strive for.

Gallup - Gallup's 2021 update on minority rights and relations finds that an increasing percentage of U.S. adults believe racism against Black people is widespread in the United States. Relatedly, Americans' satisfaction with the treatment of Black people remains near its historical low.

At the same time, more Americans than a year ago believe civil rights for Black people in the U.S. have improved in their lifetimes, though the 69% holding this view remains lower than Gallup's pre-2020 readings. A majority of Americans believe Black people are treated less fairly by police in their community than White people are, but most do not believe Black people are treated less fairly in other situations.

Americans Increasingly Perceive Widespread Racism in U.S.

Sixty-four percent of Americans believe racism against Black people is widespread in the U.S., a slight, but not statistically meaningful, increase from 2016 (61%). It is the highest in the trend of five total readings since 2008, the three most recent of which are 60% or higher.

Non-Hispanic Black (84%) and Hispanic (72%) respondents are more likely than U.S. adults, generally, to say racism is widespread. Non-Hispanic White respondents (59%) are less likely to believe it is.

The results are based on a June 1-July 5 Gallup survey that included oversamples of Black and Hispanic adults to allow for more precise estimates of those subgroups. The overall sample was weighted so all racial and ethnic groups were represented in their proper proportions of the U.S. population.

Americans became more likely in 2015 than they were in the prior measure, in 2009, to say racism against Black people is widespread. This was after several high-profile incidents in which Black people were killed in encounters with police officers. The percentage believing racism is widespread reached 60% that year and has stayed above that level since, with modest increases in the 2016 and 2021 surveys. Gallup did not ask this question in 2020, so it is not clear if perceptions of racism were higher in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd killing and news reports of racism toward Black people in everyday situations, including a man birdwatching in Central Park and a family using a hotel's swimming pool.

In addition to the racial group differences, there is a wide partisan gap in perceptions that racism is widespread, with 91% of Democrats, compared with 34% of Republicans and 62% of independents, believing it is.

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Southern Poverty Law Center - The rise in anti-AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) hate incidents and hate crimes has finally started a national conversation on the history of anti-AAPI hate in this country, what might be driving the latest increase, and how to address it.

PBS NewsHour

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Transcript:

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Four leading authorities joined me recently in an online forum to detail that connection.

  Racial justice activist Eric Ward, American University professor Pamela Nadell, former homeland security analyst Daryl Johnson, and former white nationalist Derek Black tackled extremist groups, the conspiracy theories driving their beliefs and the current and historic roots of antisemitism that underlie their convictions.

  This segment is part of our ongoing series "Exploring Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and Extremism."

  Derek, I want to ask, is anti-Semitism, a sort of binding agent.

• Derek Black:

  Yes antisemitism is the fiber of white nationalism, it is the ideology that in many ways is absolutely at the core and motivates all of its organizing. All of its core ideology and its worldview.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Derek, I want to stay with you for a second. Tell me a little bit about that. I mean, the role of lore here, when you're a child, I mean, the stories we are told as children are there conspiracy theories that you remember hearing as if it was established fact.

• Derek Black:

  I mean, absolutely. I think it's important at the beginning of this panel that people understand how white nationalists see the world is that more so than organizations for racial justice, more so than civil rights movements. White nationalists believe that all of their problems with society are created by an organized conspiracy of Jewish people who are motivating and pushing immigration laws, civil rights laws, And it's a belief system that in many ways disregards people of color so that it's not possible that that organizing is coming from actual racial justice organizations, but that it is a secret cabal, a conspiracy by Jewish people and therefore Jewish people are the main targets of white nationalists.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Daryl, I want to ask you from your work in the Homeland Security Department, can you help us see how this idea, or these ideas that Derek just rattled off binds both domestic terror groups, but also internationally? I mean, does it transcend white nationalism make for some sort of strange bedfellows?

• Daryl Johnson:

  Yeah, I think it's an important aspect that your audience needs to understand is this anti-Semitism is not just limited to white nationalists, it spans the spectrum. We have sovereign citizens that believe in these conspiracy theories of this elite Jewish cabal, of people that are secretly manipulating government and infringing on our rights and things of this nature. It also bridges over into Black nationalism, as well as Muslim extremism and even some of the militia groups that we have here embrace some of this anti-Semitic belief systems like the new world order, gun legislation. All of this, they believe, is some sort of Jewish conspiracy to undermine their Second Amendment rights. So that's an important aspect is, you know, many hate groups and different types of extremists embrace anti-Semitism as a core belief.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Eric, you also say, you know, the antisemitism is an effective conspiracy theory that dehumanizes all of us. I mean, how do you say that based on your own experience as a civil rights leader?

• Eric Ward:

  You know, one thing I've learned is you can't convince a person of something they don't already kind of believe. The first thing we have to understand is white nationalist or other politically violent movements are racially biased movements. They don't bring anti-Semitism or other forms of bigotry to our community. They merely organize the bigotry that already exists. Anti-Semitism exists in American society. White nationalists are tapping into it in order to build political power. It means we have to understand anti-Semitism, and one of the things we should understand about anti-Semitism is it doesn't just impact Jews. Non-Jews are just as vulnerable to the violence of anti-Semitism as the Jewish community.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Professor Nadal, I mean, we might be able to better understand these connections today if we're given a little bit more context about the past. I mean, some of the tropes that we are hearing from my guests here, they seem ancient. I mean, you can kind of, you can almost take this verbatim from biblical times to now.

• Pamela Nadell:

  Exactly. Hari, even even though there is anti Judaism before the birth of Christianity, what we're really seeing is we're seeing a kind of line from the Gospels where John says to the Jews, in the gospel of John he says you, you are from your father, the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires. And by the time we get to the Middle Ages, where Christendom is in power across Europe, we get these terrible images of the Jews who are seen as diabolical, that they murder children because they need them for ritual purposes. We have the image of the evil, greedy, wicked moneylender, and we also get the image of the Jews during the Black Death, the bubonic plague of 1348-49. We have the image of the Jews have poisoned the wells and that's why people are dying. And the result is across Jewish history is legislation restricting Jewish behavior, confining Jews to ghettos, but also outbursts of violence that run across history down until today.

In 2015, the rate of violent hate crime victimization was 0.7 hate crimes per 1,000 persons age 12 or older (figure 1). This rate was not significantly different from the rate in 2004 (0.9 per 1,000).1 The absence of statistically significant change in rates from 2004 to 2015 generally held true for violent hate crimes both reported and unreported to police. However, between 2012 and 2015, the rate of unreported violent hate crime declined slightly, from 0.6 to 0.3 victimizations per 1,000 persons 12 or older (90% confidence level).

Findings are primarily from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which has collected data on crimes motivated by hate since 2003. The NCVS and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Hate Crime Statistics Program are the principal sources of annual information on hate crime in the United States. BJS and the FBI use the hate crime definition established by the Hate Crime Statistics Act (28 U.S.C. § 534): “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, gender or gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” The NCVS measures crimes perceived by victims to be motivated by an offender’s bias against them for belonging to or being associated with a group largely identified by these characteristics.

Racial bias was the most common motivation for hate crime during 2011–15

The NCVS asked hate crime victims about the types of bias they suspected motivated the crime. During the aggregated 5-year period from 2011 to 2015, victims suspected that nearly half (48%) of hate crime victimizations were motivated by racial bias (figure 2). About a third of victims believed they were targeted because of their ethnicity (35%) or their gender (29%). About 1 in 5 believed the hate crime was motivated by bias against persons or groups with which they were associated (23%) or by sexual orientation (22%). About 1 in 6 hate crime victimizations were thought to be motivated by bias against the victim’s religion (17%) or disability (16%).

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Opinion - Colin P. Clarke is the director of policy and research at The Soufan Group and a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center.

Politico - Over the past year, extremism has gone mainstream, creating a new — and tougher — counterterrorism challenge for the U.S. government.

One year out from the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, how worried should we be about far-right extremism in the United States? After that tragic day, many analysts (including myself) predicted we’d see a surge in violent attacks throughout the rest of the year. This didn’t happen — but in its place, something arguably more worrisome has occurred.

Rather than a spate of attacks by organized groups — largely what the Biden administration has prepared for — instead we have seen a massive expansion of the broader ecosystem of far-right extremism. I study terrorism and regularly monitor the rhetoric traversing Telegram and other platforms frequented by far-right extremists. Over the past year, it’s become clear that the violence underpinning the Capitol rioters’ ideology has seeped into mainstream culture and politics. As a result, many more people can — and do — engage in extremist thoughts and actions, not just members of groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This raises risks of violence by radicalized “lone wolves,” who are much harder to track and thwart.

What some scholars call “mass radicalization” — the mainstreaming of extremism beyond a more organized core — presents a different sort of counter-terrorism challenge for the Biden administration. Rather than playing defense through a law enforcement-driven approach, the administration needs a comprehensive strategy that cuts across different parts of society to weaken the growing pool of extremists prepared to use violence to advance their ideological goals.

Remarkably for a year that started off with an unprecedented display of political violence, 2021 saw zero major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, nor did we experience anything resembling the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. One reason is that the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has artificially suppressed terrorism plots and attacks that we might have seen otherwise. At the same time, lockdowns, isolation and stress have exacerbated many of the underlying factors that contribute to extremism, while also making mental health matters more acute. Meanwhile, 2020 and 2021 were record years for the sale of weapons and ammunition. Americans are anxious, angry and well-armed — a combustible combination.

Another reason for fewer incidents of domestic terrorism during 2021 is that far-right extremists, both individuals and formal organizations, have likely been cowed by an aggressive law enforcement response to Jan. 6. To date, more than 700 individuals have been charged with federal crimes for their role in the insurrection. The city of Washington, D.C., has sued the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, seeking severe financial penalties. Given how paranoid many far-right extremist groups are about being infiltrated by law enforcement, many have gone underground and attempted to drop off the grid to avoid further entanglement with the authorities.

However, it would be a mistake to conclude that the problem has faded away. Though we haven’t seen the most visible signs of growing extremism, a more extreme climate is permeating our society, culture and politics. Far-right talking points about election interference and comparisons of public health officials to Nazis are now part of mainstream political dialogue among Republicans. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci needs around-the-clock personal security for him and his family, who regularly receive death threats. In November, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) tweeted an anime video that depicted him murdering his Democratic colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and swinging swords at President Joe Biden. Slogans like “Let’s Go Brandon,” a euphemism for more vulgar language denigrating the president, are commonly seen on everything from bumper stickers to baseball caps. Whereas terrorism analysts are used to seeing violent language on niche platforms like Parler, it’s far more unusual for the discourse to spill into statements by elected officials and political candidates.

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VICE News - On January 6, 2021, hundreds of people breached the United State Capitol Building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election. Many participants documented their actions on social media for the world to see. The attack left 5 dead, at least 138 police officers injured and resulted in more than $30 million in damage and security upgrades. On July 27, four of the police officers who helped defend the Capitol that day provided testimony to Congress. In this special episode of Source Material we hear their testimonies and see the violence they were subjected to.

NBC - New crime statistics in New York City show a significant increase in anti-Asian hate crimes this past year. 

Incidents targeting Asians rose by 361 percent, from 28 last year to 129 as of Sunday, the New York Police Department said at a news conference this week.

With several potential factors behind the surge, like increased awareness around reporting these crimes, Russell Jeung, co-founder of the hate incident reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate, cautioned against interpreting the data as an exact reflection of the extent to which Asian Americans experienced racism. 

“It is consistent with a general surge in racism against Asian Americans, first of all," Jeung said. "It’s consistent with the increase in crimes during the epidemic. And then thirdly, reflective of the Asian American community more likely to report."  

The news conference featured findings from the NYPD Hate Crime Review Panel, a civilian group that helps law enforcement identify potential hate crimes. James Essig, chief of detectives, said that anti-Asian incidents in part drove the city’s 100 percent overall increase in hate crimes this year. Crimes relating to sexual orientation also fueled the general jump, growing from 29 to 85 cases, as well as those targeting the Jewish community, which went from 121 to 183. 

Officials said that in the 503 total hate crimes this year, the NYPD made 249 arrests, representing a 106 percent increase from last year. Crimes included a range of “heinous” assaults to vandalism, Devorah Halberstam, the panel’s chair, said. Perpetrators included individuals with mental illness. 

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