Group Sees Rise In Hate Crimes Against Whites

For most of its 14-year history, Klanwatch has tracked a familiar foe: white supremacists who abuse and sometimes murder blacks.

But in the last couple of years, the respected Alabama-based civil rights organization has been seeing a new type of hate offender: blacks who target whites, sometimes in retaliation for what they say is years of oppression.

Last year, more whites than blacks were victims of hate murders in the United States, Klanwatch found. Nine whites were targeted because of their race, along with six blacks, four Hispanics and two Asians.

In 1991, equal numbers of whites and blacks were killed in hate incidents: eight.

Some say the black-on-white crime numbers are so small that little, if anything, can be gleaned from them.

Texas state Sen. Royce West of Dallas, a proponent of a hate-crimes bill in the Texas Legislature, said he thinks it is wrong to focus on the small number of black-on-white murders when there are so many other forms of bigotry in America.

"First of all, I don't think there is any kind of trend here," said West, a Democrat. "You can't take the sample and extrapolate from it because we don't know how reliable the sample is."

Fahim Minkah, a civic organizer and chairman of the Dallas chapter of the National Black United Front, said the numbers are not only small but also misleading.

"Every time a black person is killed by a white racist cop, I call that a hate crime," said Minkah, a former member of the Black Panther Party. "We've got thousands of people in America, in the world, that have been denied jobs, housing, because of hateful bigots."

But other blacks say the numbers may well be indicative of the depth of alienation between whites and blacks.

The Rev. S.M. Wright, president of the Interdenominational Ministers Alliance of Metropolitan Dallas, said he thinks the media's portrayal of racial injustices "can ignite reciprocal tendencies" among some blacks.

Last week, the Texas Department of Public Safety released its first annual report on hate crimes, which showed a total of 339 racial incidents in 1992 - about 58 percent of them anti-black and about 34 percent anti-white. The remaining 8 percent were directed at other races.

Morris Dees, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, noted in a foreword to a new book, "Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed," that "other contemporary conflicts reflect the growing friction generated by the increasing diversity in our society."

Besides the race-related murders, for example, Klanwatch said anti-gay attacks resulted in five deaths.

"At one time, hate crimes were white on black, committed by white supremacists - most of them Klansmen - and most occurring in the South," Klanwatch director Danny Welch said in the organization's year-end report for 1992. "Now, hate crime is not restricted to one group or one region. It occurs all over the United States and affects all racial groups - white on black, black on white, anti-Hispanic, anti-Asian."