Attorney General Holder: Whites Not Protected by Hate Crime Laws

On the night of June 1, 2008, a mob of nearly two dozen black teenagers stormed through the streets of Mount Clemens, Michigan, robbing and beating any white person who crossed their path (see article here).

One white man was talking on a payphone outside a gas station when he was accosted by the mob. He tried to run into the gas station to safety, but the attendant had already locked the door when he saw the mob approaching. As the man desperately pounded on the locked door, he was surrounded by the mob and savagely beaten. Workers would later have to wash the victim's blood from the front of the door.

In an even more violent incident, a car driven by Andy Kaufmann, a 29-year-old white father of three, was surrounded and a brick was thrown through the window. Andy was beaten unconscious and left with a fractured skull. He sustained permanent brain damage and will never be the same. Andy's wife Angelina, who was sitting in the passenger seat on the night of the attack and who watched helplessly as her husband was nearly killed, laments, “I miss the Andy I used to know."

In light of the brutality of the crimes committed that night, the sentences handed down were extremely lenient. The man who threw the brick at Kaufmann's car and instigated the attack, 17-year-old Deonte J. Williams, was sentenced to only 19 months in prison.

In a radio interview shortly after the attack, Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel was asked why hate crime charges were not sought, which would have resulted in stiffer penalties. Hackel responded that he didn't consider hate crime laws to be applicable since Kaufmann is white, and therefore not a member of a "protected class." Hackel said, "I don’t know if it [hate-crime legislation] applies to an unprotected class, and I don’t know if whites are part of that. I’m not sure.”

In hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder settled Hackel's question of whether hate crime laws protect whites: they don't.

Holder repeatedly claimed that hate crime laws are designed to protect only groups that were targeted for violence on a "historic basis," such as African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and gays. (Holder's testimony can be viewed in its entirety by clicking the 'webcast' link here. He lists the groups he considers to be protected between 73:30 and 74 minutes).

Holder's repeated charge that blacks were "historically" targeted for violence betrays the fact that in modern times they rarely are. In fact, according to the Justice Department's own statistics, in only 10% of the 650,000 violent interracial crimes that occur each year in this country are white offenders attacking black victims.

(The Justice Department statistics can be found in the second to last paragraph of the article "What is a hate crime?" which appeared in the Chicago Tribune. For a more detailed study of race, crime, and justice in America, see the publication The Color of Crime, which is released by the New Century Foundation.)

In 90% of interracial violent crimes, whites are being attacked by blacks. Attacks on white individuals and couples by mobs of black youths are all too common in this country. On this blog, I've recently written about recurring black-on-white mob attacks taking place in Philadelphia and Baltimore.

If any racial group is being targeted for violence in this country, it's whites, by blacks. If any group is deserving of special protection from racially motivated violence, it's whites.


Attorney General Eric Holder testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, June 25. Holder said that hate crime laws are designed to protect only groups such that have been targeted on a "historical basis" such as African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and gays.