Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Crime in the Media Fall 2020

Hate Crimes in the United States

Summary

This YouTube video goes into detail about crime regarding white supremacists and hate crime. This film starts off showing you groups white supremacists and neo-Nazis members marching in Charlottesville that originally started because a confederate statue was taken down. Many counter protesters also showed up to this event. Some anti-fascist groups showed up and got into many physical fights with other groups of people. In the film you see many fist fights or people wearing helmets with weapons such as guns with them. So, it is clear that these marches are not very peaceful. On top of all the fighting that took place almost no one was arrested for fighting and the police never moved to stop it. To me it seems like the government was doing very little to stop the violence taking place here. People even went up to the police asking for help when some people were getting assaulted, but the police refused to help them. More extreme events even happened after someone plowed a car through counter protesters. Many people had to go to the hospital because of this and some even died. People had various opinions on what happened and why it happened, and this film goes into detail on these views. They said that only 10 people were prosecuted in Charlottesville during these events and that is strange considering how many violent acts happened. In the film the reporter tries to figure more out about these neo-Nazi groups and why the police are doing the minimum about this.

Analyze

In class we look at how race deals with crime and in this video, we get to see race on race crime to some extent. I found it interesting how the reporter in this film was looking that the past of one of the leaders to a neo-Nazi group and how they chose that ideology. It looked like the neo-Nazi leader obtained most of his views after he went to prison for stabbing someone where he was associated with white prison gangs. It makes you think that other people that go though the prison system might also pick-up similar views during their time. I wonder if it would be the prison system to blame for having so many gangs in them and if more could be done to reduce the number of gangs in prison. It was said that most of the people taking place in these violent protests were young people around college age. To me it was shocking that most of these people were younger so this might show that we might see more events like this happen in the future. From Davis (2018) page 178 when the author talks about the Jena six case this documentary reminded me of some aspects of that. For example, when the police let the violent fights go on without trying to stop it or arrest people. This shows that the police could be biased and choose who they want to arrest or choose who they ignore.

Another way this can be related to what we learned in class was the implicit bias test that we learned about in class prep 6 (Implicit bias pp). Implicit bias might be related to this because the film talks a lot about white supremacists’ groups or neo-Nazis, and you need to think about the biases that they have and how they got them which led them to join these groups. People in these group probably have some sort of explicit bias currently, but it might have started out as implicit bias. Finding out why people join these groups and trying to solve the problem from the ground up may be the only way to stop events like this from happening again, but it can be difficult because you only need a few bad actors to make a tragic event happen.

Personal Reflection and Rational

As someone who does not go to any protests or marches it is shocking for me to see how violent some of these can get. I am sure this film shows a more extreme violent example of this though. In the film we hear about many small extremist groups rather than big, organized ones. I think the small groups can be more dangerous than the bigger ones because you have less information on them so it can be harder to find out who they are. Something that I found interesting was how many of these groups have a large presence online so it can be easier for them to get younger people that use social media to see their views. I thought it was good that later some of the people responsible for the violence were charged with crimes. However, I do not think these violent hate crimes will stop anytime soon because many of these small groups are hard to stop and it can be extremely hard to change someone’s personal beliefs when they are set.

References

Davis, A. J. (ed.). (2018). The Prosecution of Black Men. In A. J. Davis, Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment (pp. 177=208). Vintage Books.

Implicit bias PP. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2020, from https://d2l.iup.edu/d2l/le/content/2963644/viewContent/22757053/View

Matthew B.