The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,235

was kidnapped, beaten, mutilated, and killed in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman. His murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury in a perfunctory trial.

Fears of a renewal of lynching were raised in the late 1990s, when a vicious murder stunned the nation. In 1998 three racists in Texas abducted an African American man, James Byrd, Jr., beat him senseless, chained him by the ankles to their pickup truck, and dragged him along the pavement for three miles until his body hit a culvert and was torn to pieces. Though the clandestine murder was very different from the lynchings of a century before, in which an entire community would execute a black person in a carnival atmosphere, the word lynching was widely applied to the crime. The murder took place a few years after the FBI had begun to gather statistics on so-called hate crimes, namely acts of violence that target a person because of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Since 1996 the FBI has published these statistics in annual reports, allowing us to see whether the Byrd murder was part of a disturbing new trend.11 Figure 7–3 shows the number of African Americans who were murdered because of their race during the past dozen years. The numbers on the vertical axis do not represent homicides per 100,000 people; they represent the absolute number of homicides. Five African Americans were murdered because of their race in 1996, the first year in which records were published, and the number has since gone down to one per year. In a country with 17,000 murders a year, hate-crime murders have fallen into the statistical noise.

Far more common, of course, are the less serious forms of violence, such as aggravated assault (in which the assailant uses a weapon or causes an injury), simple assault, and intimidation (in which the victim is made to feel in danger for his or her personal safety). Though the absolute numbers of racially motivated incidents are alarming—several hundred assaults, several hundred aggravated assaults, and a thousand acts of intimidation a year—they have to be put in the context of American crime numbers during much of that period, which included a million aggravated assaults per year. The rate of racially motivated aggravated assaults was about one-half of 1 percent of the rate of all aggravated assaults (322 per 100,000 people per year), and less than the rate that a person of any race would be murdered for any reason. And as figure 7–4 shows, since 1996 all three kinds of hate crime have been in decline.

FIGURE 7–3. Hate-crime murders of African Americans, 1996–2008

Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics (http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.ht); see U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010a.

As lynching died out, so did antiblack pogroms. Horowitz discovered that in the second half of the 20th century in the West, his subject matter, the deadly ethnic riot, ceased to exist.12 The so-called race riots of the mid-1960s in Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit, and other American cities represented a different phenomenon altogether: African Americans were the rioters rather than the targets, death tolls were low (mostly rioters themselves killed by the police), and virtually all the targets were property rather than people.13 After 1950 the United States had no riots that singled out a race or ethnic group; nor did other zones of ethnic friction in the West such as Canada, Belgium, Corsica, Catalonia, or the Basque Country.14

Some antiblack violence did erupt in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it took a different form. The attacks are seldom called “terrorism,” but that’s exactly what they were: they were directed at civilians, low in casualties, high in publicity, intended to intimidate, and directed toward a political goal, namely preventing racial desegregation in the South. And like other terrorist campaigns, segregationist terrorism sealed its doom when it crossed the line into depravity and turned all public sympathy to its victims. In highly publicized incidents, ugly mobs hurled obscenities and death threats at black children for trying to enroll in all-white schools. One event that left a strong impression in cultural memory was the day six-year-old Ruby Nell Bridges had to be escorted by federal marshals to her first day of school in New Orleans. John Steinbeck, while driving through America to write his memoir Travels with Charley, found himself in the Big Easy at the time:Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest negro girl you ever saw,