The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,236

dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.

The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd, but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first step, the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards.15

FIGURE 7–4. Nonlethal hate crimes against African Americans, 1996–2008

Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics (http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.htm); see U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010a. The number of incidents is divided by the population covered by the agencies reporting the statistics multiplied by 0.129, the proportion of African Americans in the population according to the 2000 census.

The incident was also immortalized in a painting published in 1964 in Look magazine titled The Problem We All Live With. It was painted by Norman Rockwell, the artist whose name is synonymous with sentimental images of an idealized America. In another conscience-jarring incident, four black girls attending Sunday school were killed in 1963 when a bomb exploded at a Birmingham church that had recently been used for civil rights meetings. That same year the civil rights worker Medgar Evers was murdered by Klansmen, as were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner the following year. Joining the violence by mobs and terrorists was violence by the government. The noble Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were thrown into jail, and peaceful marchers were assaulted with fire hoses, dogs, whips, and clubs, all shown on national television.

After 1965, opposition to civil rights was moribund, antiblack riots were a distant memory, and terrorism against blacks no longer received support from any significant community. In the 1990s there was a widely publicized report of a string of arson attacks on black churches in the South, but it turned out to be apocryphal.16 So for all the publicity that hate crimes have received, they have become a blessedly rare phenomenon in modern America.

Lynchings and race riots have declined for other ethnic groups and in other countries as well. The 9/11 attacks and the London and Madrid bombings were just the kind of symbolic provocation that in earlier decades could have led to anti-Muslim riots across the Western world. Yet no riots occurred, and a 2008 review of violence against Muslims by a human rights organization could not turn up a single clear case of a fatality in the West motivated by anti-Muslim hatred.17

Horowitz identifies several reasons for the disappearance of deadly ethnic riots in the West. One is governance. For all their abandon in assaulting their victims, rioters are sensitive to their own safety, and know when the police will turn a blind eye. Prompt law enforcement can quell riots and nip cycles of group-against-group revenge in the bud, but the procedures have to be thought out in advance. Since the local police often come from the same ethnic group as the perpetrators and may sympathize with their hatreds, a professionalized national militia is more effective than the neighborhood cops. And since riot police can cause more deaths than they prevent, they must be trained to apply the minimal force needed to disperse a mob.18

The other cause of the disappearance of deadly ethnic riots is more nebulous: a rising abhorrence of violence, and of even the slightest trace of a mindset that might lead to it. Recall that the main risk factor of genocides and deadly ethnic riots is an essentialist psychology that categorizes the members of a group as insensate obstacles, as disgusting vermin, or as avaricious, malignant, or heretical villains. These attitudes can be formalized into government policies of the kind that Daniel Goldhagen calls eliminationist and Barbara Harff calls exclusionary. The policies may be implemented as apartheid, forced assimilation, and in extreme cases, deportation or genocide. Ted Robert Gurr has shown that even discriminatory policies that fall short of