‘An Environment of Hate’? – Shepherd Express

On March 16, a young white gunman went on a killing spree in suburban Atlanta. Six of his eight victims were Asian American women. Police were hesitant to declare it a hate crime; the gunman denied racial motivation and claimed sexual obsession as his reason, yet he chose Asian women.

The Atlanta murders are among the latest in a sequence of deadly, highly publicized crimes that targeted specific groups. On October 27, 2018, a young white gunman slipped into a synagogue during morning services and killed 11 worshippers. On June 12, 2016, a young Muslim inspired by ISIS entered a gay nightclub in Orland, Florida and killed 49 clubgoers. On June 17, 2015, a young white gunman entered a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine congregants. And on August 5, 2012, a white gunman killed six Sikhs worshipping at their Oak Creek, Wisconsin temple. Although hate crimes have always occurred and few become headlines or are even reported, the verbal and physical abuse of groups targeted by white supremacist and other violent movements rose disturbingly after 2016.

Official hate crime tallies are slow in coming and never record the full extent of the problem, yet they provide a useful measure. According to the FBI, although the total number of hate crimes dipped slightly to 7,120, violent hate incidents reached a 16 year high in 2018 with 4,571 assaults. In 2019 numbers for violent and other hate crimes climbed again, totaling 7,314, including 51 murders.

Many hate crimes are never reported to the FBI. Most don’t end in homicide, and many acts of hate against targeted groups aren’t crimes at all. “Often to the victim, it is difficult to distinguish between hate crimes, bias and prejudice while it is happening to you—I would use the example of a Native woman being called in public a ‘Pocahontas,’” said Marin Webster Denning, a member of the Oneida Nation and lecturer at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Continuing Education. “We use the language of hate violence rather than hate crimes because not all hate is prosecutable and we do not want the focus to be on law enforcement,” explained Kathy Flores, anti-violence program director for Diverse & Resilient, a nonprofit dedicated to the health, safety and wellbeing of Wisconsin’s LGBTQ population. But the headline-grabbing hate violence seen on television news is usually criminal, and over the past year, much of it has been directed against at people whose heritage is identified or misidentified as of Chinese.

Asian Americans

In 1889 Chinese immigrants in Milwaukee were targeted by a race riot spurred by a Milwaukee Sentinel report of white girls lured into sex trafficking by Asian entrepreneurs. It was one of many anti-Chinese riots that occurred in cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles and across the U.S. during that period.

The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism recently compared anti-Asian hate crimes (as reported to the police) in America’s largest cites. According to the report, hate crimes fell in some cities from 2019 to 2020 but soared in others. San Jose, Dallas and Houston saw numbers rise dramatically since the arrival of COVID.

“There is a long history of anti-Asian racism in the United States,” said Alexa Alfaro, spokesperson for the AAPI Coalition of Wisconsin. “It is not new, and this is not the first time Asian Americans have been used as scapegoats during medical, political, and economic crises… We saw similar attacks on the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in 2003 during the SARS outbreaks. The previous administration’s rhetoric only amplified longstanding biases towards Asian Americans.” 

Did the election of Trump result in the immediate rise of prejudice against Asian Americans—or did the rise in hate crimes begin in 2020 in response to the idea that COVID “came from China”?

“The number of recorded incidents has increased significantly since the beginning of the pandemic, but prejudice against Asian Americans has long persisted,” Alfaro continued. “Part of the problem is that racism against Asian Americans goes largely unacknowledged and widely tolerated. It is rarely explicitly confronted. The diversity within the Asian American community can make it hard to capture the nuanced racism. However, with the pandemic paired with the politician’s rhetoric, we saw an unprecedented scenario where all the different Asian communities were equally affected by the racism… Words matter, especially those of the president. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric helped fuel racist attitudes toward Asian Americans and created an environment of hate.”

Alfaro cites growing reports of harassment since the beginning of the pandemic. “Lucky Liu’s, a local restaurant, shut down temporarily due to growing xenophobia and verbal attacks toward their staff members,” she said. “We also know that harassment and hate incidents in the AAPI community go underreported. Several factors have contributed to underreporting. One of the most significant issues is the lack of adequate and accessible reporting and tracking systems. Communities don’t always know where to report and language barriers can make reporting inaccessible. Some communities do not have trust in the authorities and don’t see reporting as particularly useful.”

What can Milwaukeeans—and Milwaukee’s civic leaders—do to combat the problem?

“Name it as a hate crime and publicly condemn anti-Asian racism,” Alfaro said. “Report anti-Asian incidents that you personally witness, rather than turning a blind eye… Support legislation that includes the teaching of Asian American history. Similar to many non-white communities, our history has been left out of Wisconsin public school curriculums. Take the time to personally learn about the depth of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S., such as the invisibility of the 19th century Chinese railroad workers, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the murder of Vincent Chin by Detroit auto workers in 1982, up to the present, where the ‘model minority myth’ has resulted in Asian Americans being positioned against other communities of color.”

Jews

Jews were the original “others” in Western civilization. Jews were expelled from some nations, forced into ghettos on others. Wild charges hurled against them in medieval Europe included spreading the Plague as a way of killing Christians and murdering Gentile children as part of Passover rituals. America became one of the refuges for Jews fleeing persecution, but Old World bigotry had migrated ahead of them to the New World. By the middle of the last century, Jews were comfortably established in the U.S., yet prejudice against Jews never entirely abated.

According to Rabbi Hannah Wallick, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s vice president for outreach, anti-Semitism has remained a steady factor in American society, but anti-Semites have become more emboldened over the past four years. Citing a recent Anti-Defamation League study, she said, “overall antisemitic attitudes have not changed significantly but the recent uptick in incidents shows that more of these individuals feel more willing and comfortable expressing it openly and through acts of violence and hate speech.”

Wallick does not pin responsibility directly on Trump but sees the situation in the U.S. as part of global trends. “Hate is on the rise here in our country and throughout the world,” she said. “One reason may be antisemitic groups use of social media to subtly spread their conspiracies and consequently, their followers feeling emboldened to speak their hate more freely. Even a person who would never join a hate group will begin to repeat some of their arguments and talking points after enough exposure.”

She added, “Hate is a larger issue than any political administration or figure. We are seeing a worldwide pendulum swing and we need to work together and stand up for one another and to combat it.” 

Milwaukee’s Jews have been confronted by the spike in anti-Semitic incidents. The 2020 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents by the Jewish Federation’s Community Relations Council show “an overall increase in incidents and some troubling trends,” in Wisconsin, including “99 reported and corroborated incidents, a 36% increase in from 2019.” Some online comments quoted in the audit include “Jews are responsible for organizing violent protests all over the country” along with the usual rants that Jews control the country’s banks and media.

Wallick explains: “Over the past several years we have seen the largest increase in outward expressions of antisemitism, especially online. This has included harassment of Jewish political and community leaders and organizations. We have seen vandalism of Jewish organizations and synagogues, often including swastikas and references to the Holocaust. In our schools, we have seen an overall upward trend of Holocaust jokes and harassment of Jewish students through hateful comments.”

Latinos

In 2016 on Milwaukee’s South Side, a white man opened fire on his Puerto Rican neighbors after shouting at them to “go home.” He killed a father in front of his son and continued shooting, killing a Hmong couple. He was charged with three first degree counts of intentional homicide but not with a hate crime.

The hate crime statistics for Milwaukee appear to be low. According to FBI records, compiled from reports by local law enforcement agencies, only two hate crimes based on race or ethnicity were committed in Milwaukee in 2019. For Christine Neuman-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a community organization focused on immigrant and workers’ rights, “one problem is getting hate crimes recognized as hate crimes.” In 2017, Voces helped organize Milwaukee’s “Day Without Latinos” to protest Sheriff David Clarke’s Trump-inspired plan to crack down on immigration.

Regardless of official numbers, Neuman-Ortiz has witnessed “an increasing trend of emoldenment of racism that occurred under the Trump administration” She links the issue to America’s worsening problems with guns and mental illness. “Trump’s rhetoric emboldened people who are unstable and armed to act on their racism,” she continued. “The problem was there but Trump ginned up his base by explicitly inviting violence, by explicit approval of white nationalism and white nationalist violence, by the forced separation of children at the border and the delight in cruelty. The administration’s attacks and degradation of Black Lives Matter, immigrants and refugees goes hand in hand with hate crimes. His administration was relentless.”

As for Joe Biden, “there is a difference, clearly, in attitude and rhetoric on immigration, on Black Lives Matter, and his condemnation of anti-Asian violence,” Neuman-Ortiz said, “but we need to keep organizing and recognize the weakness of Democrats with corporate leanings that allow the status quo to go on.”

One positive outcome from four years of Trump is that his rhetoric is that various social justice “movements have intersected,” Neuman-Ortiz said. “The critical fight ahead is to hold the Biden administration accountable to his promises on institutionalized racism and immigration reform. He has good policy answers but needs to be courageous and get the job done.”

LGBTQs

Under the 1964-1984 regime of Chief Harold Breier, the Milwaukee Police Department operated on a color-coded system. The MPD patrolled a sharply segregated black-white city; the department’s Red Squad kept tabs on leftists and its vice squad maintained an extensive set of “Pink Cards,” mini-dossiers on people suspected of being gay. Milwaukee’s gay bars, subjected to periodic police raids, were located in the Third Ward and Walker’s Point, industrial districts in those years that were otherwise desolate after sundown.

The MPD compiled some of its Pink Cards by taking down license plate numbers from cars parked in those neighborhoods at night. If you got pulled over for something, they might ask, “What were you doing parked on Broadway and Erie?”

In recent years social acceptance of LGBTQ people has risen dramatically, but so have acts of homophobia. Diverse & Resilient Kathy Flores blamed Trump for encouraging the spike. “Words matter. Policies and actions matter, too,” she said. “The former administration used disparaging language against marginalized community members that fueled followers to act in horrendous ways. This was evident all throughout the Trump administration and after the election of a new administration. One only has to watch footage of the January 6 insurrection to see the presence of Confederate flags to see the white supremacy on display. Those who uphold the Confederate flag are often not just racist and antisemitic, but they have proven time and time again to be anti-LGBTQ as well.”

She added that that hate violence against the LGBTQ community—especially people of color—“rose as the rhetoric from this administration rose.”

However, exact figures remain impossible to establish. “The statistics in Milwaukee are reported by the FBI and local law enforcement. However, those numbers are vastly underreported,” Flores said. “In a one year period alone, when the FBI released its numbers of anti-LGBTQ hate violence, those numbers did not include all the survivors we have worked with because most of our survivors do not wish to report to law enforcement for fear of racism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment that sometimes come from Milwaukee Police.” 

According to surveys compiled by PrideFest, 34% of respondents answered that they had experienced hate violence, a number that rises to 86% for trans people. “The strain of hypervigilance is seen in negative health and mental health outcomes,” Flores continued. “General stress theory in addition to minority stress theory demonstrate that toxic levels of stress—when the stress is chronic and exceeds an individual’s coping capacity—leads to higher levels of physical illness, depression and anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Actual violence against Trans people and the constant threat of violence is debilitating and directly impedes Trans individuals from showing up in their homes, in schools and workplaces and in the community as their whole complete selves.”

Muslims

Islamophobia became noticeable in Milwaukee during the Iran hostage crisis (1979-1981) when resentment against that country’s theocracy spilled over into resentment against Muslims. Islamophobic incidents rose and fell with geopolitics in the last century and spiked with 911. Bigots identified Muslims as well as Southern and Western Asians of all faiths as culpable for the fall of the Twin Towers.

The situation levelled under President Barack Obama. According to Janan Najeeb, president of the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition, Obama “stood out against hatred and the broad brushing of an entire faith or ethnicity, however he did not visit mosques and was careful not to be seen with Muslim crowds because he had been labeled as a ‘closet Muslim’ by many of the extreme Republicans. I do wish he had instead responded to their bigotry. The only reason they called him a Muslim and pushed the idea he was not born in the U.S. is because they could not come out and say, ‘We will not accept a black man as president,’ whereas no one called them out for spewing Islamophobic rhetoric.”

The rise of Trump changed the situation, with Muslims across the country and in Milwaukee reporting a rise in Islamophobia. “Under Trump, there have been times it has surged past the levels of anti-Muslim sentiment experienced right after 9-11,” Najeeb said. “The irresponsible rhetoric of both Trump and many of those he put in power—such as well-known Islamophobes like Steve Bannon and others—lead to real acts of violence. The Muslim Ban added to the ‘othering’ of Muslims.”

Trump “was absolutely responsible for the spike,” she continued. “He ran on an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant platform, he used it to deflect attention from all of his corrupt and shameful behavior. He rewarded his base, the ‘Armageddon Christians’ and the anti-Muslim Jewish extremists, with policies they wanted such as the Muslim Ban and declaring Syria’s Golan Heights and Palestinian East Jerusalem as now owned by Israel—as if it is his to give away. His supporters believe in a racist god, a god that hates the same people they do,  and Muslims, blacks, immigrants, etc. are their main target, so he catered to them.”

Muslim women wearing the hijab (headscarf) have especially been targeted and, Najeeb added, “make up 85% of the victims of anti-Muslim hate because they are obvious.  Followed by Sikh men who wear a turban,” even though Sikhs are not Muslim. “There are some Muslim women that stopped wearing hijab out of fear of attacks.”

It may be too early to tell, but has Joe Biden’s election changed the situation? “It is clear that President Biden is much more presidential, I think many people feel the potential for change is there. President Biden has appointed some Muslims to his administration, and he is clearly aiming for a more representative government. I hope he really works with progressives because they were instrumental in helping him win. However, as Muslims we encourage everyone to remain vigilant, Islamophobia is real.  If the insurrection at the Capitol taught us anything, it is that because of Trump, there are thousands of radicalized white supremacists who have become mainstreamed.”  

Native Americans

During the 19th century the U.S. brutally expelled the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) and Ojibwe native to Wisconsin and forced them onto reservations in Minnesota and Nebraska, actions that today would be called ethnic cleansing. However, many Native Americans kept returning to the homeland, living as fugitives until reservations were established, diminished and remote parcels of land whose treaty rights were often ignored.

“People can even take a gun and shoot at us with no repercussions,” said Denning. He’s not referring to incidents from 150 years ago but to a 2021 decision by a Vilas County judge. Last year in northern Wisconsin a white man opened fire on Ojibwe spearfishers. He was allowed to plead guilty to use of a firearm while intoxicated and handed a modest fine.  

“I cannot speak for all Natives in Milwaukee but can only represent my experience in the larger community,” Denning continued. “One issue is that municipalities self-report hate crimes to the FBI,” inevitably leading to underreporting. “As a person, in the late four years I had my life threatened and home threatened to be burned down. This according to the folks that uphold our laws is free speech.”

Denning’s most recent encounter with white supremacists occurred during the debate over changing the Menomonee Falls High School “Indian mascot,” and was enabled by the internet. “Someone took drone footage above our home, listed the address and invited people to engage in their hate,” he said.

What role did the Trump factor play in acts of physical or verbal abuse against Native Americans? “That one person like former President Donald Trump be held accountable for hate crimes today, or the past five years misses the point,” Denning answered. “Hate has always been here, and we have always been targets of hate since 1492. The contribution the president made was to commodify the racial divide, leverage it for a transactional vote based in fear. The final movement was to provide a social environment that would allow for existing hate to be seen and owned by the perpetrators with little consequence—and even when it was clear that white terrorism became a clear threat to American democracy and the foundation of our country—there is complicity at the highest levels.”