Hate Crimes, Religion and

Identifying Hate Crimes

Throughout U.S. history, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh communities, among others, have been victims of hate crimes. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data, there were 6,604 hate crime incidents during 2009. All but 6 of these incidents involved a single form of bias, and 19.7% of these involved religious bias. Of the 1,303 incidents in which religious bias was the motive,

In addition, 8.6% were against some other religion, 4.4% were against multiple religions or religious groups, and 0.7% targeted forms of atheism or agnosticism.

However, these data may actually represent an underreporting of hate crimes based on religion, both because some crimes are likely to be unreported, and because some crimes that are reported may be miscategorized by authorities as based upon a factor other than religion (such as race). In addition to the FBI, civil rights organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Sikh Coalition also compile statistics on assaults and general violence toward different religious communities.

It is not uncommon for the religious roots of discrimination to be hidden by race through a process known as the racialization of religion. In this process, racial characteristics become attached to the religion, and individuals' religious and racial identities become conflated. The religious nature of discrimination is overlooked because of the racial/ethnic visibility of the population. Crimes against South Asian American Muslims and Sikhs, [Page 1036]or African American Muslims—in which individuals are targeted based on religion but the crime is reported as one involving race—can be examples of this phenomenon. By comparison, when a target population is racially White, religious discrimination—for example, anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism—can be seen for what it is. When the assumption is that the bias is racial/ethnic in nature, the religion becomes invisible. For members of religious groups that are also racial minorities, this can result in complete marginalization. Thus, the conflation of victims' racial and religious identities, with religious hate crimes being reported as racial in nature, indicates that the religious identity of Middle Eastern and South Asian Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs is less meaningful to society than their “brown-ness.”

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