UPDATE: Despite the denials, hate crime charges have been filed.
Of course it wasn't.
Whom are you going to believe, your lying eyes and ears... or the Chicago police?
The Illinois teenager who was allegedly tortured by four black suspects on live Facebook video was targeted because he has mental disabilities — not because he’s white, investigators said.
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Thursday that while the suspects made “terrible racist statements” against white people during the attack, it does not appear to be racially motivated.
Having mental disabilities made him vulnerable to a racist attack. It's like saying that the motive for the bombing of a black church was that it was empty and unguarded.
When you have people shouting racial slurs during an attack, it's generally assumed to be a hate crime.
Except when it comes to minority attacks on white people where suddenly motive becomes so very ambiguous. Let's compare this horrifying abuse to a much more minor incident that did lead to hate crimes charges in Chicago.
Jessica Sanders, 26, was arrested last week and charged with two felony counts of committing a hate crime and two misdemeanor counts of battery/making physical contact, according to Chicago police.
Her arrest comes nearly three months after the July 30 incident was filmed and uploaded to social media. The dispute started over a beanbag tossing game at the city’s Margarita Festival, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
In the approximately 1-minute clip, Sanders gets into an altercation with Ernest Crim, who is filming. Sanders appears to knock Crim’s phone out of his hand. “You’re acting like a n****r. Go home,” she tells Crim, who is black. At one point, she shouts the word multiple times in a row.
Sanders, speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times on Monday, said she regrets her actions and said they do not accurately portray her.
“It was wrong of me to use the word. To me it means ‘ignorant person.’ If they were Caucasian, I would have said the same thing. Latino, black. [Race] has nothing to do with it,” she said.
How do we know that Jessica's actions were motivated by race just because she shouted racial slurs during it? Obviously we don't. Maybe she shouted racial slurs because she was already angry at X, but race wasn't the motivating factor of the attack.
But the assumption is that if you use racial slurs during an attack, it's a hate crime. It's a shaky assumption and one reason why the very idea of a hate crime is legally dubious. But that is how it's done.
Except when it comes to a minority attack on white people and then suddenly the motives becomes impossible to pin down. This is a double standard and it needs to be challenged.