Hoax hate crimes accomplish three main things, all of them bad.
First, they cause (usually) minority populations to fear for their lives needlessly. People have every good reason to be scared if, say, it appears that someone is hanging nooses around to intimidate them. If there is no shadowy, violent and racist power making such overt displays, then what special place in hell can be reserved for the person who would make others believe there is one, and to fear for no reason? This result, all on its own, justifies throwing the book at those who fake hate crimes.
Second, hoax incidents cause people to be suspicious of their neighbors. In falsely convincing people that there exists a large, hostile, and potentially violent population in their midst, it breeds distrust and divides communities. If the goal is to make people hate and distrust each other, hoax hate crimes will do the trick.
Third, these hoax incidents cause everyone to view all hate-crime incidents, including the ones that turn out to be real, with cynicism and disbelief. This is a natural result of people seeing so many high-profile incidents that turn out to be hoaxes.
There are two key things you can do in order to avoid these three negative outcomes. First, obviously, don’t fake hate crimes. Second, if you write about such things, even in an informal commentary capacity, exercise a bit more skepticism before setting off a panic over suspicious incidents.
Obviously, the context here is the growing case that “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett might have been involved in staging a hate crime against himself in Chicago late last month. He continues to deny any involvement, aside from being attacked.
If this incident was fake, then he’s gotten a lot of egg on a lot of other people’s faces. He actually managed to get Democratic 2020 presidential candidates on record discussing him. He prompted a high-profile televised attack on Vice President Mike Pence, just for defending the traditional definition of marriage between a man and a woman. Whatever you think of Pence, this looks like an injustice — of all the things that may have caused this attack, Mike Pence doesn’t seem to figure at all.
Hate crimes are real, but so are hoaxes, and the latter occur more often than you’d think. Recently, our own Eddie Scarry catalogued three incidents that occurred just on college campuses in November — campuses being a favorite location for hoax hate crimes. We’ve taken other previous looks at this lamentable phenomenon as well.
But as Quillette’s Andy Ngo pointed out today on Twitter, there’s an abundance of such hoaxes on and off campus, and they seem to have become considerably more frequent upon Trump’s election. It’s as if his presidency provides the excuse for people to pretend things are much worse than they are. The staged attacks and false-flag intimidation tactics range from seemingly minor campus incidents to street violence and racially intimidating vandalism. But all of these are harmful, for the reasons noted above.
When these things happen, the proper response is prudence and sober reporting of facts, rather than credulity and sensationalism. To wait and see is an improvement on starting a moral panic and convincing everyone that their communities are hopelessly rotten and their neighbors vicious and evil.
