Journalism will never subdue its unruly temptation to turn the world into a soap opera. When motives are mixed, we want to unmix them. When the truth lies in shadows, we want to flip a switch. If the reason why can’t be told in 800 words, maybe it’s the wrong reason. And when searching for answers, the human heart is always a more entertaining source than dusty law books.
Just last week, ten years later, Royko’s successor at the Tribune, John Kass, ripped the idea of hate crimes for a different reason. “When I think of hate crimes that are not considered hate crimes under the law,” Kass’s June 13 column began, “I think of Ionya Feldman, the old shoemaker.” Kass then told the story of a rabbi’s son from Kiev who was beaten to death by a black man. Echoing Royko, he asserted, “Hate crimes and the lack of hate-crime status depend on the politics of the day,” and he implicated the media in what struck him as fundamental unfairness. “Why journalists play down black-on-white crime would take more than a few columns to answer,” he wrote. “We don’t want to give comfort to white racists. It also may have something to do with our politics. . . . Mostly we’re of a certain class and tone: white and college-educated, politically liberal, holding an abiding (and terribly mistaken) faith in government regulation to engineer social outcomes.”
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Hate crimes are defined by state and federal laws, but Witt didn’t bother with those. His preoccupation was the conservative street definition, a hate crime being whatever fetches national reporters to the scene and Al Sharpton to a microphone. The Knoxville murders didn’t receive much attention outside of Knoxville–except, Witt observed, by “conservative commentators across the country who insist the case offers clear evidence of liberal bias in the major media.”
The trouble with the state and federal hate-crime acts is something Byrne put his finger on: they’re shopping lists. The principle that a greater crime is committed when the individual is made to suffer for the group may justify hate-crime laws, but it’s not written into them. All the laws do is set forth cate-gories. Shuman-Moore’s letter listed the categories protected under Illinois law. One of the goals of the federal act the House just passed was to add sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability to a list that included race, color, religion, and national origin. Then on May 8, Texas representative Eddie Bernice Johnson introduced an amendment that would establish people with “homeless status” as a group tracked under the Hate Crimes Statistics Act.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Kurt Mitchell.
