Hate Crime Theories

In the ten days following the 2016 United States presidential election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent civil rights and legal advocacy organization, recorded almost 900 incidents of hate-motivated harassment, intimidation, or violence in the United States. This “outbreak of hate” was primarily directed toward ethnic, racial and religious minorities, and perpetrators often invoked President-elect Donald Trump’s name during their assaults. These incidents were self-reported, thus it is likely that they represent only a small portion of all election-related hate crimes that occurred in the immediate aftermath of November 8, 2016. So what is a hate crime, why were there so many after the election, and what motivates people to act in such a cruel and seemingly irrational way? Hate crime is generally classified as an act of violence where the perpetrator targets the victim for belonging to a …show more content…
Proponents of the personality theories argue that individuals who demonstrate traits associated with “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” or “Social Dominance Orientation,” which can be defined respectively as the desire to be overly deferential to authority figures and cling to traditional societal values, as well as the desire to dominate and or be superior to others. These theories are limited because they do not account for the inclination to express prejudice toward members of certain groups, ??? and situational factors/groupthink etc. The most prominent study on the motivations of hate crime is the typology of hate crime perpetrators, which found that the majority of perpetrators are driven by boredom and the desire for “excitement and thrills.” According to this theory, victims are chosen based on some perceived difference, but this is not the primary motivating factor for the