海角大神

Police in Greenville, Miss., have charged a man with arson in connection with the November torching of a black church that was also graffitied with the words 鈥淰ote Trump,鈥� in an incident that made national headlines and caused the FBI to open a civil-rights investigation in the days leading up to the election.

Now comes the twist: the suspect, Andrew McClinton, is an African-American member of Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church鈥檚 congregation. Authorities haven鈥檛 ascribed a motive yet.

鈥淲e do not believe it was politically motivated,鈥� said Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney, in an interview with the Associated Press. 鈥淭here may have been some efforts to make it appear politically motivated.鈥澛�

The revelation may refocus attention on how political rhetoric that often casts minority groups in a critical light might be linked to aggressions against members of those groups 鈥� and how incomplete reporting of hate crimes might create fertile terrain for skepticism. Anecdotal evidence of those linkages can sometimes fuel skepticism.

The church鈥檚 burning produced an outpouring of grief and support, in various manifestations: a GoFundMe page created to help the church rebuild, for example, raised $200,000 in just two days. The page鈥檚 mission statement referred to the 鈥減otent racial history of burning black churches鈥� 鈥� a past that seemed not entirely past, following several incidents in 2015, as 海角大神鈥檚 Patrik Jonsson reported that summer:

Some local officials in Mississippi had expressed doubt over the assumptions being made about potential motives, as 海角大神鈥檚 Gretel Kauffman reported:

But the election of President-elect Donald Trump gave the Greenville arson a special symbolic charge, to which neither much of the national press nor civil-rights groups were oblivious. The Southern Poverty Law Center opened with a mention of it in a November report on what it described as a deluge of post-election hate incidents.

That report took stock only of media reports and submissions to the center鈥檚 web page, while the organization did not seek to verify individual incidents. And as Quartz noted upon its release, counting hate crimes on the national scale can be tricky, since FBI statistics rely on local police departments to report statistics. Many departments don鈥檛. There鈥檚 also no uniform, federal definition of a hate crime, leading some researchers to argue that numbers for individual states might not be entirely on point.

That鈥檚 not to say that there isn鈥檛 clarity on some matters, like who tends to be the victim: In 2015, as in past FBI surveys, African-Americans made up the overwhelming majority. And researchers on the topic tend to conclude that political rhetoric can be a factor in hate crimes, even if precise, short-term links to particular candidates and events remain hard to track.

鈥淭here鈥檚 very compelling evidence that political rhetoric may well play a role in directing behavior in the aftermath of a terrorist attack,鈥� Brian Levin, director of the California State University-San Bernardino鈥檚 Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, told the Atlantic in November, following the release of an SPLC report on anti-Muslim hate crimes since 9/11.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 think we can dismiss contentions that rhetoric is one of the significant variables that can contribute to hate crimes.鈥�