Hate crimes—what are they? In Newport, Rhode Island, a mixed-race couple complained that threats from their white neighbors had driven them from their home. Generous contributions from strangers helped the family to find a new place and to pay the rent. Local police, however, were suspicious from the first and eventually charged Tisha Anderson with plotting her own hate crime. On February 7, Miss Anderson pleaded no contest to charges of filing false police reports. Even if the threats had been genuine, they would have been only words, but if the hate-speech perpetrators had been found, there would have been a public inquisition on the level of the Salem Witch Trials.

At virtually the same time the Newport farce was drawing to a close, a grimmer drama was being played out in Addison, Illinois, where a pregnant Debra Evans was brutally murdered along with her ten-year-old daughter, Samantha. The killers slashed open Miss Evans’ belly and removed the baby alive. The next day, her seven-year-old son Joshua was killed, but they spared the life of another child in the house. Charged in the slaying were neighbor Jacqueline Annette Williams, her boyfriend Fedell Caffey, and her cousin Laverne Ward.

According to police, Jacqueline Williams was unable to have children and plotted the murder with her boyfriend. She apparently had been feigning pregnancy for some time in order to make the arrival of a newborn more plausible. In the most bizarre twist of the case. Laverne Ward claims to be the father of Evans’ surviving children and is claiming custody. The fact that is hardly mentioned in any of the reports is the race of the victims and the “alleged perpetrators”: Debra Evans and her two murdered children were white; Jacqueline Williams and her friends are black; the two surviving children are mulatto. So there it is in black and white.

One of the worst aspects of this case has been the media coverage. Unless you were listening to talk radio, you would have needed the skills of a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the race of the victims and killers. But the press routinely refuses to identify the race of criminals, although in some parts of the country, it is an easy trick to figure it out: outside the South, any criminal with an Anglo surname is probably black. American citizens have a right to know the facts of a criminal case, if only because they, ultimately, have a voice in deciding criminal justice policies. Unfortunately, the American media are more interested in condemning white racism than in reporting the facts.

In Boston, a black couple in an automobile grew impatient with the slow progress of pedestrians leaving a public New Year’s Eve celebration. The boyfriend, driving without benefit of a license, simply gunned the engine and plowed through the crowd, injuring 21 people. The couple is claiming they acted in self-defense in reaction to threats from white pedestrians, but the policeman on the scene commented: “He said he was going to drive over those people, and that’s exactly what he did.” Nonetheless, newspapers dutifully reported the “threats,” as if an insult justified attempted homicide. Last year, when Michael Westerman was murdered by a group of black toughs who objected to the Confederate Flag on his truck, the immediate press response was to condemn the atmosphere of white bigotry that had inspired the crime, and the FBI was called in to investigate not the murder but alleged incidents of cross-burning.

At the beginning of the Bosnian conflict, I asked a Serb fighter what it was like, and he replied: this is warfare at the biological level. What he meant was sociobiological warfare, as when a male cat kills a mother cat’s litter and almost immediately impregnates her with his own genetic inheritance.

Unfortunately, in teaching black Americans to demonize whites, black nationalists—and their friends in the press—are working to bring about another Bosnia. Even bitter enemies sometimes recognize the humanity of their opponents, but the poisonous race hatred that is being taught to blacks is beginning to blind some of them to the humanity of their “white oppressors.” They look at a child and see only the white skin that gives them a license to kill.