he Aryan Nation and neo-Nazis, and others to black racists. Often hate crimes are committed by deranged individuals, many of whom are adolescents. According to Seligman (1997, December 15), "the dirty little secret about hate crimes" is that 90 percent of them are committed by blacks on whites (p. 138). The more widespread public impression is that the principal victims are racial and ethnic minorities. Davis (1995) reports that, among minorities, blacks were the primary targets of hate crimes, then Jews, other ethnic crimes and in about 11 percent of the cases gays and lesbians (p. 387).
A new word has been added to the American political lexicon, ethnoviolence. According to Matsuda et al. (1993), a 1990 report by the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence found that 65 percent to 70 percent of minority students at public schools and on university campuses reported that they had been the targets of ethnoviolent harassment, an estimated 800,000 to 1 million cases per annum (p. 1). However, New York University law professors James Jacobs and Kimberly Potter, who have recently published their study on hate crimes, "don't see a trend" of increasing hate crimes (Dooling, 1998, July 20, p. A18). In fact, Troy (1998, October 19) says, FBI statistics shows a slight decline in hate related murders, which is in line with the general national decline in homicides (p. A27).
Reconciling these conflicting estimates is difficult. Statistics on hate crimes have been kept only during the past eight years, making comparisons with previous periods difficult. There are definitional problems. Some would limit hate crimes only to those which are committed against minorities, while others would include the killing of an abortion doctor by a pro-choice fanatic. Some types of hate crime which are reported today, such as police brutality against blacks, might have gone unnoticed in previous eras. Kleg (1993) says that "constant racial and eth...