nypd slow to call a hate crime a hate crime

Adding to the now-documented wave of hate crimes against Black people, Ann Marie Washington, a 57-year-old Trinidadian mother of two, was in the Church Avenue subway station in Brooklyn when an unidentified white male viciously attacked her, punching her face and stabbing her while calling her a “Black Bitch”repeatedly. Washington’s attacker fled on an outgoing train and is still at large according to The Root.

Washington didn’t even realize that she had been stabbed until she got home Friday night. She was then hospitalized on Sunday, undergoing surgery for a collapsed lung. Y’all… To add insult to life-threatening injury, Black women are having to contend with the growing threats to our safety while also having to watch media outlets and police forces hesitate in labeling such violent crimes as hate crimes.

White terrorists have ravaged the country for the last century or so but the past few weeks have been inundated with stabbings, shootings and mass shootings that make the tyranny of white men harder to ignore. This trend is backed by FBI statistics that show hate crimes increasing from 6,121 in 2016 to 7,125 in 2017, and of the 7,106 single-bias hate crimes reported, almost 60% had to do with race and ethnicity. That being said, the story of the two Black people murdered by a white terrorist in a Kentucky Krogers was sidelined in the mainstream media, speaking to a dangerous habit perpetrated by the police and media, where hate crimes and terrorism targeting people of color are downplayed or completely disregarded. Fuck “racially charged.” This is racism. Period.

There are Black children who huddle in fear near older Black people at BART after what happened to Nia Wilson. That’s across the country in California. Our children are scared and traumatized and the media and police won’t act because they, themselves, are reluctant to call out their own toxic racism; calling out racism-fueled violence would implicate them for how they contribute to the problem, forcing them to address it. Hello, racial profiling and police brutality. Hello, white media criminalizing Black victims of “racially charged” violence.

Push back anyway, because regardless of how the media or the police feel about Black lives, they are accountable to us. Period.