Hate crimes' impact on minority stress levels

This paper looked at how hate crimes affect stress levels in minority communities, focusing on the impact of one event: the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA. Using Uniform Crime Reporting Program hate crime statistics, authors Hellyer and Gereke showed that there was an increase in anti-Black hate crimes in the two weeks following the rally. And by using data from the study, Stress in America, United States, 2007-2018, they found that Black people in the US felt a corresponding increase in stress due to fear of being victimized by hate crimes during that period. Distributed by RCMD, Stress in America is a large, ongoing nationally representative survey to determine stressors and coping mechanisms in use in the US, and it contains large samples of racial and ethnic minority respondents. Data collection for the 2017 wave of the survey happened to be taking place when the Charlottesville rally occurred. This allowed Hellyer and Gereke to compare minority stress levels before and after it. Note, their findings showed that unlike for Black Americans, this specific rally did not increase crime against Asian or Latine populations, nor did their stress significantly increase, perhaps due to the clear anti-Black focus of the rally. Nevertheless, the authors showed that widely publicized hate incidents can have negative effects on minority communities by generating a climate of fear, even in people who were not directly targeted.