Schools sometimes teach that only whites can be racist, and that all whites are racist, notes Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars, citing claims made by diversity trainers. These claims are not just wrong, but also at odds with court precedent, which recognizes that racism can have white victims and non-white perpetrators.
At Hot Air, John Sexton points to a recent hate-crime prosecution, in which the victims were white, and the perpetrators were nonwhite. The court not only recognized that the hate crime was racism against whites, but sentenced the perpetrators to six years and four years in prison.
Sexton writes:
There’s a federal hate crime case that you probably haven’t heard about before. About 10 years ago, Chris Kunzelman’s wife Lori was diagnosed with MS. Chris and Lori lived in Scottsdale, Arizona but in light of the diagnosis they decided to make a major change. He asked her where she wanted to live out the remainder of her life and she picked Hawaii. So they paid $175,000, site unseen, for a run down house on the beach in Maui. The house needed work and so in February 2014 Kunzelman and his uncle traveled to the small fishing village where it was located in order to start moving things in and setting it up for he and his wife to move there. And that’s when things turned ugly. Two native men who lived nearby showed up at his house and attacked him and his uncle.
The Washington Post reports:
Two neighbors punched him, struck him in the head with a shovel and bashed in his car windows as he tried to escape.
The suspects — Hawaiians whose families had lived in Kahakuloa village for generations — told police they believed Kunzelman was trespassing. Ultimately, they pleaded guilty to local prosecutors’ charges of assault and were sentenced to probation.
Thus, the two native Hawaiians received a slap on the wrist after after attacking and beating Kunzelman and his uncle and driving Kunzelman out of his own home. Kunzelman saw it as favoritism in favor of the native Hawaiians:
Under the plea agreement reached in 2019, Alo-Kaonohi was sentenced to four years of probation, and Aki received probation and time-served in prison, about seven months. Both men apologized to Kunzelman, but he was not satisfied.
“The only word I can come up with is corruption,” he told Hawaii News Now in 2019. “Both of them got probation and absolutely nothing. They got off Scot-free.”
But then federal prosecutors got involved. In 2020 a federal grand jury indicted the two men again, this time for violating the federal hate crimes law, because the attackers discriminated against Kunzelman because of his race. The attackers made explicit anti-white comments during the attack, portions of which were captured on video by a camera in Kunzelman’s car. That included a derogatory term for whites:
In video footage, Aki can be heard using the term “Haole,” a Hawaiian word for outsiders, usually referring to White people, that is sometimes used pejoratively. He later told police Kunzelman was a “typical Haole” trying to use his wealth to “change everything up in Kahakuloa.”
Assistant U.S. attorney Chris Thomas said at the trial that the defendants told Kunzelman that his “skin is the wrong [expletive] color” and that no White man would ever live in their neighborhood. Defense lawyers challenged the accusations, saying no racial threats could be heard on the security video.
In December, the attackers were convicted. They were sentenced on March 2. Judge Michael Seabright told one of the two men at the sentencing hearing, “You were racist on that day.” The attackers got prison sentences of six years and four years, respectively.
As Sexton observes,”the obvious lesson here is that anyone can be racist,” citing FBI data showing that in 2020, there were 869 racially motivated attacks on whites.
The Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to fire white employees because they were white, in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education and in McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. (1976). Courts have ruled that racial harassment is illegal even when it is committed against whites, in cases such as Huckabay v. Moore (1998) and Bowen v. Missouri Department of Social Services (2002).
