Does Racism Persist in America?

 Of course.  How commonly?  The FBI's 2020 Hate Crimes Report shows a little under 8000 hate crime incidents.  In a nation of 322 million, that does not seem very high.  Obviously, not every expression of prejudice qualifies as a crime.  But reports like this from 10/1/21 Yahoo News:

Criminal charges were filed against Terresha Lucas, a 30-year-old Black woman

In an unexpected turn of events, this week authorities in Georgia revealed they believe a Black woman is behind the “racially charged” notes that have been terrorizing her neighborhood.

Since last December, a Douglasville, Georgia neighborhood has been gripped in fear due to racially charged messages that have anonymously been left in the mailboxes of residents of color, reports Fox News. But now officials say police said they have made an arrest and the alleged culprit is not who anyone would have expected.

Wednesday, the Douglasville Police Department confirmed that they had filed criminal charges against Terresha Lucas. Lucas is a 30-year-old Black woman who they believe threatened people in her community while posing as a Ku Klux Klan member.

These fake hate crmes are identified surprisingly commonly.  Fakehatecrimes.org  keeps track of them.  Now a few hundred fake hate crimes compared to a few thousand a year is not much.  But these were the fake hate crimes done so inexpertly as to be detected.  A reasonably competent self-victimizer could create a plausible looking hate crime that survives investigation.  The not bright ones include a lesbian minister in San Francisco whose "attackers" used permanent marker to write slurs on her face.  Police noticed immediately that they were reversed; as though whoever wrote them was looking in a mirror.

Why bother making these up?  Often they are to excite political tension and guilt privileged whites into supporting the latest expressions of anti-white hatred.  Sometimes they are simpler and sadder: a black woman who wanted to drop out of college and come home, so she put up racist graffiti.

Also of interest: 

Of the 6,431 known offenders:

• 55.2% were White
• 20.2% were Black or African American

So blacks are overrepresented among the offenders.  Not what you expected?