Generalized Hate: Bias Victimization against Non-Asian Racial/Ethnic Minorities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

While much attention has been focused on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hate crime victimization among the Asian population, there is reason to expect that other racial/ethnic minorities may also be at risk of bias-motivated victimization. The current research examines the prevalence of discrimination, hate crime victimization, and fear of victimization among Black and Hispanic individuals during the pandemic. The results, obtained from a survey administered in May 2020 to roughly 1,400 non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic respondents, indicate substantial bias victimization among both groups during the pandemic. Additionally, results reveal important associations between victimization and pandemic-related circumstances.

KEYWORDS:

• Bias crime
• hate crimeNJHN_A_1976585
• COVID-19
• victimization
• fear of victimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15564886.2021.1974136

Notes

1. While the disease caused by the novel coronavirus was originally called “2019-nCoV”, the World Health Organization (WHO) later permanently renamed it COVID-19 (CDC, 2020). We refer to the disease as COVID-19 throughout for parsimony.

2. All study procedures, including informed consent, were approved by the Florida State University institutional review board.

3. Due to the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we do not have pre-pandemic measures of bias victimization. As such, our analyses examine the prevalence and nature of bias victimization experiences during the pandemic rather than whether the pandemic increased these experiences.

4. We focus on racially/ethnically-motivated bias victimization because this type of bias motivation is the most common type of bias victimization according to official statistics and the National Crime Victimization Survey (Harlow, 2005); because the link between the pandemic and bias victimization is the most salient and obvious for racial/ethnic bias; and because the survey asked exclusively about racial/ethnic bias victimization.

5. We have also created variety scores of these summary measures coded as a count of the number of different types of victimization experienced by each respondent within each summary type (α_{any bias} = .92; α_{non-criminal bias} = .81; α_{criminal bias} = .90). That said, we use the binary measures for all primary analyses rather than the variety scores due to the rarity of hate crime victimization and the skewness of the variety score measures. However, we have replicated all analyses using the variety scores as well; results can be found in Tables S.2 and S.3 in the online supplementary material. Results are largely consistent with those using the binary measures.

6. We replicated all analyses using a more inclusive measure of non-Hispanic Black which included everyone who selected “Black” as a racial category, regardless of whether it was the racial group they identified with most. Results were largely consistent.

7. See Table S.1 of the online supplementary material for a correlation matrix of analytic variables.

8. In the multivariate models for Hispanic respondents, we also control for whether the respondent identifies as Black (in addition to Hispanic).

9. The size of the foreign-born Black population in our sample is only 41, which may partially explain our non-significant findings here.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Collaborative Collision Grant from the Florida State University Council on Research and Creativity;Florida State University Council on Research and Creativity Collaborative Collision [grant number 045678].