Racial hate and discrimination are serious problems in California’s Inland Empire—and solving them begins at the most fundamental levels. This was the conclusion of a panel of people who study and fight against hate crimes at “How Does the Inland Empire Strike Back Against Hate?,” a Zócalo/California Humanities event at UCR ARTS in Riverside, California. The speakers agreed that acts of racism and hatred go underreported across the region, and that building strong institutions that promote understanding begins in schools.

The discussion was moderated by Brian Levin, professor emeritus at the Cal State San Bernardino School of Criminal Justice, who studies extremism and hate crimes. He opened the discussion by noting that hate crimes “increased at double digit levels in major American cities” in 2023. This year isn’t likely to get better given that hate crimes have increased in every election year since 1991. Levin asked the panelists to speak to how California—which perhaps should be “a shining city on the hill for the rest of the country”—is combating hate.

California State Assemblymember Corey A. Jackson said that his goal is to build anti-racist, anti-xenophobic infrastructure around the state. He pointed to two bills recently signed by Governor Gavin Newsom—AB 1078, which pushed back against book banning (and which Jackson wrote) and AB 1955, which bars schools from notifying parents about student gender identity—as well as the state’s Civil Rights Department’s Commission on the State of Hate as examples. “Overall, what are we saying in the state of California? Not on our watch. We are making sure we are upholding what other generations did for us. When hate, racism, [or] xenophobia raises its ugly head, we are going to beat it back in the shadows where it belongs,” he said.

Turning to Candice Mays, project director of Black Voice News’ Mapping Black California, Levin asked how local institutions are fighting hate, and what they can do to combat skepticism and distrust of law enforcement and government.

The first hurdle, said Mays, is “How do you tell the police on the police?” Currently, the responsibility to report an incident is on the victim—who may not want to report a violent interaction to the organization perpetrating it. And law enforcement itself might not tick the proper boxes to characterize a violent act as a hate crime. Who holds the people who are mandated to report hate crimes accountable for their reports? Mays asked. She added, “It’s not as much as, how do we fix the Black community’s opinion of law enforcement; it’s how does government hold law enforcement accountable, so it’s not on us to deal with that.”

Levin concurred, pointing out that over the last few years, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department—the nation’s 10th largest law enforcement agency—has reported just a handful of hate crimes each year, while the Los Angeles Police Department reported over 800 in 2023.

Xenophobia has a long history in the Inland Empire, said ACLU Southern California Inland Empire Office senior policy advocate and organizer Luis Nolasco. He sees his work as “ensuring that the Inland Empire is welcoming and is not anti-immigrant,” he said. “The hate comes from lack of knowledge or interfacing with the group.” He added, “A lot of that can be solved by talking to a person that’s an immigrant.” Some of his work has been with young people—including a lawsuit challenging how law enforcement and schools punish Black and brown students—but he is also working on recognizing racism as a public health crisis.

Mays said that unequal healthcare access is a major issue in both Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, though it’s significantly worse in the latter. She said that people by and large have health insurance. But new arrivals from Los Angeles County—many of them Black and brown, and without local networks—lack access to resources and providers. They often end up going to urgent care, for instance, instead of a primary care doctor.

Levin turned the discussion toward solutions. “What can we do to hone allyship?” he asked.

Jackson said that Black people are always at the top of any list of hate crime victims—but they are not alone there. “We are all on the menu. It depends what the dish of the day is. As a matter of fact, this is starting to become a buffet, when it comes to hate,” he said. He urged people to band together—but also to “hold onto your own humanity. Speak up against other people who are being targeted, even if you have nothing to win or lose.”

In the face of extreme hate, allyship has to be active, said Nolasco. “We’ve lost that sense of really putting ourselves on the line for our other communities,” he said. “This is something we all need to do for each other.”

Mays echoed that sentiment in response to a question from an audience member about helping people who want to fight hate but feel too overwhelmed to take action.

“I’m exhausted, too. I look at bad numbers all day,” she said. “It’s important to work in collaboration and connection with other people because then you’re restoring each other.” Surround yourself in community, she added, and remember that other people did this work before you.

Another audience member asked the panelists whether anti-hate, anti-racism movements needed better marketing—slogans like “Occupy,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Defund the Police” are triggering, or easy to push back on.

Mays didn’t deny the need for better marketing but pointed out that “desegregation” and “integration” got pushback in the civil rights era. “Whatever we’re going to push for next, no matter how we word it, is going to upset people, she said. “Honestly if it’s not, I don’t think we’re pushing the right things or pushing hard enough.”

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What’s that got to do with Brexit? More than you’d think. When Britain voted early this summer to leave the European Union and go it alone, a large number of those who voted to leave did so explicitly because of concerns over immigration. Tensions ran high in the days surrounding the vote. Immediately following the result of the referendum, police all over the country noted a rise in racial hate crimes. Reports flooded in of foreigners being spat at and snarled at on Britain’s streets, and told to go back to where they came from. This hatred of other people, of those viewed as non-Britons, escalated on the night in late August when a gang of English youths murdered 40-year old Polish immigrant Arkadiusz Jóźwik as he was eating pizza in Harlow, just south of London, in what is widely suspected to be a hate crime. Perhaps most notoriously, on 16 June, a week shy of the vote, a man shouting “Britain first” shot and stabbed Jo Cox, a young Labour Member of Parliament. When he was asked in court a few days later to state his name, he replied: “My name is death to traitors. Freedom for Britain.”

Back on this side of the Atlantic, it’s been reported that supporters at Trump rallies have sometimes cried not just for jailing Hillary Clinton, but also for killing her. Trump’s own veiled threat of “Second Amendment” action at a rally in North Carolina in early August had many wondering whether he was inciting potential armed violence. Last year after a campaign rally in Alabama where several white Trump supporters assaulted a Black Lives Matter protester who interrupted the candidate’s speech, Trump responded on Fox News, “Maybe [the activist] should have been roughed up.” In March in St. Louis, Trump claimed “Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to kick protestors out of campaign stops] is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” And the list goes on. And on.

In both campaigns—the U.S. presidential bid and the U.K.’s European referendum—the movement of people from nation to nation, and the economic consequences of that movement, has played an outsized role. Whether it’s Trump complaining about Latinos or Syrian refugees, or the Leave campaign’s poster showing a seemingly unending line of dark-skinned migrants under the headline “Breaking Point” (a poster ironically released the same day Jo Cox lost her life), it’s once more acceptable to speak openly and disparagingly of immigrants, refugees, and of others who don’t “belong”–those who don’t look, or sound, or seem like a particular conception of what makes “us” as nations.

Trump visited Scotland (which voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in the European Union) the day after the U.K.’s June referendum. He said there were “great similarities” between the vote and his campaign, including that “people want to take their country back” and “they don’t necessarily want people pouring into their country.” His words echo not only those of the haters, but also of the woman who is now Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May. Just a year ago when she was Home Secretary and in charge of immigration policy, she declared at the annual Conservative Party conference that “millions” of people wanted to come to Britain, and that their presence would doom the economy, drive wages down, expand the criminal classes, and make it impossible to build a cohesive society. The speech was pure Trump (albeit delivered in complete sentences), though it was given at a time when few in the U.S. believed Trump could be a serious contender. In both countries, interestingly, the foreign-born residents—41 million in the U.S. and 8 million in Britain—amount to some 13 percent of the total population.

In both countries, this type of rhetoric reveals a regression in recent years that has brought open statements of intolerance and bigotry back into mainstream discussion, often in the name of freedom of expression. Hatred of difference has a long and always ugly history. It was only after 1945, with the horrors of Nazism fresh in people’s minds that derogatory commentary—whether about people of different backgrounds or religions, women, those with disabilities, or migrants—began to retreat from open conversation. Slowly but surely, it became less and less acceptable to make casual anti-Semitic, racist, or sexist comments in public. Instead, such expressions moved to the periphery, the province of fringe organizations and privately expressed antipathy.

But the pushback against migration in much of the industrialized world, fanned by manipulative politicians scapegoating outsiders for all societal woes, has allowed this bigoted talk to return to our political landscape in recent years. Trump and his counterparts around the world couch their blunt rhetoric, which often involves the denigration of difference, in the message that freedom lies in the ability to speak the unspeakable, and that political correctness has made us skirt around real problems and real frustrations that we ignore at our peril. For Brexit supporters, for those who stump for Trump, and for white supremacists and the Alt-Right, diversity has become the favored whipping post. And it’s not just speechifying. The murders of Jóźwik and Cox in the U.K. and the violence at Trump rallies are a painful testament to the dangers of this new manifestation of discontent. Just last week a Conservative MP asked his Parliamentary colleagues how Britain could be made great again, echoing not only Trump’s campaign slogan but a speech delivered in 1950 by a young Margaret Thatcher.

The night before the referendum last June, Nigel Farage, leader of the ultranationalist U.K. Independent Party (UKIP) and a major architect of the Leave campaign, stated in a speech that his opponents had “lost faith in their country.” When Trump, as he will surely do, invokes his “Make America Great Again” slogan the night before our own election, we can only hope that his strikingly similar sentiments don’t seal this country’s fate for the coming years too. Brexit and Trump share values that have ignited a new era of hatred and intolerance—which neither side of the Atlantic can afford.

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I saw a tarantula there, so lovely and slow
with her haired segments.
I saw a snake once, too, its rattle woke
the bottom of my brain.
How I hated that what she taught me.

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