In a society that trains people to celebrate victimhood, racial hate crime hoaxes abound. A Missouri high school just added the latest one to the very, very long list.
Parkway Central High School in St. Louis County was hit with racist graffiti using racial slurs and language that wished for the death of black people. The graffiti led to walkouts at multiple high schools.
It was revealed shortly afterward that the student who wrote the messages was black.
This isn’t even the first such hoax to occur in this specific high school. In 2017, a nonwhite student admitted to writing “white lives matter” followed by a racial slur in a Parkway Central bathroom, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
And the event also tracks with the long list of hate crime hoaxes that have occurred across the country in recent years. High-profile incidents such as Jussie Smollett’s faked assault or the “noose” in the garage of NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace (actually just a pull-rope) got the most headlines. But many of these hoaxes are similar to that of Parkway Central, and they follow a familiar formula.
The students who drew a lynching captioned with a racial slur and the hashtag “white power” at Salisbury University’s library in 2016 turned out to be black. In 2016, a gay man defaced the church where he worked with a swastika and a homophobic slur, which he then pretended to discover and report to authorities. That same year, a gay man accused Whole Foods of writing a homophobic slur on his “Love Wins” cake, seemingly unaware that Whole Foods has security cameras.
November 2018 saw an explosion of hate crime hoaxes on college campuses, likely fueled by the campus atmosphere surrounding the midterm elections that took place that month. A black student admitted to racist graffiti at Albion University in Michigan earlier this year. Wilfred Reilly, a professor at Kentucky State University, wrote in 2019 that he was “able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes” while doing research for a book. These incidents, most of which have occurred since 2016, are now depressingly common in schools, and especially at universities.
When you make victimhood a virtue in the culture, that is what people, especially young people, will chase. As Parkway Central has seen once again, they will even leave racist graffiti in their own school to draw attention to themselves.
The demand for hate crimes is greater than the supply, both among those who want to be victims and the media outlets who breathlessly report certain “hate crimes” before they are revealed to be hoaxes. Until that changes, these incidents will continue to occur.
