An op-ed in the New York Times this morning from officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the magazine DiversityInc:

In the past decade or so, only about a dozen noose incidents a year came to the attention of civil rights groups. But since the huge Sept. 20 rally in Jena, La., where tens of thousands protested what they saw as racism in the prosecution of six black youths known as the “Jena 6,” this country has seen a rash of as many as 50 to 60 noose incidents. Last Tuesday, for example, a city employee in Slidell, La., was fired after being accused of hanging a noose at a job site a few days earlier.
These incidents are worrying, but even more so is the social reality they reflect. The level of hate crimes in the United States is astoundingly high — more than 190,000 incidents per year, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study….
It seems that the September rally in Jena — much as it was seen by many civil rights activists as the beginning of a new social movement — signaled not a renewed march toward racial and social justice, but a surprisingly broad and deep white backlash against the gains of black America.

An accompanying map (apparently derived from the DiversityInc Noose Watch) suggests that the New York/New Jersey area has become the nation’s capital for noose incidents, leaving Mississippi and Alabama in the dust. But what about that 190,000 number? Can that be true?

Well, there is such a Justice Department study, “Hate Crimes Reported by Victims and Police.” And it does say, based on victims’ reports, that from July 2000 through December 2003 “an average of 191,000 hate crime incidents involving one or more victims occurred annually.” What it does not do, however, is support the idea of a “surprisingly broad and deep white backlash against the gains of black America.”

For example, the study reported:

There were no significant differences in rates of hate crime vulnerability for racial or ethnic groups. Whites were victimized at a rate of 0.9 per 1,000, blacks at 0.7 per 1,000, members of other races at 1.4 per 1,000, Hispanics at 0.9 per 1,000, and non-Hispanics at 0.9 per 1,000.

Moreover, the report says that “victims of violent hate crimes [ones in which victims actually saw the perpetrators] reported white and black offenders in close percentages.” Forty-four percent of the reported victimizations involved a white offender, while 39 percent involved a black offender. If the study is correct, hate crimes, at least those covered in the Justice Department report cited by the Times, are a bit more diverse than DiversityInc would have you believe.