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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The most recent racial justice movement that emerged in the United States beginning in the summer of 2020 in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd laid bare the overdue need to revisit white America’s legacy of racist violence against its Black citizens. Historians can help bridge the gap between past and present and urge more Americans to identify and confront racial violence. As a born-and-raised Hoosier, I wanted to contribute to social change and racial justice at home. The historical silence on the history of racist violence in Indiana supports the myth that Indiana was a free state where Black citizens found refuge from the racist violence they experienced in the South; thousands of primary source newspapers containing details of white perpetrators lynching and violently attacking Black Hoosiers refute this myth. This paper identifies white perpetrators’ acts of anti-Black violence and Black Hoosiers resistance to anti-Black violence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis of racial violence in Indiana shows that white perpetrators employed violence in defense of white supremacy and that Black Hoosiers resisted anti-Black violence and white supremacy. The record indicates that racial terrorism has been embedded in the fabric of Indiana since its founding. Grassroots efforts, such as the Facing Injustice Project’s work to acknowledge the 1901 lynching of George Ward in Terre Haute, Indiana, are starting to recognize the harm white Hoosiers did to Black Hoosiers and bring repair to victims’ descendants and communities. More public history projects are needed to engage all Hoosiers in reckoning with the history of anti-Black violence. Activists and organizations have shown that Wikipedia is one digital institution where anyone can do the work of rooting out inequalities and injustices. This digital public history Wikipedia project challenges the historical silence on Indiana’s racially violent past by telling the truth about the history on one of the most-visited websites in the world. Using Wikipedia to do public history invites Hoosiers of all backgrounds to take up the work of acknowledging Indiana’s history of anti-Black violence, updating the historic record, and reevaluating the narrative constantly.

Hate crime is a collective name for criminal acts committed due to the offender’s prejudice or hate against an individual or a group of people. There is no explicit legal definition of “hate crime” in Swedish criminal law, but in 1994 a rule called “straffskärpningregeln” has been introduced, primarily to combat racist crime and protect vulnerable groups in society. The rule means that all types of crime may constitute hate crimes if the motive is to aggrieve a person or group of people because of race, colour, ethnic origin, creed, sexual orientation or similar circumstance (Penal Code 29 chapter 2§ 7p).The aim of this essay is to study and investigate how the Swedish judicial system handles hate crime cases, but also to describe constructions of crime victims and discuss perpetrator’s motives. In order to gain a better understanding of hate crimes in the Swedish context, the ideal victim theory has been applied. With the use of critical discourse analysis, I have identified three different discourses. The results of my study are among other findings that the Swedish legal system need to make visible how “straffskärpningregeln” is applied. The perpetrator paints a stereotypical picture of “the others” by categorizing themselves as “we” and the others as “them” and thereby constructing differentiated categories.