Chief Justice Roger Taney issued his Supreme Court opinion on the rights of Black people on March 6, 1857 in the historic Dred Scott v. Sanford case.
He wrote: “(Black people) had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect;
And that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”
The hatred of Black people and beliefs of White supremacy and Black inferiority have continued 168 years later.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program indicated that from April 2020 to April 2023, anti-Black bias made up a third of all bias types, and 67% of anti-Black hate crimes were committed by White people, according to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer.
“As Caucasians begin to feel threatened and their security is compromised, the mask of civility comes off,” the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, said in Part 27 of his 58-week lecture series, “The Time and What Must Be Done.”
“All over our planet, the hatred of Black is manifesting,” he added.
Recent incidents in the United States alone point to the continued manifestation of anti-Black hate.
A hate crime, at the federal level, is “a crime motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Bias or hate incidents are “acts of prejudice that are not crimes and do not involve violence, threats, or property damage.”
Hate in California
California’s Commission on the State of Hate issued its annual report in March, analyzing hate in California from 2023-2024. The report found that “as in previous years, in 2023, hate crimes disproportionately targeted Black Californians.
These crimes are part of a broader scourge of racism in nearly every area of modern life, including employment, housing, and the criminal legal system.”
Between 2021 and 2022, anti-Black hate crimes increased more than hate crimes overall in California, according to the report.
In March, an Orange County, California, school board member used the N-word at a public meeting, sparking backlash.
The Orange County Black Solidarity Network, a coalition of local organizations dedicated to addressing hate against the Black community in Orange County, condemned the use of the slur.
“Her words were not just an unfortunate choice—they reflect a deeper, long-standing pattern of racial insensitivity and systemic exclusion that continues to harm Black students, families, and educators in Orange County.
An apology, absent of true accountability and a willingness to engage in repair, is not leadership. It is damage control,” Gregory C. Scott, president and CEO of Community Action Partnership of Orange County, a member organization of the Black solidarity network, wrote in an article published in Voice of OC, a nonprofit news agency.
On April 12, police arrested a White woman in Palo Alto, California, after spitting on a man while shouting anti-Black racial epithets. She was booked into jail for disturbing the peace, battery and a hate crime.
As part of their report, California’s Commission on the State of Hate reviewed nearly 300 studies examining the health effects of racism and found that experiencing racism is associated with negative mental health impacts, including depression, anxiety, and psychological distress.
The commission also found that experiencing hate and discrimination can result in altered brain development and higher levels of stress hormones, inflammation, blood pressure and risk of obesity.
White supremacy and mass shootings
Studies and reports have also tied mass killings in recent years to anti-Blackness. The Associated Press published a story in 2023 on the link between mass killings and right-wing extremism and White supremacy.
A mass shooting occurred at Florida State University on April 17, leaving two people dead and six injured. The suspect, 20-year-old Phoenix Ikner, had a history of White supremacist views and anti-Black hate speech, according to a classmate.
“I got into arguments with him in class over how gross the things he said were,” Lucas Luzietti, a politics student who shared a class with Ikner, told USA Today.
Ideas voiced by Mr. Ikner included how “Rosa Parks was in the wrong” and how Black people were ruining his neighborhood, according to Mr. Luzietti’s words to USA Today.
Another student, Reid Seybold, crossed paths with Mr. Ikner at a political roundtable club.
“Basically our only rule was no Nazis—colloquially speaking—and he espoused so much White supremacist rhetoric, and Far-Right rhetoric as well, to the point where we had to exercise that rule,” USA Today quoted Mr. Seybold.
Fighting back
Other recent racialized incidents include racist graffiti in schools, a White man charged with a hate crime offense after allegedly shouting anti-Black racial slurs at and attacking a Black woman in Seattle, Washington.
A Black mother demanding justice in New York City after her teenage son was attacked and called the N-word by a group of teenagers and a Black woman’s discrimination lawsuit after being kicked off a plane for looking at a White flight attendant.
“This case epitomizes the revolting reality that, even in the year 2025, Black Americans continue to endure the indignity of ‘Flying While Black,’ an experience steeped in humiliation and echoing the dehumanizing degradations of the Jim Crow South,” the woman, Teresa Hudson Jordan, says in her complaint, according to the Atlanta Black Star.
One Black town had enough. Residents of Lincoln Heights, Ohio, about 13.5 miles from Cincinnati, decided to form their own protection group after a neo-Nazi group waved swastika flags and shouted racial slurs on the edge of the majority-Black community on Feb. 7, according to NBC News.
Residents voiced complaints about how police responded to the incident. As a result, organizers with The Heights Movement, a community empowerment organization, formed the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program.
“I’ve never felt safer as a Black man in my community than I have right now,” NBC News quoted Daronce Daniels, the watch group’s spokesperson. “These are my friends. These are my cousins, my brothers, my sisters, my aunties.”
“What I don’t understand is how I can be standing here in America in 2025, and somebody can walk up to my window with a swastika and have guns and call me the N-word and law enforcement watch,” local business owner Eric Ruffin said, according to NBC News.
A divine warning to Black people
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has warned Black people in America of the hate and White backlash that would continue to manifest.
“Why would there be a White lash?” he questioned in a Final Call year-end review interview for 2016.
“Most of us have not understood the nature of the people in whose hands we have been for the last 460 years. We have fallen in love with our open enemy because we have hope that one day they will receive us as an equal or treat us as an equal.
And the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said to us that is not going to happen,” he said, referring to Black people’s relationship to White people. “Any kind of unity with our former slave masters and their children has to be on their terms and not on ours. Otherwise their power and their arms and their will, will be against our rise as it always has been.”
The White backlash is due to the darker people of the earth now challenging the rule of Whites over them, he added. “And that challenge is coming up in the rise of our people and our desire for justice, our desire for equity and our desire for greater freedom, greater equality of opportunity.”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan spoke on the desire of White people to “make America White again” and to “bring back White Power.” In another message delivered on May 27, 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, he described him as “the savior of the alt-right,” but said God put President Trump in place to serve as “a whipping wind on the dry bones in the valley.”
Minister Farrakhan has been ordered by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, since after Saviours’ Day 2024, to be silent and he has not spoken about the president’s re-election. Yet, his divine insight and guidance from 2018 is still unfolding and manifesting.
“Now, you’re talking like this: ‘It’s kinda getting rough with that (President) Trump. We’ve got to do something.’ You’re right. What you got to do? You have to unite and get busy to do something for yourself. What does God say?” Minister Farrakhan said.
“Those who refused to submit to the God of Moses and Aaron, they were bitten with cockatrices and fiery serpents. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told me that the ‘fiery serpents’ mean angry White people. Are they biting you now? Are they stopping you in the street and talking to you like some dog? ‘Get down on the ground.’ Look at you: ‘I know my rights.’”
“And Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney said you have no rights that a White man is bound to respect. So, the whipping winds, Mr. Trump is stirring them up and the whipping on you is going to keep going until you say to God:
‘I’m ready God to obey you. I know you want what is best for me, and if you want to give me land that we can be free, I’m with you,’” Minister Farrakhan continued.
In his 2016 year end interview, he warned Black people that “this wind” will blow “from every direction to force us to come to the realization that we cannot get along in peace with this people after giving them 400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment ever accorded to a human being.”
“This is going to pick up with greater force, these winds, and so the bones will ultimately be forced to come together,” he warned. “And when they see this mask of civility taken off and now you see an enemy that hates our shadow. And like Abraham Lincoln said, ‘you suffer from being here with us and we suffer from your presence among us.’”
“This is going to come to a head, and the Will of God will be carried out, which is that the Black and the Brown and the Red, we must go free in a land of our own; not under White supremacy but ruled under our own wisdom, knowledge, understanding and the guidance of God,” he concluded.
