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SPEAKER 1: Mario and Luigi.

SPEAKER 2: Just push the power. If you want to start over, you push this button.

SPEAKER 1: Mario on top of the clouds, that's what I have.

SPEAKER 2: And then you want to move your man, you push the arrows.

STEPHEN SMITH: The five young children of Russell and Laura Jones are flopped on the floor with a video game flashing on the TV screen.

SPEAKER 2: See, one, the video game has 42 games. I never heard of it. I couldn't believe it.

STEPHEN SMITH: The children are gracious and friendly. They love explaining how the game works. And the roomy carpeted house the Jones family recently bought seems like it can hardly contain their buzzing energy on a rainy day. Most of the people in this East St. Paul Minnesota neighborhood are working class whites. Russ and Laura Jones moved here hoping it would be a safe place for their kids. They also knew it might be difficult.

RUSSELL JONES: Being Black, it seemed like you have to prove yourself to people before they accept you.

LAURA JONES: They think you're some drug dealing pimp.

RUSSELL JONES: That's the reason we came away from the drug dealing part of it. We came, we thought everything was going to be peaceful over here. And I said, well, we'll just show that, hey we're no problem. We're not trouble. We're not here trying to interrupt anybody else's life. We're just trying to live a life of our own. And that's how we're going to act. We're not going to interfere with no one else's life.

SPEAKER 3: You guys were talking.

STEPHEN SMITH: But someone interfered with them. The Jones family awoke one night to the menacing glow of a cross burning in their yard. An 18-year-old white man who lived across the street was arrested along with two juveniles. They'd been drinking and set fire to three crosses in St. Paul that night. The man has moved away and neighbors rallied behind the Jones family, but the children still can't sleep without the lights on.

For more than a decade, hate messages pounded at Vivian Jenkins Nelson through the mail. Nelson is an African-American woman. She works with a nonprofit organization in Minneapolis that promotes racial understanding.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSON: The first letter that I got came to me on a new job. And it came with a photo clipping tucked inside of it announcing my coming to the job. And it had inside of it all sorts of rambling messages about how the devil has taken over God's people and the church is part of the whole business and that there's all this race mixing going on.

ELROY STOCK: Mixed race people belong to no race. They are destroyed forever. The dictionary defines mongrel as people resulting from interbreeding called racial genocide, today's Holocaust. My name is Elroy stock, and I've had a mission for many years to preserve the human races that were created by God.

STEPHEN SMITH: Elroy Stock is a white man. At the time he sent the letters, Stock worked at a St. Paul publishing company. He mailed thousands of racial purity messages each year to people whose names he found in the newspaper. Some surely viewed him as a pestering religious crank. But to Vivian Jenkins Nelson, Stock's unsigned letters were hate mail.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSON: When I started getting the mail at home, that's when it really started to take on that kind of scary edge. And you start to worry and wonder about everybody you meet, everybody you work with.

STEPHEN SMITH: Vivian Jenkins Nelson sued Elroy Stock in court, and Stock lost his job. Someone painted swastikas on Ari Mann's office building.

ARI MANN: One was right here. Now, the other one I painted, but you see you can see that it was swastika there. You see that.

STEPHEN SMITH: Ari Mann is a 65-year-old Jew. He lives in a northern Twin Cities suburb where he ran a hardware store for many years. In addition to the graffiti, someone left a can of urine in his mailbox. Ari Mann's welcoming face turns cold, and his small frame shakes with rage when he talks about the incidents. He doesn't know who did it.

ARI MANN: But it occurred in the same day that they desecrated a cemetery with turned over 200 stones. And this is just about 10 blocks away from here. The person who is dead and buried six feet under the ground and he's probably rotten many years ago, to him, probably doesn't matter. But if their aim was to hurt the survivors, they succeeded.

SPEAKER 4: Comedian Andrew Dice Clay.

ANDREW DICE CLAY: Look at these Japs. These madam butterfly walk-using, little nip mothers. I mean, I go into a bank, the name of my bank is [INAUDIBLE]. They're taking over. Didn't we drop two bombs on them a few years ago? What was in those bombs, fertilizer?

And they're the worst drivers. I mean, how do you drive with your eyes 3/4 closed? You can blindfold these people with dental floss. You don't give them keys to a car.

STEPHEN SMITH: The stain of prejudice marks much of American culture. Sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes not. There are few reliable statistics to tell us how many crimes are fueled by bigotry each year in the US. Most experts studying the issue believe that bias crimes are on the increase. Some call it an epidemic. Howard Ehrlich is the research director for the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence in Baltimore, Maryland.

HOWARD EHRLICH: At least one out of four, one out of five people are attacked for reasons of prejudice during the course of a calendar year. That is a substantial proportion of the population. It includes whites as well as minorities. And if we had any other disorder, for example, if the surgeon general of the United States reported that disease entity X had affected one out of five of Americans, we would consider it a public health crisis.

STEPHEN SMITH: Advanced research on the motivations for hate crime is limited. Howard Ehrlich says violence against a single minority group appears to increase when that group becomes visible and vocal.

HOWARD EHRLICH: As people begin to make demands for equality, for civil rights and civil liberties, they are impinging upon the past power and privilege that the dominant particularly white male groups have had. And so we are really in a struggle for power right now.

STEPHEN SMITH: Minnesota commissioner of human rights Stephen Cooper says the level of racial violence is clearly rising.

STEPHEN COOPER: St. Paul in June of this year had six cross burnings. I would hazard to guess that from 1960 to 1990, there were not six cross burnings in the city of St. Paul. There were six in the month of June.

STEPHEN SMITH: The racial sickness is not confined to a particular part of the country. The Northwestern US, for example, is an ethnically sparse region and may not seem the kind of place for hate crime. But Bill Wassmuth, director of the five-state Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment says violence is no stranger.

BILL WASSMUTH: We identified in 1989 265 incidents of harassment in the five Northwestern states. That included one murder. That included 120 assaults, 73 threats, several bombings, some cross burnings, those kinds of incidents. 265 incidents certainly doesn't put us in the quiet bracket in terms of the rest of the country.

STEPHEN SMITH: One of the more publicized hate crimes in recent years occurred in Oregon. Ken Mieske is serving a life sentence for that crime here at the Oregon State Prison in Salem. On an early November morning in 1988, Mieske and two other young white men got into a fight with three Ethiopian men on a Portland Street. With a softball bat, Mieske split the skull of 27-year-old Mulugeta Seraw.

Mieske pleaded guilty to the murder, admitting that he killed Sarah because the victim was Black. Mieske belonged to a racist gang called East Side White Pride. They were skinheads, young gang members with shaved heads and combat boots. Mieske claims now that the killing was simply a street fight that got out of hand. But his white supremacist ideas haven't changed.

KEN MIESKE: Skinheads are American patriots that are standing up for their race. And they're getting tired of being disrespected by other minorities. And they're standing up, and they're saying, hey, we're white, and we're proud of it. People have a different idea of what a racist is. They tend to go with what the media tends to point a finger and say, well, this guy's a racist because he don't like niggers, he don't like Jews, he don't like spics, blah, blah, blah.

Just because you don't get along with them, I don't consider them a racist. Some people don't like cats and dogs. Some people like tarantulas. Some people don't like Blacks, some like Mexicans, some like Chinese. Some don't like people from Iran. They're not-- I don't consider them racist.

STEPHEN SMITH: Police say there are hundreds of racist skinheads in Portland. White separatist groups have longed for years to make the Northwest an independent whites-only country. Jonathan Mozzochi is an organizer for a citizen's group in Portland called the Coalition for Human Dignity.

He keeps an eye on racist skinheads. Mozzochi says that several older neo-Nazi hate groups are aggressively recruiting skinheads to be the next generation of racists. And Mozzochi says a number of skinheads are trying to act more mainstream.

JONATHAN MOZZOCHI: We think that there's a significant portion that are being transformed from street brawlers into political soldiers. And on the other hand, we think that there's a large number of them that are not going to be able to make that transition. They're going to stay in a gang format. But we think it's very important to realize that a large number of neo-Nazi skinheads and white racist youth who have long hair who are just regular looking kids view themselves as Aryan Warriors.

MICHELLE: There's too much of that chaos. They go out, let's kick some ass. Doesn't get anything done.

STEPHEN SMITH: A 20-year-old Portland skinhead named Michelle agreed to meet at a highway restaurant north of the city. Her hair is chopped short and her manner is blunt. Michelle says she hates minorities because she's been beaten up by Black people. She hates Jews because her mom married a Jewish man, Michelle says, abused her.

MICHELLE: And it got me into a love for Hitler. And for a good five years, it was only a love for Hitler. It was just the thought of killing this Jew. And I wasn't really sure why I wanted to kill this Jew, but-- well, other than abuse. But there was nothing behind it.

STEPHEN SMITH: Then Michelle discovered the white supremacist movement, and her feelings were backed up by doctrine. Michelle thinks that minorities enjoy more civil rights than white people and that Jews essentially control government and commerce. Michelle scorns violence, saying that white supremacy should be achieved through political action. She wants nothing more than a separate nation for whites. How many Black people have you known well in your life?

MICHELLE: None.

STEPHEN SMITH: How many Jews other than the stepfather that you say abused you have you known pretty well?

MICHELLE: None.

STEPHEN SMITH: Homosexuals?

MICHELLE: None.

STEPHEN SMITH: How about Asian people?

MICHELLE: Mm-mhm, doesn't happen.

STEPHEN SMITH: Well, one thing that occurs to me is that you're forming ideas about people you don't know.

MICHELLE: Well, I don't know them extensively. But I'm around them enough to feel how they are. For instance, I was walking to the bank, and this Black guy came up and started, hey, baby, how's it going? How about you going over to my house and we da-da-da-- just jump right on top of me. And my husband came over, and there was a conflict. That type of thing happens to me a lot. And just from those type of experiences, I don't need to know them well. Just that does it for me, that type of thing.

STEPHEN SMITH: Not all skinheads are racist. In a downtown Portland park, members of the group Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice or SHARP meet to discuss strategy. A young woman takes role.

SPEAKER 5: --Josh, Mike, Steve, DJ, Sherry.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

STEPHEN SMITH: SHARP includes gays and minorities as well as white skinheads. SHARP leaders have been arrested for attacking racist skinheads, and Portland Police say that SHARP has been a key deterrent to racist gang activity. The recent trial of California neo-Nazi Tom Metzger may also have slowed the supremacist cause.

Metzger is one of the most prominent white power activists in the country, and civil rights lawyers won a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Metzger for inciting the skinhead murder of the Ethiopian man in Portland. The suit aims at bankrupting Metzger's organization and cutting his connections to skinheads across the country.

Organizations that monitor hate groups believe there are some 20,000 hardcore white supremacists in the US. While hate group violence is a vicious problem, experts say that most hate crimes are committed by young white males acting independently, often after a night of drinking. Few are ever caught. Portland writer Eleanor Langer says the very existence of hate groups may make random hate crime more likely. Langer wrote a special report on neo-Nazis for the Nation magazine.

ELEANOR LANGER: Things are articulated by this movement, which have been forbidden to be articulated in American life for a long time, really, and in some ways if ever. And people, I'm sure, must think, oh, you can say that? And then that causes them somehow to dig down inside themselves and see what suppressed hateful things they have inside themselves. And then that comes out.

SPEAKER 4: The hate hotline for a neo-Nazi group called The American Front.

SPEAKER 6: Greetings. You have reached The American Front. This week's message goes out to all you faggot, booty bandit, hug up butt, fudge-packing, AIDS-carrying queers from the national fag army in San Francisco. I remember the spirit of '86 when [INAUDIBLE]--

EDDIE MURPHY: I wouldn't bother. I bothered him when I'm with my friends.

SPEAKER 4: Comedian Eddie Murphy.

EDDIE MURPHY: Driving around, guys, you see a faggot on the street, you pull him in the concert, Hey, faggot! Hey, you faggot ass. Hey, hey, babe, babe [BLOWS KISSES] Faggot ass, faggot. You forget that this faggot is a guy, man. They can kick your ass. Friends walk over some guy going, "Why are you bothering me?

STEPHEN SMITH: It was here on a busy downtown Minneapolis street that a 40-year-old man named Dan became the target of a hate crime. Dan was walking to his car with a friend when a stranger approached and started slugging him. Another man came at them with a 2 by 4. Dan was badly bruised by the attack, and the assailants disappeared.

DAN: When someone is beating you up because you're a gay man and they hate you that much, a stranger, it's devastating.

STEPHEN SMITH: A gay man named Joe Sulka was jumped by a pair of strangers on a different Minneapolis street. He needed 12 stitches in his face. Sulka says the attack was simply a new entry in a dreary resume of hate.

JOE: I think it would be impossible to find a gay or lesbian in this day and age who has not had the assails of verbal assaults as they're growing up or just on the street. Somebody asked me just the other day, well, how many times does this happen? At least once a week. At least. I think they're the same people who when they can get away with it will also yell nigger or spick or chink.

STEPHEN SMITH: A 1987 report to the US Justice Department found that gays and lesbians are probably the most frequent victims of bias crime. Minneapolis psychotherapist Bill Seales who has been counseling violent male offenders for more than two decades thinks that attacks on gays and lesbians are the product of homophobia.

BILL SEALES: The more homophobic the male, usually the greater fear that he is going to become something like that. I think people who go gay bashing are primarily those who have a great fear of being gay.

STEPHEN SMITH: The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force chartered 7,000 incidents of anti-homosexual activity in 1989 ranging from harassment to murder. Many activists believe that tally is far too low, and that the increased violence is a reaction to greater openness by homosexuals. Patti Abbott of the Minneapolis Gay and Lesbian Community Action Council says the public is slow to get outraged about gay bashing.

PATTI ABBOTT: Gays and lesbians are the last group, I think, in this country for whom it is OK to go out and actually physically accost. And you get a lot of reward for doing it and very little punishment.

SPEAKER 7: You have just reached the Northern Hammer Skinhead Minnesota white man's association hotline. Racial greetings, white men and a short warning that those non-whites Jews or white race traitors listening to this hotline message. White men, wake up. The time is now to stand up and reclaim your racial birthright for our race has been the builders of great civilizations spanning from the beginning of time.

SPEAKER 8: And Ms. Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. On came a Spidey, sat down beside her. He said, hey, what's in the bowl, bitch? Jack and Jill went up the hill both with a buck and a 1/4. Jill came down with 2.50. That whore.

STEPHEN SMITH: Congress has ordered the Justice Department to begin counting crimes motivated by the victim's race, religion, or sexual orientation. The statistics do not include crimes against women like domestic abuse or sexual assault. Some people believe those are hate crimes too. Nancy Beil is director of the Sexual Violence Center, a rape crisis program in Minneapolis.

NANCY BEIL: When we look at individual acts, even of sexual assault, we are looking at a crime against that person because of who she is or because of what she is. And that is female.

STEPHEN SMITH: Beil tried to get crimes against women included in the federal hate crime reporting law. She says it's clear from research that sexual assaults have little to do with sexual craving. Rape, she says, is an act of power and hatred and should be seen as such. Minneapolis therapist Bill Seales agrees. He says that men have been deeply threatened by the feminist movement.

BILL SEALES: Usually, the hate crimes are a result of our fear of being overrun or of being taken over in some respect. And I think that that's what happens between men and women as an example. The men of the world fear that if we continue to allow women to make all these-- not all the men, some of the men-- that if we continue to allow women to make all this progress, eventually, they're going to take over the world.

STEPHEN SMITH: Eight years ago, Dorothy Schlesselman was raped by a stranger. Two years ago, Bill Sloane beat and raped his wife. The incidents were not related. Bill Sloane's story represents by far the most common kind of violence against women. Sloane knew his victim. He attacked his wife when he found she was having an affair. Sloane and Schlesselman stories are different, but both crimes were the product of hate.

SPEAKER 9: He jumped on top of me and threatened that he had a knife, and slapped my face, raped me, and Stole all my property and anything that was of value from my home. And took off, broke into the apartment again later, and was never apprehended.

BILL SLOANE: I found out by walking in on them. And I went a little overboard. I kind of forgot who I was for a split second actually. And I was going to kill her. I had a telephone in my hand, and I threatened to crush her skull.

SPEAKER 9: I feel that this bizarre and crazy behavior on the part of the man who raped me is only possible in a climate where there is a very active hatred of women.

BILL SLOANE: For the first time in my life, I felt hate. After the scaredness went away, I actually felt hate. Hate is so much like anxiety, it's hard to tell apart except for the thing that wants to burst out of you is rage. I hated her. And I couldn't understand why I hated her so bad.

STEPHEN SMITH: As the federal government begins the first detailed count of bias crimes, more than 30 states have passed their own laws aimed at punishing such acts. Minnesota and Oregon are among the states that hand out stiffer court sentences for hate crimes than for other assaults. John Leo, a columnist for US News and World Report magazine believes that the US is awash in a wave of hate. But Leo has used his column to protest new laws against hate crimes. He says they are the wrong response because the laws only deepen racial divisions.

JOHN LEO: What we're being invited to do is to have different penalties for different groups. In other words, as a straight white heterosexual male, you will get a discount if you crack me over the head. You only get nine months for getting me. But if you get a gay male or a female, you'll get 12 months. I just don't think we should get into that kind of crazy sentencing economics.

BILL WASSMUTH: I think that's the backwards way around. I mean, you're talking about offering a discount as if it was nicer to crack a white skull than another skull. That's not the point.

STEPHEN SMITH: Bill Wassmuth is director of a Seattle-based group called the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment.

BILL WASSMUTH: Cracking somebody's skull is a serious crime and should be treated as such. When that crime is committed for bigoted reasons with a bigoted motivation, then you have an additional crime because not only is that person's skull cracked, but a whole group of people are also intimidated by that action and are terrified by that action.

STEPHEN SMITH: As the economic boom appears to end and the US economy skids into recession, competition for jobs and social programs could dislodge even more violent expressions of hatred like hornets shaken from a tree. The commissioner of human rights in Minnesota, Stephen Cooper argues that hate crime laws will send a vital message to young people growing up in such a climate.

STEPHEN COOPER: Remember, every major civil rights leader was dead before any of the people that are in high school or below today were born. And that's an important thing. We've also had a 10-year message or more coming out of the national government, I believe, that's been saying, hey, don't worry about these things. It's not important. We really don't have racism anymore. We really don't have religiousism anymore. Just don't worry about it. Go on and be comfortable with your prejudice.

STEPHEN SMITH: Cooper encourages people to see the hatred already crackling beneath the surface of society. One barometer, he says, is popular culture like comedy by Andrew Dice Clay.

STEPHEN COOPER: And you think for a second, think how we sell things in America. Think of McDonald's. What does McDonald's say? It says food, fun, and friends or friends, food, and fun. Some order like that. They know if you associate something with friendship and fun, people buy it.

A racist joke associates racial hatred with fun and friends. When you tell jokes, you tell them to your friends. Are jokes something that's funny? Yeah. Do you enjoy jokes? Yeah. The funnier it is, the more successfully it sells the Levis, the more successfully it sells the automobiles, the more successfully it sells the racism.

STEPHEN SMITH: The woman who received hate mail year after year, Vivian Jenkins Nelson argues that one racial stereotype we should dispense with today is that bigots are easy to spot.

VIVIAN JENKINS NELSON: There is a deep and abiding strain of hatred that runs right through the core of the best of us. And it runs right through faith communities, it runs right through well-to-do suburban communities, and it no longer has a big pot belly and says, "Y'all."

STEPHEN SMITH: Laura Jones echoes the words of many experts on hate crime She says the only way to fight incidents like the cross burning on her lawn is to educate prejudiced people by meeting them face-to-face.

LAURA JONES: I mean, look at all they're missing out on. We're nice people. And I think anyone whether Black, white, yellow, red, if they're racist and if they're letting that prejudice turn them away from other people, they're just hurting. Hate never helped anybody.

STEPHEN SMITH: Sometimes, Ari Mann would like to beat the hatred out of whoever sprayed swastikas on his building. Sometimes though, Ari Mann just wants to sit down with that person and talk.

ARI MANN: I would invite them to have coffee with me with a cake, and I would ask him, what makes you so angry? Why are you doing things that even the Germans won't dare to do it today? Don't forget that you are living under the blue skies of freedom. Don't abuse it.

SPEAKER 4: Whom They Fear, They Hate was written and narrated by Stephen Smith and produced with Dan Olson, technical director John Scherf. The executive producer was George Bouzy. This program is a co-production of Minnesota Public Radio and Soundprint. It was made possible by a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation with additional funds from the McKnight Foundation.