A white backlash against decades of civil-rights gains for minorities is gaining force on the ground, and the chief engine has been the increasingly extreme-right bent of the conservative movement.

Recently the New York Times carried a report on the "noose incidents"http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25potok.html that have been occurring with rising frequency around the country, inspired seemingly by the protests over the "Jena 6"http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/jena_update case.

The report came complete with a graphic http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/11/25/opinion/25opchart.htmlshowing where the incidents have occurred. Remarkably, it isn't just happening in the South: the incidents are also being reported in places like Minneapolis; Cicero, Ill.; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia; Newark; Baltimore; and New London, Conn.

Equally striking was the analysis from Mark Potok, the SPLC's Intelligence Project director, who wrote:

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.

And the number of hate groups, according to the annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has shot up 40 percent in recent years, from 602 groups in 2000 to 844 in 2006.

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/white_backlash_and_right?tx=3