ABSTRACT
In 1990, then president George Bush signed into law the federal Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA), which mandated that the attorney gen-eral’s office collect data on hate crime motivated by the victim’s race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. This measure amounted to the public admission that this was not the “kinder, gentler nation” the president declared he sought. In fact, Bush signed the bill in the midst of an apparent upsurge of ethnoviolence.
