Date of Submission

Spring 2020

Academic Program

Global and International Studies

Project Advisor 1

Christopher McIntosh

Abstract/Artist's Statement

This paper aims to answer the question of what took place, in regard to presidential responses and hate crimes, following the September 11th attacks that had not occurred following previous terrorist attacks. This is done in order to find a deeper explanation for the wave of hate crimes that took place in the aftermath of 9/11. By examining the presidential responses to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the Olympic Park bombing in 1996, and the US embassy bombings in 1998, and comparing them to the response of the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, it is found that the difference between the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 responses was the use of stochastic violence. The volume of attention that was paid to the attacks and the issue of terrorism by the US government, as well as the amount of exposure that the American public had to the event and the issues surrounding it, resulted in an unprecedented amount of hate crimes committed towards Muslims and individuals of Middle Eastern descent. This paper utilizes the idea of stochastic violence to link presidential rhetoric to the committing of hate crimes in order to highlight the power and importance of presidential rhetoric. By doing so, it attempts to shine a light on the issue of hate crimes towards Muslims and Middle Eastern individuals in order to demonstrate that it is a highly prevalent issue which remains today and one that continues to define post-9/11 America.

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Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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