How Many 'Black Bitches' Does a Woman Have to Be Called While Being Stabbed for It to Be a Hate Crime?

A black woman was brutally attacked by a white man on a Brooklyn subway platform Friday night, and he reportedly called her a “black bitch” over and over again as he did it. So why is it that both the police and larger legacy media outlets are hesitant to label the crime as what it is—a racist hate crime?

Family members told the local NBC News station in New York that 57-year-old Ann Marie Washington, a Trinidad native and mother of two, was on her way home from work when she exited the the subway at the Church Avenue stop.

The unidentified white male reportedly attacked her as she exited the train, punching her repeatedly in the face and stabbing her, calling her a “black bitch” as he did so. The man then fled on another train.

The victim did not even realize she had been stabbed until she got home. She was hospitalized Sunday and had surgery for a collapsed lung.

Washington described her attacker as a white male in his early 30s, about 5-feet, 3-inches tall, and wearing grey and black sweatpants and a black hooded sweatshirt.

And while the brutal and senseless attack is horrible enough, what makes it even more egregious is the fact that NYPD did not initially consider it a hate attack—despite the witness descriptions and video of what the man said as he attacked Washington.

Imani Henry of Equality for Flatbush said at a news conference Sunday “If this was a white resident, a new gentrifier to this neighborhood, there would be swarms of cops here, but when it is a black person who is attacked by a white racist, there isn’t anything.”

NYPD has since said its hate crimes task force would look into the attack. The department told NBC it did not have all the details about the crime at the time it was reported.

But even larger media reporting on the incident has referred to the attacker’s comments as “racially charged” rather than calling them out for what they were—plain old racism.

This was obviously a racially motivated attack, and to treat it as anything other than that does a disservice to Washington and black people as a whole. Every time a black person suffers something like this, the media scrambles for softer euphemisms to use to describe it. Enough of that bullshit.

How many “black bitches” does a woman have to be called while being stabbed for it to be a hate crime?

I’ll wait.