Jussie Smollett's fake attack wasn't an uncommon ploy

Jussie Smollett's fake attack wasn't an uncommon ploy:

• In writing a book about hate crime hoaxes, I found more than 400. Such frauds damage good race relations.

"The hate attack on Empire star Jussie Smollett is now alleged to be a hoax. 
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Smollett’s story was bizarre, bordering on the absurd. 

...The questions here are obvious. 
How many Trump supporters even exist in the downtown of a city that went 83% for Hillary Clinton — and how many of them watch "Empire?" 
How many guys looking for a fight carry rope and bottles of bleach around with them? 

A great many hate crime stories turn out to be hoaxes. 
...Simply looking at what happened to the most widely reported hate crime stories over the past 4-5 years illustrates this: not only the Smollett case but also the Yasmin Seweid, Air Force Academy, Eastern Michigan, Wisconsin-Parkside, Kean College, Covington Catholic, and “Hopewell Baptist burning” racial scandals all turned out to be fakes. 
And, these cases are not isolated outliers.

Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. 
An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. 

...There is very little brutally violent racism in the modern USA..."
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