Post-election racial hate incidents spike

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- White supremacist activity and racial incidents have skyrocketed since U.S. President-elect Barack Obama won the Nov. 4 election, experts say.

More than 200 incidents of racial hate crimes have been recorded around the country since the election of the United States' first black president, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday.

"We've seen everything from cross burnings on lawns of interracial couples to effigies of Obama hanging from nooses to unpleasant exchanges in schoolyards," Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center told the Times. "I think we're in a worrying situation right now, a perfect storm of conditions coming together that could easily favor the continued growth of these groups."

The Ku Klux Klan has re-emerged in two episodes -- one in Louisiana where a Klan leader has been charged with slaying a would-be recruit and in Kentucky, where two men were charged in a plot to assassinate Obama and kill 88 black students.

"The rhetoric right now is just about out of control," Brian Levin, director of Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, told the newspaper. "When you get this depth of hatred, it usually is the smoke before the fire."