re: White Kroger employee beaten by black mob determined not to be a hate crime.

Honestly, I'm not sure. As far as I've read there haven't even been any allegations, much less evidence, that this is a hate crime other than the race of the victims. And by this I mean there have been no allegations that the mob was shouting to attack a particular victim because of their race or any other overt actions like that.

We know that the first victim the mob seemed to have targeted was a white guy. What we don't know is if they skipped over anybody else on their way to him. Did they pass up attacking a potential black victim looking for white victims only? Did they attack this guy because he stopped to film them, thinking they were an innocent flash mob? We don't know why he was "picked."

All we do know is that it was a group largely (possibly exclusively) composed of blacks, who attacked and injured three people, at least one of whom was also black. Based upon this fact, I don't think there is any way to conclusively say that the attacks had racial elements.

It's certainly possible that the initial attack did contain racial elements, and I'm not ruling out revisiting the possibility that this was a "hate crime." However, based upon what we know right now, I don't see it.