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Jackson, Mississippi, saw the long-awaited end to one particularly notorious case, as the last of 10 white defendants pleaded guilty to his part in the random assaults of several black men, as well as one murder, in a series of racially motivated hate crimes in 2011. Meanwhile, authorities in Colorado Springs, Colorado, began an investigation into the bombing of the NAACP local office there. No one was hurt in that explosion, and motives and suspects are still elusive, but the FBI is exploring the possibility that it, too, was a racially motivated “bias attack,” or hate crime.

According to the FBI’s most recent annual hate crime statistics released last month, about half were motivated by racial bias. Racial-bias crimes far outnumbered crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, disability status, gender, or gender identity.

Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, the group that fought a civil case for the victims in Jackson, Mississippi, says that that proportion has not changed much over the years. The bulk of hate crimes, as they are recorded by the FBI, have been related to race. (According to those latest figures, about half of the offenders were white, about a quarter were black, and the rest were of other races or of unknown race.)

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For instance, for many years Mississippi and Alabama reported zero hate crimes, which the SPLC knew for a fact was wrong. Last year, New Jersey didn’t get its numbers in on time, so none of its crimes were included. And so on. “We’ve known this for a long time,” Potok says. “There’s a lot more happening out there than the statistics are capturing.”