If you’ve been keeping track of the news like I have, you’ve learned that Austin Wright Greenwood, 18, of Oregon City will be charged with multiple felonies for his role in the attack on two Latino men in Mulino’s Wagon Wheel Park on May 24, but he will not be charged with any hate crimes.

This is wrong.

You can’t convince me that race did not play a part in this attack.

I’m aware of two reasons that county officials have given to explain why Greenwood was not charged with hate crimes. First that, although some members of the crowd allegedly shouted racial slurs like, “Go back to Mexico,” the police are having trouble figuring out who specifically made the comments. This, they say, makes it difficult to prosecute it as a race-based crime.

Second, both of the victims themselves are saying they think the crime wasn’t racially motivated. They think it’s because they were hanging out with a couple of girls and that made the group of attackers angry.

According to the sheriff’s report, the two Latino men stopped at the park to drink beer after work. They started talking to two young women who were at the park with the young white men. They drove with the women to buy more beer and when they got back, the group of white guys attacked them.

I may not be the smartest guy in the class, but you’re still going to have some trouble convincing me that the same thing would have happened if the two Latino guys were just a couple of white guys.

Race mattered in this crime. Let’s all be honest about this. It’s easy to have a “this can’t be happening in my back yard” attitude, but if you start looking around, you’ll see that this kind of thing is happening more frequently all over our nation and the world.

Here in the U.S., our FBI says hate crimes against Latinos grew by 23 percent between 2003 and 2005.

Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have conducted studies that show hate crimes committed against Latinos in the United States are increasing.

Something is going on and I think I began to lay it out pretty clearly in last week’s column. It’s about fear, ignorance and misinformation. Part of it is about some of the media, especially talk radio, and some in the government convincing people that immigrants are to blame for the economic woes we are experiencing.

Here’s a large part of the problem recently. Lawmakers in Washington D.C. have been arguing over a controversial immigration bill that would tighten U.S. borders while giving up to 12 million illegal immigrants a chance at legal status. People are watching this debate and it’s having an effect on how they are treating each other.

Last Thursday the bill stalled out in the U.S. Senate when it failed to get enough votes to keep being discussed. In short, Democrats seemed to want the bill to move forward and Republicans didn’t while the White House supported it. And so the issue isn’t any closer to a resolution and the overall debate continues. At what cost?

It’s more than a bit odd that during the ongoing heated debate in Washington, D.C. and more recently the arguments over that controversial immigration bill, attacks on minorities have occurred all over the country — not just in our backyard of Mulino.

• At an Ohio University library a white male yelled, “Go back to Africa,” among other racial slurs and threatened to hit two black female students on May 31. He was upset that they were playing a video too loud and that’s how he asked them to turn it down.

• Last fall, two college students beat two men in New York just because they were Asian. The pair was sentenced for the hate crime last month.

• Recently in Mississippi someone was going around and scribbling anti-black racial slurs on mailboxes in front of African-American homes.

• A 20-year-old man stabbed three people, two of which were black, after shouting racial slurs at them last Tuesday in a small town in Pennsylvania.

• A 35-year old man who harassed and attacked a Seattle business owner was sentenced to nine months in jail last month because he called the middle-eastern shop owner a “terrorist” while spouting other racist obscenities in February.

There were many others, but my editor limits the length of my columns.

And to make matters a bit worse, racially-motivated crimes seem to be occurring more often all over the globe, not just in the U.S.

According to a recent report released by the American advocacy group Human Rights First, anti-Semitism and hate crimes rose last year in several places throughout Europe.

Here I am being naïve again, but my mom used to always say, if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you? Can’t we Americans just take that advice and not follow the rest of the world as they jump off this bridge?

I know, I know I’m being silly again, but I always figured Americans had more class.