A recent report for the US-based international human rights organisation, Human Rights First, argued that the most pervasive and most threatening form of racist violence in Europe and North America ‘is also perhaps the most banal and unorganized: the low-level violence of the broken window, the excrement through the letter box, late night banging on doors, and the pushes, kicks and blows delivered to the passerby on the sidewalk’ (McClintock, 2005, p 5). While issue might be taken with the notion that any such incidents can be ‘low level’ (on this matter see also Chahal and Julienne, 1999, p 8), given the evidence of the emotional impacts of ‘hate crime’ discussed in Chapter One (and to be dealt with further in Chapter Four), victims’ experiences do show that such incidents are indeed pervasive and ordinary, and not unusual. By the same token, the experiences of victims also show us that in general ‘hate crime’ offenders are not an aberration, or politically motivated extremists confined to the margins of society. Instead, many are ‘ordinary’ people who offend in the unfolding contexts of their everyday lives. The ordinariness of offenders and offending is arguably a further key dimension in the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’ (in addition to the dimension of harm as proposed in Chapter One), when victims’ experiences are placed at the centre of understanding about ‘hate crime’. This line of argument is pursued in this chapter in the spirit of conceptualising ‘hate crime’ as a scholarly domain characterised by an analysis of the commonalities and differences between various forms of oppressive violence. In that spirit it unravels the situational dynamics of anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim and other racist incidents, incidents against people with a disability and homophobic incidents. It will be argued that understanding the situational foreground of incidents is not only important in its own right for understanding how and why incidents occur, but it also sheds light on the background structural contexts that inform the actions of offenders. And, most significantly, it illuminates the connections between background structure and the foreground of offender action in cases of ‘hate crime’, providing the missing link between the macro-societal ideological edifice and the micro-level actions of offenders.