It will be interesting to see if police in Austin, Texas, will be charging Rashaad Devon Ben with a hate crime.

The 23-year-old black man -- allegedly a serial road-rage offender -- has been identified as the motorist who terrorized a young white mother and her 4-year-old daughter in a high-profile road rage incident in east Austin -- a mainly working-class area with a large black population. A video of Ben going ballistic (and spewing racial slurs) has gone viral on social media. Yet curiously, only one Austin media outlet has been reporting on the incident. Other media outlets, on the other hand, have been providing hyperventilating coverage of a University of Texas fraternity that held an allegedly hateful "South of the Border" theme party trading in ethnic stereotypes.

If you want to see real hate, however, look at the YouTube video in which Ben stops his car in a bike lane, forcing the motorist behind him to a stop. That car's 39-year-old driver, Julie Nowlin, had been recording Ben's road rage antics with her cell phone, and Ben became enraged when he spotted her in his rear-view mirror. Bolting out of his car, Ben walks menacingly toward Nowlin. He spits on her windshield. Then he flips his two middle fingers at her and thrusts a clinched fist in the air. “Fu-k you! Black power. White bitch,” he snarls. Nowlin's frightened little girl lets out a cry.

KVUE, a local news channel affiliated with ABC, ran a segment about the incident revolving around the video and an interview with Nowlin.

Nowlin told KVUE that Ben was veering erratically on the road, intimidating motorists and trying to run them off the road. "[He was] crossing on the yellow stripe, driving in the bike lane, driving really close to them, intimidating them until they exited and left," she said

Nowlin said Ben pulled over and blocked her path three times in all.

After KVUE's first segment aired, several people came forward to say they had witnessed or been on the receiving end of Ben's road-rage antics. One of those witnesses included a KVUE employee. It will be interesting to learn whether most or all of Ben's road rage victims were white.

The story took an even stranger turn when Ben showed up at KVUE with his mom. Wearing a nice shirt and appearing the perfect gentleman, he apologized profoundly for what he'd done. Where was Ben's father?

Citing records from the Texas Department of Public Safety, the website Smoking Gun noted that Ben has eight criminal convictions, the first being for theft when he was 17. Since then, he has been convicted of possessing marijuana (twice); drunk driving; theft; resisting arrest; and driving with a suspended license (twice). Last January, he was arrested for possessing drug paraphernalia.

As to whether the police might bring hate-crime charges against Ben, the short answers is: it's doubtful. At least not if past history is anything to go by. Six years ago, after all, Austin's police said they saw no evidence of a hate crime when a brick was thrown through the window of a home in east Austin occupied by a white mother and her baby. Attached to the brick was a note: “Keep Eastside black. Keep Eastside strong.”

Perhaps Ben's road rage antics were a variation of that brick-throwing incident. But if that proves to be the case, don't expect local news outlets and Austin's police to do much more than yawn. Imagine the media frenzy, on the other hand, if Ben had been white and his victim black.

For a video clip of the Ben's apology, click here.