Reconsidering Hate

Since the 1980s, there has been a robust, sometimes fiery debate in social justice arenas over the desirability, efficacy, and possible consequences of “hate speech” law as a response to violent and dehumanizing rhetoric. An increasing number of colleges and universities have adopted policies prohibiting certain forms of speech, with the stated intention of protecting pluralism and ensuring equal educational opportunities.⁵

Prominent advocacy organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)⁶, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)⁷, and Center for New Community,⁸ regularly monitor and report on “hate” and “extremist” groups (defined according to their own criteria). “Stop Hate” initiatives abound.⁹ SPLC offers an array of “teaching tolerance,” diversity awareness, and prejudice reduction educational resources for both teachers and students. Not in Our Town is a national organization that highlights community initiatives to resist, respond to, and prevent hate violence.¹⁰

The Gonzaga University Institute for Hate Studies, created to help advance an interdisciplinary field of Hate Studies and disseminate new theories, models, and discoveries about hate, began publishing the Journal of Hate Studies in 2001.¹¹

These are significant achievements, and represent a major investment by social justice advocates, However, I believe the hate frame has had unintended, harmful consequences that social justice activists and scholars need to re-evaluate. Does calling something a hate crime or hate speech clarify or distort the nature of our struggles?

Beyond “Bad Attitudes”

No one familiar with the history of lynching and other means of enforcing racial segregation and asserting White supremacy in the United States could reasonably argue that such actions are not motivated by racial hatreds—or that hate doesn’t motivate anti-immigrant vigilantes who take it into their hands to “patrol” the U.S. Mexico border. Similarly, one could not plausibly assert that vile, anti-LGBT sentiments expressed in queer bashings and anti-gay political campaigns aren’t hateful. Hate is very much as the center of bombing and burning of Black churches, synagogues, and mosques. Hate is certainly involved when women’s health care centers are torched and abortion providers murdered.

But beyond a sense that we know hate when we feel it, we don’t know a great deal about hate itself. Is hate an emotion? A belief? A behavior? A process? An outcome? Is it innate? Learned? A mental disorder? Is it an individual phenomenon? Is it still considered “hate” when it appears in systemic form, preserved in routine actions of public and private institutions? What is its relationship to hierarchies of power, if any? Is it intrinsically violent? Is it a fixed part of human nature? Can it be corrected or healed?

Ken Stern, specialist on antisemitism and extremism for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), suggests that one working definition of hate might be “the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’ and the processes which inform and give expression to …that capacity.”¹² At first glance, that seems clear and useful. But the waters muddy when we try to utilize a single frame—hate—for interpreting and responding to the actions of the following actors: individuals motivated by obvious bigotry; independent groups and networks pushing openly oppressive agendas; and the histories and systemic operation of respectable public and private institutions and entire nation-states.

The liberal version of the hate frame asserts that people who engage in bullying, threat, intimidation, and violence stand outside the circle of normalcy and mainstream standards of civic morality. “Haters” are identified as “extremists” acting outside social norms.

However, these kinds of hatreds aren’t merely about personal prejudice or “bad attitudes.” Sociologist Kathleen Blee is one among a number of social scientists and legal scholars writing about hate who recognizes that violent acts motivated by bias or hatreds “can reflect broader social institutions and cultural norms.”¹³

Racist and gendered violence is supremacist in nature, touting the alleged superiority of Whites over people of color; heterosexuals over queers; men over women; and a certain variety of Christianity over other denominations and faiths. Such hatreds, openly expressed and used as a focal point for organizing, intend to retain and reinforce traditional (and unjust) hierarchies of racial, gender, and economic power. As former PRA political analyst Chip Berlet notes in the Journal of Hate Studies, “Organized supremacist groups utilize and amplify the same elements of prejudice, supremacy, demonization, and scapegoating that already exist in mainstream society. [Their] ideologies, styles, frames, and narratives…are drawn from pre-existing systems of oppression buried in mainstream society.”¹⁴

Safety or Distraction?

At the time President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law in October 2009,¹⁵ many activists believed that with the passage of federal and state hate crime laws, law enforcement (historically a persecutor of people of color, queers, and other targeted groups) would at last protect those marginalized communities. Hate crime laws, major advocacy organizations said, would help deter and prevent hate violence. They would make our communities safer.

Unfortunately, no such message was sent or received. Violence against people of color, queers, and other vulnerable groups remains widespread. In fact, some communities are now more likely to experience harassment and abuse.¹⁶ Racial, gender, and sexual profiling permanently classify people from targeted communities as “suspicious” and “dangerous others.”

Glimpses and discussion of criminalizing processes at the intersections of race, class, gender, and immigration status are found in Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, which documents these overarching problems:

The neutral wording of hate crime and related laws is “power-evasive.” When selectively enforced, these laws can morph into instruments of injustice. For example, a South Carolina anti-lynching statute intended to protect African Americans against White mob violence has transformed into a legal tool used disproportionately against young Black men–simple enough, given the law’s race-neutral definition of “mob” as “the assemblage of two or more persons, without color or authority of law, for the premeditated purpose and with the premeditated intent of committing an act of violence upon the person of another.”¹⁸

Police often treat many LGBT and HIV-affected people who attempt to report hate violence as offenders rather than as people who have suffered violence. Such “re-victimization” is especially likely if the person reporting is a person of color, transgender or gender nonconforming, poor, presumed to be a sex worker, or an immigrant. Additionally, many who are targets of hate crimes do not wish to report incidents to the police out of fear. These can include fear of not being believed, fear of additional abuse at the hands of police, fear of being reported to immigration authorities, fear of unwanted and negative publicity, and fear of reprisals.

According to NCAVP, police officers consistently constitute a major hate violence offender group; Amnesty International has documented widespread, systemic police misconduct and abuse—particularly against queers of color. Police in some jurisdictions have refused to take hate crime reports, and some reports may not be accurately classified as hate crimes under legal criteria.

Most discussions of hate violence in the United States cite annual reports from the FBI. However, as recently as 2005, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) recognized that the actual incidence of hate violence was vastly understated by the FBI. The FBI’s reports suffer from these shortcomings:

Making the Change We Need

If hate is a social problem, and not just a matter of individual psychology, then intensified policing and enhanced punishments cannot create safe and just communities.

Does that mean every concept in hate crime law is worthless? Not at all. Most of us would probably all agree, for instance, that documentation, reporting, and analysis of violence directed against targeted groups are essential. We should not stop being concerned about White supremacist, neo-Nazi, and other groups that are rooted in fear, intimidation, and violence. There is a strong argument for, and tradition of, identifying, monitoring, and exposing virulently bigoted groups and individuals in order to interrupt their actions and minimize their influence on the larger culture and mechanisms of the state. Political Research Associates, SPLC, Center for New Community, Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, and other organizations have been doing this for many years.

SPLC suggests that the most recent expansion of “right-wing extremism came even as politicians around the country, blown by gusts from the Tea Parties and other conservative formations, tacked hard to the right, co-opting many of the issues important to extremists.”²⁰ Yet it is often difficult to distinguish between the messages of “hate” groups and the actions of leaders in public and private institutions.

We should also ask how federal hate crime commitments to respond to violence against “protected” groups square with other federal programs, such as “Secure Communities” (S-Comm) which automatically compares fingerprints submitted by local law enforcement agencies against Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) databases—a program slated to be mandatory nation-wide by 2013. Marketed as a program to locate and deport criminal immigrants, in practice, S-Comm is deployed against immigrants regardless of criminal background.²¹

But we also need resist the easy demonizing of “criminals” and challenge our overreliance on the legal system to produce community safety. After all, processes of criminalization, selective law enforcement, and mass incarceration are structural ways of devaluing and destroying the lives of people of color, poor people, immigrants, and queers.

How do liberal and progressive groups and leaders go beyond our now well-established pattern of responding to one egregious act of hate violence or police brutality after another with little more than outraged demands for more policing, prosecution, and punishment? Even when these demands are fulfilled in individual cases, the structures of violence and injustice remain intact. As Ejeris Dixon, former coordinator of the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Collective once observed, “It’s easier to talk about hate than power.”²²

We must turn to community-based strategies that seek to address structures of violence as well as individual acts. To that end, we might better focus our efforts on increasing the capacity of (underfunded and overstressed) community-based anti-violence organizations and coalitions committed to collecting, analyzing, and reporting anti-violence data that includes law enforcement as an offender category.

A growing number of “movement building” initiatives have emerged to help equip social justice advocacy groups with the additional knowledge, tools, and resources essential to expanding their capacity to organize for lasting change, and intersectional organizing is taking root in new ways. For instance, the federal government’s S-Comm program has been met with growing opposition from surprising allies. Law enforcement officials, state and local governments, and dozens of LGBT organizations have joined to protest programs and laws that restrict and criminalize immigrants.²³And while Critical Resistance, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, families of prisoners, former prisoners, and others have long educated about and organized to oppose the prison industrial complex, resistance to mass incarceration is now expanding rapidly to include new networks of civil rights groups, students, faith communities, and others.²⁴ They are finding new ways to address violence in their communities without overreliance on the criminal legal system.

It’s time to build on the best of our histories, deepen and expand our vision, take in some fresh air, and redouble our efforts to create, in the words of Angela Y. Davis, “new terrains of justice.”²⁵

Read a response from Rinku Sen, Applied Research Center (ARC) executive director.

Read a response from Pat Clark, former director of Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch program.

Read a response from Rahsaan D. Hall, Deputy Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice.