Book Review of Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative

In this paper I argue that to understand and reduce violence we must study the productive moments of power, particularly the discourses that (re)produce ideas and practices of violence. I focus here on questions of labeling a violent act a "hate crime " and how identity-based activist work for hate crime legislation shapes conceptions about what it means to be a member of that identity group. I present data on anti-violence activism done by and for transgender people in the United States between 1990 and 2005. I detail how, following a precedent set by past identity groups, these activists framed violence against transgenderists as caused by hate and fought for inclusion of "gender identity " in hate crime legislation. I argue that, while this style of activism promoted recognition of transgender people as valuable humans and marked the violence they experienced as unjust, it also constructed the group as universally hated and at constant risk for horrific violence. Thus, although scholars have focused on the positive consequences of hate crime legislation, I find that the struggle for such laws can have negative symbolic consequences for identity groups, mainly the construction of a vulnerable subjecthood. I conclude with a suggestion for an alternative tactic for both constructing subjecthood and doing anti-violence activism.

Theoretical Criminology, 2002

Jacobs and Potter's work is a unique entry into the debate on hate crime. It injects a much needed note of scepticism into the ongoing march toward what characterize as homogenization, elaboration and domain expansion in hate crime policies. We have come a long way in just two decades in terms of the extent to which hate crime has become entrenched as a legal construct. Jacobs and Potter are right to encourage us to be a little more reflective before forging ahead any further. In this sense, I welcome their intervention and especially their caveats about the nature and potential consequences of hate crime legislation. Scholars, activists, policymakers and practitioners should explicitly consider each of the questions that Jacobs and Potter raise. However, they should seek their own answers to these questions rather than rely on the nay-saying approach favoured in Hate Crime: Criminal Law and Identity Politics. This work raises a number of serious reservations about the utility and potential impact of hate crime as a legal concept. I would identify the most salient as follows: the complexity of defining prejudice and establishing motive; the complexity of deciding what classes of conduct and victim to include; the illegitimate construction of a hate crime 'epidemic' that underlies the creation of hate crime legislation; that hate crime invokes identity politics; the futility, and potential unconstitutionality, of punishing 'hate'; the difficulty of enforcing hate crime legislation; and that hate crime legislation balkanizes society. While I take issue with most of the arguments the authors develop, space does not permit a review of each of these concerns. Instead, I opt to respond to two interconnected themes: the embeddedness of 'identity politics' in the construction of hate crime; and the contention that hate crime legislation is divisive. I refer to these as interconnected because Jacobs and Potter's analysis suggests that it is the illegitimate insertion of Theoretical Criminology

Law and Critique, 2001

Any analysis of hate crime that attempts to separate speech from action, language from violence, faces epistemological difficulties that limit the range of conversations about laws responding to identity-based injury in the United States. Active debates have raged over the implications of bias crime sentence enhancement laws for the protection of ‘freespeech’, thus addressing the inextricability of language and meaning from hate crime. Those in favor of legal responses to identity-based injury tend toward essentialist claims which assume the stability of identity and of meanings inherent in words or actions. Those opposed assert the impossibility of codifying the meaning of words or actions in the law, and/or they worry about the reification of (victimized) identities accompanying bias crime statutes. This article argues that the focus on language and speech in these debates simultaneously enables an evasion of discussion about the law's response to bias-related violence, and misleadingly assumes too much stability in the functions of law and the nature of state power. Interviews conducted by the author with individuals involved in a 1992 racist hate crime are used to show the diverse elements of state power suffusing the incident and its aftermath. An analysis of the crime's investigation and prosecution under a Maryland hate crime statute suggests that law enforcement officers are primarily using hate crime laws as public relations tools in a fight against community perceptions that they are themselves bigots.

Sociology Compass, 2011

The process to create hate crime laws in the United States has wrestled with the core issues of freedom of speech and greater harm. This article looks at the evolution of bias crime laws, culminating with President Obama's signing of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009. The constitutionality of the laws is 'discussed and suggestions for sociological research are made. Four elements of hate crime laws are discussed; criminality, intent, perception, and protected statuses. The logic of hate crime laws is based on the argument that hate crimes are a form of terrorism, designed to intimidate large groups of people. Readers should be familiar with the basic case for the existence of such laws.

In recent decades, activists and researchers have described harassment and violence targeted against minority groups as “hate crime”. They have also petitioned police, courts and state agencies to react against this form of crime. Nevertheless, the term remains conceptually awkward and is highly contested in debates about what incidents and victim groups it ought refer to, and what new laws and measures reconcile liberal freedom with minority protection.

Criminal law has served as both an archive and a template for early sociologists to understand how societies wished to perceive themselves. For Weber, Marx, and Durkheim, criminal codes were a window to understand the way society defined the boundaries of the normative, and indicated the range of acceptable behavior and with it the communities that shared the realm of “civility”. Therefore, criminal law has been a natural sight for boundary work, for shaping and reshaping the boundaries of political membership (Lamont 2009).1 ... Though much less studied, Criminal law has also been a site for modern state building, as new regimes asserted their authority and performed their political power through the spectacle of criminal law while maintaining, as Durkheim (1933)2 pointed out, the unlawful underbelly...

BCL Rev., 1998

Nationalities Papers

Using Hungary as a case study and focusing on legislative policies and the practical application of hate crime legislation, this article shows the various ways legal policy can become misguided in the labyrinth of identity politics, minority protection, and penal populism. The first mistake states can make, the author argues, is not to adopt hate crime legislation. The second error arguably pertains to conceptualizing hate crimes as an identity protection but not a minority-protection mechanism and instrument. The third fallacy the author identifies concerns legislative and practical policies that conceptualize victims based on self-identification and not on the perpetrator’s (or the wider community’s) potential perception and classification. The fourth flaw concerns the abuse of the concept of hate crime when it is applied in interethnic conflicts wherein members of minority communities are perpetrators and the victims are members of the majority communities. The fifth is instituti...

2021

As I prepared a lecture to be delivered at Texas A&M called "The Body Remembers: The Cost of Institutional Racism," I was reminded of Sara Ahmed's warning: "The creation of diversity as a political solution can participate in making those who speak about racism the cause of the problem." 1 I am taken back to a time when my entire being felt like it would shut down resulting from being made a problem. A problem and a shutdown caused by speaking up against institutional failures to protect the very bodies the institution had hired (and benefitted from) to be abused. To be made a problem, I realized, stemmed from what I want to call a "racist algebra of abjection"-targeting those whose views threaten the status quo of upholding white supremacist structures. And it all started in a small town in East Texas right after September 11, 2001, a month after the Twin Towers crumbled.