Questions left responses to hate crimes
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
I HAD ALWAYS been sympathetic toward the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center. As a Jew whose father's family had been murdered during the Holocaust, and as...
...He describes it as "mercifully rare" in the United States, writing it off as the province of sociopaths and psychopaths with no "widespread" influence...
...In the course of this activity I learned that the issues of hate, hate groups, and hate crimes are very real, that they are capable of shocking and galvanizing a community, and that they are inextricably related to the "bigger" issues that we on the left typically and rightfully address— issues like racism, class inequality and resentment, media violence, and the accessibility of dangerous weapons...
...We ran ads in the local newspaper condemning the expressions of hate...
...Before long an ad hoc community group called Bloomington United was formed...
...Like any social movement, Bloomington United is a diverse group...
...One of those killed was a Korean graduate student at Indiana University, WonJoon Yoon, who was shot while standing outside Bloomington's only Korean church...
...There is a politics behind this legal discourse about hate crimes...
...It has grappled with some thorny issues related to the representation of specific groups—Asians and Asian DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 9 COMMENTS & OPINIONS Americans, African Americans, Jewish Americans, and especially gays—and it has thus far navigated these successfully...
...The mayor spoke...
...It includes leaders of the gay community and religious people whose churches are uncomfortable with homosexuality...
...I HAD ALWAYS been sympathetic toward the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center...
...This is borne out by the ADL's report Poisoning the Web, and by the literature of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for New Community, to name but a few of the many national organizations and community groups that monitor the activities of hate groups...
...No Hate Crimes...
...Sullivan's argument is powerful, but only because he insists on interpreting "hate" the way much of the sentimental discourse he criticizes interprets it—in subjective, purely experiential terms, as a personal feeling or passion...
...The community responded with a "Gathering of Healing...
...As a participant, I have found it both publicly necessary and intellectually challenging to explain this politics and to respond to some of the unfair criticisms of it, often made by individuals who have stood on the sidelines...
...But it is a serious politics not reducible to these, and it uses the law as one strategy among others to address a very real and frightening social and political phenomenon: the organizations that use money, media, and weapons to aid and abet the murderous actions of people like Benjamin Smith...
...More than three thousand people attended, a standing-room-only crowd, with people of all ages, races, and religions spilling outside the hall...
...But it is simply not true that the targets of such legislation— hate crimes—are nebulous, subjective experiences...
...But it is also a very specific kind of politics, an ad hoc civic initiative that avoids strong ideological definition...
...Not in our Yards...
...We raised a few thousand dollars to produce cardboard signs that read "Bloomington United...
...Not Anywhere...
...Hate groups are a disturbingly palpable, objective phenomenon...
...IU's vicechancellor spoke, followed by the Hillel rabbi, and by Janet Reno...
...It was a moving event, and in its wake Bloomington United continues to function as a symbol of democratic civility and as a respected community group...
...and hate-crimes laws can only have pernicious effects...
...There is a politics here, and it is a politics of inclusivity and democratic civility that has the potential to radiate out onto other issues...
...No Hate Speech...
...We have not chosen to make an issue of hate...
...The principal targets of hatecrimes legislation are organized forms of hostility and the violence that these directly promote...
...His latest book is Democracy in Dark Times...
...Sullivan argues that the motivations behind hate are various and that the subjective experience of hate takes different forms and has different effects depending on who is acting it out...
...The advantage of well-written hate-crimes laws is that under certain circumstances they make these organizations the legitimate subjects of criminal law enforcement and that the elevated penalties they prescribe make it very costly for individuals to act on their hatred by doing violence to the property and/or persons of targeted minority groups...
...And then, on the weekend of July 4, 1999, the young man who had been distributing the neonazi literature—one Benjamin "August" Smith, a "representative" of the neo-nazi World Church of the Creator—went on a shooting spree that left two people dead and eleven others injured...
...As a Jew whose father's family had been murdered during the Holocaust, and as someone on "the left" for whom the civil rights movement was a decisive moment of contemporary politics, I could not help but support organizations that monitored and opposed so-called "hate groups" like the KKK and the Aryan Nation...
...It helped to organize study circles on race...
...The community outpouring of support was tremendous...
...Thousands of signs went up all over town...
...Still, the groups are real, and the subculture that generates them is equally real, and it ought not to be dismissed or written off as some psychopathological aberration...
...And the question of whether or not to be against them never struck me as interesting...
...It has confronted criticisms for being too "liberal," for preaching to the converted, and for failing to organize lower-class whites in the hinterlands of Southern Indiana...
...Responding to hate is by no means the only thing worth doing, but it is important to do it...
...My answer is simple...
...These hate groups do comprise only a small number of people, and I agree that they constitute "a deranged fringe of an American subculture...
...I was shocked, as were many of my friends and neighbors...
...I am sometimes asked why we in Bloomington United have been making such an issue of hate...
...Hate has chosen to come to Bloomington and it has made an issue of us...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political theory and directs the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Bloomington...
...Not in our Town...
...And it is borne out by what happened in Bloomington, and not only in Bloomington...
...But these issues never engaged me deeply...
...But efforts like Bloomington United draw their energy from their specificity, and it is sometimes important to make the connections but not make them too sharply...
...It has confronted criticisms from segments of the African-American campus community for worrying too much about hate groups and not enough about broader issues of racism...
...Many of these criticisms were echoed this fall in a piece published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Andrew Sullivan, "What's So Bad About Hate...
...There are legitimate civil liberties concerns about such laws, though serious organizations, most notably the ADL, have sought to address them in their model legislation...
...We organized a march, joined by more than a thousand people, from the campus of Indiana University to the town square, where for over an hour speakers including the mayor, an African-American minister representing the United Methodist Church, the rabbi of the only synagogue in town, and representatives of the gay community and the labor movement spoke out in favor of civility and equal respect...
...After a number of such incidents some of us felt the need to respond in a serious way to this leafleting, which was politically revolting but also threatening to many, especially Jews and people of color, who were singled out in inflammatory ways by the leaflets...
...If asked, I would answer "of course I oppose them," and then I would proceed to read about and talk about all the "bigger" questions—about capitalism, liberalism, democracy, civil society...
...The hate groups seemed utterly marginal in American life...
...But behind this admittedly sentimental way of thinking about hate lies a very real, historical and political phenomenon—the activities of hate groups, mainly, though not exclusively, right-wing organizations that systematically promote hostility toward racial, religious, and sexual minorities that talk about and plan "racial holy wars...
...Bloomington United brought together leaders from the Jewish community, the gay/lesbian/ transgendered community, the AfricanAmerican community, and a wide range of citizens...
...and that offer various forms of military and paramilitary inspiration and training to their members, supporters, and fellow travelers...
...Sullivan conveniently downplays this phenomenon...
...Bloomington United includes labor people and the president of the Bloomington Chamber of Commerce, who is one of the most important activists...
...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n I I...
...Sullivan is rightly suspicious of the legislation of niceness...
...Then, in July of 1998, I woke up one morning to discover that sections of the college town in which I live—Bloomington, Indiana—had been blanketed with vicious anti-Semitic and racist literature...
...If only we can make people feel nicer toward one another, we could eliminate hate...
...And it has sought to address these challenges and criticisms, making adjustments when necessary...
...That is its strength...
...It sought connections with the public schools...
...It is a politics fraught with the dangers of one-upmanship and competitive vulnerability...
...Indeed, one of my leftist friends in the university has gone so far as to describe Bloomington United as "the largest social movement" in the recent history of Bloomington...
...His conclusion: the IO n DISSENT / Winter 2000 preoccupation with hate is overstated and sentimental, there is really no intellectually respectable way to distinguish hate crimes from other crimes...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
