What's So Bad About Hate
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I wonder what was going on in John William King's head two years ago when
he tied James Byrd Jr.'s feet to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him
three miles down a road in rural Texas. King and two friends had picked up
Byrd, who was black, when he was walking home, half-drunk, from a party. As
part of a bonding ritual in their fledgling white supremacist group, the
three men took Byrd to a remote part of town, beat him and chained his legs
together before attaching them to the truck. Pathologists at King's trial
testified that Byrd was probably alive and conscious until his body finally
hit a culvert and split in two. When King was offered a chance to say
something to Byrd's family at the trial, he smirked and uttered an
obscenity.
I.
What was that? And what was it when Buford Furrow Jr., longtime member of
the Aryan Nations, calmly walked up to a Filipino-American mailman he
happened to spot, asked him to mail a letter and then shot him at
point-blank range? Or when Russell Henderson beat Matthew Shepard, a young
gay man, to a pulp, removed his shoes and then, with the help of a friend,
tied him to a post, like a dead coyote, to warn off others?
For all our documentation of these crimes and others, our political and
moral disgust at them, our morbid fascination with them, our sensitivity to
their social meaning, we seem at times to have no better idea now than we
ever had of what exactly they were about. About what that moment means when,
for some reason or other, one human being asserts absolute, immutable
superiority over another. About not the violence, but what the violence
expresses. About what -- exactly -- hate is. And what our own part in it may
be.
I find myself wondering what hate actually is in part because we have
created an entirely new offense in American criminal law -- a ''hate crime''
-- to combat it. And barely a day goes by without someone somewhere
declaring war against it. Last month President Clinton called for an
expansion of hate-crime laws as ''what America needs in our battle against
hate.'' A couple of weeks later, Senator John McCain used a campaign speech
to denounce the ''hate'' he said poisoned the land. New York's Mayor,
Rudolph Giuliani, recently tried to stop the Million Youth March in Harlem
on the grounds that the event was organized by people ''involved in hate
marches and hate rhetoric.''
The media concurs in its emphasis. In 1985, there were 11 mentions of
''hate crimes'' in the national media database Nexis. By 1990, there were
more than a thousand. In the first six months of 1999, there were 7,000.
''Sexy fun is one thing,'' wrote a New York Times reporter about sexual
assaults in Woodstock '99's mosh pit. ''But this was an orgy of lewdness
tinged with hate.'' And when Benjamin Smith marked the Fourth of July this
year by targeting blacks, Asians and Jews for murder in Indiana and
Illinois, the story wasn't merely about a twisted young man who had emerged
on the scene. As The Times put it, ''Hate arrived in the neighborhoods of
Indiana University, in Bloomington, in the early-morning darkness.''
But what exactly was this thing that arrived in the early-morning
darkness? For all our zeal to attack hate, we still have a remarkably vague
idea of what it actually is. A single word, after all, tells us less, not
more. For all its emotional punch, ''hate'' is far less nuanced an idea than
prejudice, or bigotry, or bias, or anger, or even mere aversion to others.
Is it to stand in for all these varieties of human experience -- and
everything in between? If so, then the war against it will be so vast as to
be quixotic. Or is ''hate'' to stand for a very specific idea or belief, or
set of beliefs, with a very specific object or group of objects? Then waging
war against it is almost certainly unconstitutional. Perhaps these kinds of
questions are of no concern to those waging war on hate. Perhaps it is
enough for them that they share a sentiment that there is too much hate and
never enough vigilance in combating it. But sentiment is a poor basis for
law, and a dangerous tool in politics. It is better to leave some unwinnable
wars unfought. Hate is everywhere. Human beings generalize all the time, ahead of time,
about everyone and everything. A large part of it may even be hard-wired. At
some point in our evolution, being able to know beforehand who was friend or
foe was not merely a matter of philosophical reflection. It was a matter of
survival. And even today it seems impossible to feel a loyalty without also
feeling a disloyalty, a sense of belonging without an equal sense of
unbelonging. We're social beings. We associate. Therefore we disassociate.
And although it would be comforting to think that the one could happen
without the other, we know in reality that it doesn't. How many patriots are
there who have never felt a twinge of xenophobia?
Of course by hate, we mean something graver and darker than this kind of
lazy prejudice. But the closer you look at this distinction, the fuzzier it
gets. Much of the time, we harbor little or no malice toward people of other
backgrounds or places or ethnicities or ways of life. But then a car cuts
you off at an intersection and you find yourself noticing immediately that
the driver is a woman, or black, or old, or fat, or white, or male. Or you
are walking down a city street at night and hear footsteps quickening behind
you. You look around and see that it is a white woman and not a black man,
and you are instantly relieved. These impulses are so spontaneous they are
almost involuntary. But where did they come from? The mindless need to be
mad at someone -- anyone -- or the unconscious eruption of a darker
prejudice festering within?
In 1993, in San Jose, Calif., two neighbors -- one heterosexual, one
homosexual -- were engaged in a protracted squabble over grass clippings.
(The full case is recounted in ''Hate Crimes,'' by James B. Jacobs and
Kimberly Potter.) The gay man regularly mowed his lawn without a grass
catcher, which prompted his neighbor to complain on many occasions that
grass clippings spilled over onto his driveway. Tensions grew until one day,
the gay man mowed his front yard, spilling clippings onto his neighbor's
driveway, prompting the straight man to yell an obscene and common anti-gay
insult. The wrangling escalated. At one point, the gay man agreed to collect
the clippings from his neighbor's driveway but then later found them dumped
on his own porch. A fracas ensued with the gay man spraying the straight
man's son with a garden hose, and the son hitting and kicking the gay man
several times, yelling anti-gay slurs. The police were called, and the son
was eventually convicted of a hate-motivated assault, a felony. But what was
the nature of the hate: anti-gay bias, or suburban property-owner madness?
Or take the Labor Day parade last year in Broad Channel, a small island
in Jamaica Bay, Queens. Almost everyone there is white, and in recent years
a group of local volunteer firefighters has taken to decorating a pickup
truck for the parade in order to win the prize for ''funniest float.'' Their
themes have tended toward the outrageously provocative. Beginning in 1995,
they won prizes for floats depicting ''Hasidic Park,'' ''Gooks of Hazzard''
and ''Happy Gays.'' Last year, they called their float ''Black to the
Future, Broad Channel 2098.'' They imagined their community a century hence
as a largely black enclave, with every stereotype imaginable: watermelons,
basketballs and so on. At one point during the parade, one of them mimicked
the dragging death of James Byrd. It was caught on videotape, and before
long the entire community was depicted as a caldron of hate.
It's an interesting case, because the float was indisputably in bad taste
and the improvisation on the Byrd killing was grotesque. But was it hate?
The men on the float were local heroes for their volunteer work; they had no
record of bigoted activity, and were not members of any racist
organizations. In previous years, they had made fun of many other groups and
saw themselves more as provocateurs than bigots. When they were described as
racists, it came as a shock to them. They apologized for poor taste but
refused to confess to bigotry. ''The people involved aren't horrible
people,'' protested a local woman. ''Was it a racist act? I don't know. Are
they racists? I don't think so.''
If hate is a self-conscious activity, she has a point. The men were
primarily motivated by the desire to shock and to reflect what they thought
was their community's culture. Their display was not aimed at any particular
black people, or at any blacks who lived in Broad Channel -- almost none do.
But if hate is primarily an unconscious activity, then the matter is
obviously murkier. And by taking the horrific lynching of a black man as a
spontaneous object of humor, the men were clearly advocating indifference to
it. Was this an aberrant excess? Or the real truth about the men's feelings
toward African-Americans? Hate or tastelessness? And how on earth is anyone,
even perhaps the firefighters themselves, going to know for sure?
Or recall H.L. Mencken. He shared in the anti-Semitism of his time with
more alacrity than most and was an indefatigable racist. ''It is
impossible,'' he wrote in his diary, ''to talk anything resembling
discretion or judgment into a colored woman. They are all essentially
childlike, and even hard experience does not teach them anything.'' He wrote
at another time of the ''psychological stigmata'' of the ''Afro-American
race.'' But it is also true that, during much of his life, day to day,
Mencken conducted himself with no regard to race, and supported a politics
that was clearly integrationist. As the editor of his diary has pointed out,
Mencken published many black authors in his magazine, The Mercury, and
lobbied on their behalf with his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. The last thing
Mencken ever wrote was a diatribe against racial segregation in Baltimore's
public parks. He was good friends with leading black writers and
journalists, including James Weldon Johnson, Walter White and George S.
Schuyler, and played an underappreciated role in promoting the Harlem
Renaissance.
What would our modern view of hate do with Mencken? Probably ignore him,
or change the subject. But, with regard to hate, I know lots of people like
Mencken. He reminds me of conservative friends who oppose almost every
measure for homosexual equality yet genuinely delight in the company of
their gay friends. It would be easier for me to think of them as haters, and
on paper, perhaps, there is a good case that they are. But in real life, I
know they are not. Some of them clearly harbor no real malice toward me or
other homosexuals whatsoever.
They are as hard to figure out as those liberal friends who support every
gay rights measure they have ever heard of but do anything to avoid going
into a gay bar with me. I have to ask myself in the same, frustrating kind
of way: are they liberal bigots or bigoted liberals? Or are they neither
bigots nor liberals, but merely people? Hate used to be easier to understand. When Sartre described anti-Semitism
in his 1946 essay ''Anti-Semite and Jew,'' he meant a very specific array of
firmly held prejudices, with a history, an ideology and even a pseudoscience
to back them up. He meant a systematic attempt to demonize and eradicate an
entire race. If you go to the Web site of the World Church of the Creator,
the organization that inspired young Benjamin Smith to murder in Illinois
earlier this year, you will find a similarly bizarre, pseudorational
ideology. The kind of literature read by Buford Furrow before he rained
terror on a Jewish kindergarten last month and then killed a mailman because
of his color is full of the same paranoid loopiness. And when we talk about
hate, we often mean this kind of phenomenon.
But this brand of hatred is mercifully rare in the United States. These
professional maniacs are to hate what serial killers are to murder. They
should certainly not be ignored; but they represent what Harold Meyerson,
writing in Salon, called ''niche haters'': coldblooded, somewhat deranged,
often poorly socialized psychopaths. In a free society with relatively easy
access to guns, they will always pose a menace.
But their menace is a limited one, and their hatred is hardly typical of
anything very widespread. Take Buford Furrow. He famously issued a ''wake-up
call'' to ''kill Jews'' in Los Angeles, before he peppered a Jewish
community center with gunfire. He did this in a state with two Jewish female
Senators, in a city with a large, prosperous Jewish population, in a country
where out of several million Jewish Americans, a total of 66 were reported
by the F.B.I. as the targets of hate-crime assaults in 1997. However
despicable Furrow's actions were, it would require a very large stretch to
describe them as representative of anything but the deranged fringe of an
American subculture.
Most hate is more common and more complicated, with as many varieties as
there are varieties of love. Just as there is possessive love and needy
love; family love and friendship; romantic love and unrequited love; passion
and respect, affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings. There is
hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that
expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is revenge,
and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and
hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and
hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the
oppressor's hate, and the victim's hate. There is hate that burns slowly,
and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never
catches fire.
The modern words that we have created to describe the varieties of hate
-- sexism,'' ''racism,'' ''anti-Semitism, ''homophobia'' -- tell us very
little about any of this. They tell us merely the identities of the victims;
they don't reveal the identities of the perpetrators, or what they think, or
how they feel. They don't even tell us how the victims feel. And this
simplicity is no accident. Coming from the theories of Marxist and
post-Marxist academics, these ''isms'' are far better at alleging structures
of power than at delineating the workings of the individual heart or mind.
In fact, these ''isms'' can exist without mentioning individuals at all.
We speak of institutional racism, for example, as if an institution can
feel anything. We talk of ''hate'' as an impersonal noun, with no hater
specified. But when these abstractions are actually incarnated, when someone
feels something as a result of them, when a hater actually interacts with a
victim, the picture changes. We find that hates are often very different
phenomena one from another, that they have very different psychological
dynamics, that they might even be better understood by not seeing them as
varieties of the same thing at all.
There is, for example, the now unfashionable distinction between
reasonable hate and unreasonable hate. In recent years, we have become
accustomed to talking about hates as if they were all equally indefensible,
as if it could never be the case that some hates might be legitimate, even
necessary. But when some 800,000 Tutsis are murdered under the auspices of a
Hutu regime in Rwanda, and when a few thousand Hutus are killed in revenge,
the hates are not commensurate. Genocide is not an event like a hurricane,
in which damage is random and universal; it is a planned and often merciless
attack of one group upon another. The hate of the perpetrators is a
monstrosity. The hate of the victims, and their survivors, is justified.
What else, one wonders, were surviving Jews supposed to feel toward Germans
after the Holocaust? Or, to a different degree, South African blacks after
apartheid? If the victims overcome this hate, it is a supreme moral
achievement. But if they don't, the victims are not as culpable as the
perpetrators. So the hatred of Serbs for Kosovars today can never be equated
with the hatred of Kosovars for Serbs.
Hate, like much of human feeling, is not rational, but it usually has its
reasons. And it cannot be understood, let alone condemned, without knowing
them. Similarly, the hate that comes from knowledge is always different from
the hate that comes from ignorance. It is one of the most foolish cliches of
our time that prejudice is always rooted in ignorance, and can usually be
overcome by familiarity with the objects of our loathing. The racism of many
Southern whites under segregation was not appeased by familiarity with
Southern blacks; the virulent loathing of Tutsis by many Hutus was not
undermined by living next door to them for centuries. Theirs was a hatred
that sprang, for whatever reasons, from experience. It cannot easily be
compared with, for example, the resilience of anti-Semitism in Japan, or
hostility to immigration in areas where immigrants are unknown, or fear of
homosexuals by people who have never knowingly met one.
The same familiarity is an integral part of what has become known as
''sexism.'' Sexism isn't, properly speaking, a prejudice at all. Few men
live without knowledge or constant awareness of women. Every single sexist
man was born of a woman, and is likely to be sexually attracted to women.
His hostility is going to be very different than that of, say, a reclusive
member of the Aryan Nations toward Jews he has never met.
In her book ''The Anatomy of Prejudices,'' the psychotherapist Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl proposes a typology of three distinct kinds of hate: obsessive,
hysterical and narcissistic. It's not an exhaustive analysis, but it's a
beginning in any serious attempt to understand hate rather than merely
declaring war on it. The obsessives, for Young-Bruehl, are those, like the
Nazis or Hutus, who fantasize a threat from a minority, and obsessively try
to rid themselves of it. For them, the very existence of the hated group is
threatening. They often describe their loathing in almost physical terms:
they experience what Patrick Buchanan, in reference to homosexuals, once
described as a ''visceral recoil'' from the objects of their detestation.
They often describe those they hate as diseased or sick, in need of a cure.
Or they talk of ''cleansing'' them, as the Hutus talked of the Tutsis, or
call them ''cockroaches,'' as Yitzhak Shamir called the Palestinians. If you
read material from the Family Research Council, it is clear that the group
regards homosexuals as similar contaminants. A recent posting on its Web
site about syphilis among gay men was headlined, ''Unclean.''
Hysterical haters have a more complicated relationship with the objects
of their aversion. In Young-Bruehl's words, hysterical prejudice is a
prejudice that ''a person uses unconsciously to appoint a group to act out
in the world forbidden sexual and sexually aggressive desires that the
person has repressed.'' Certain kinds of racists fit this pattern. White
loathing of blacks is, for some people, at least partly about sexual and
physical envy. A certain kind of white racist sees in black America all
those impulses he wishes most to express himself but cannot. He idealizes in
''blackness'' a sexual freedom, a physical power, a Dionysian release that
he detests but also longs for. His fantasy may not have any basis in
reality, but it is powerful nonetheless. It is a form of love-hate, and it
is impossible to understand the nuances of racism in, say, the American
South, or in British Imperial India, without it.
Unlike the obsessives, the hysterical haters do not want to eradicate the
objects of their loathing; rather they want to keep them in some kind of
permanent and safe subjugation in order to indulge the attraction of their
repulsion. A recent study, for example, found that the men most likely to be
opposed to equal rights for homosexuals were those most likely to be aroused
by homoerotic imagery. This makes little rational sense, but it has a
certain psychological plausibility. If homosexuals were granted equality,
then the hysterical gay-hater might panic that his repressed passions would
run out of control, overwhelming him and the world he inhabits.
A narcissistic hate, according to Young-Bruehl's definition, is sexism.
In its most common form, it is rooted in many men's inability even to
imagine what it is to be a woman, a failing rarely challenged by men's
control of our most powerful public social institutions. Women are not so
much hated by most men as simply ignored in nonsexual contexts, or never
conceived of as true equals. The implicit condescension is mixed, in many
cases, with repressed and sublimated erotic desire. So the unawareness of
women is sometimes commingled with a deep longing or contempt for them.
Each hate, of course, is more complicated than this, and in any one
person hate can assume a uniquely configured combination of these types. So
there are hysterical sexists who hate women because they need them so much,
and narcissistic sexists who hardly notice that women exist, and sexists who
oscillate between one of these positions and another. And there are
gay-bashers who are threatened by masculine gay men and gay-haters who feel
repulsed by effeminate ones. The soldier who beat his fellow soldier Barry
Winchell to death with a baseball bat in July had earlier lost a fight to
him. It was the image of a macho gay man -- and the shame of being bested by
him -- that the vengeful soldier had to obliterate, even if he needed a gang
of accomplices and a weapon to do so. But the murderers of Matthew Shepard
seem to have had a different impulse: a visceral disgust at the thought of
any sexual contact with an effeminate homosexual. Their anger was mixed with
mockery, as the cruel spectacle at the side of the road suggested.
In the same way, the pathological anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany was
obsessive, inasmuch as it tried to cleanse the world of Jews; but also, as
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen shows in his book, ''Hitler's Willing Executioners,''
hysterical. The Germans were mysteriously compelled as well as repelled by
Jews, devising elaborate ways, like death camps and death marches, to keep
them alive even as they killed them. And the early Nazi phobia of
interracial sex suggests as well a lingering erotic quality to the
relationship, partaking of exactly the kind of sexual panic that persists
among some homosexual-haters and anti-miscegenation racists. So the concept
of ''homophobia,'' like that of ''sexism'' and ''racism,'' is often a crude
one. All three are essentially cookie-cutter formulas that try to understand
human impulses merely through the one-dimensional identity of the victims,
rather than through the thoughts and feelings of the haters and hated.
This is deliberate. The theorists behind these ''isms'' want to ascribe
all blame to one group in society -- the ''oppressors'' -- and render
specific others -- the ''victims'' -- completely blameless. And they want to
do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it
doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own
form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people
-- white straight males for example -- purely because of the color of their
skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly
ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does:
it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group
identity. And it postures morally over the result.
In reality, human beings and human acts are far more complex, which is
why these isms and the laws they have fomented are continually coming under
strain and challenge. Once again, hate wriggles free of its definers. It
knows no monolithic groups of haters and hated. Like a river, it has many
eddies, backwaters and rapids. So there are anti-Semites who actually admire
what they think of as Jewish power, and there are gay-haters who look up to
homosexuals and some who want to sleep with them. And there are black
racists, racist Jews, sexist women and anti-Semitic homosexuals. Of course
there are. Once you start thinking of these phenomena less as the ''isms'' of
sexism, racism and ''homophobia,'' once you think of them as independent
psychological responses, it's also possible to see how they can work in a
bewildering variety of ways in a bewildering number of people. To take one
obvious and sad oddity: people who are demeaned and objectified in society
may develop an aversion to their tormentors that is more hateful in its
expression than the prejudice they have been subjected to. The F.B.I.
statistics on hate crimes throws up an interesting point. In America in the
1990's, blacks were up to three times as likely as whites to commit a hate
crime, to express their hate by physically attacking their targets or their
property. Just as sexual abusers have often been victims of sexual abuse,
and wife-beaters often grew up in violent households, so hate criminals may
often be members of hated groups.
Even the Columbine murderers were in some sense victims of hate before
they were purveyors of it. Their classmates later admitted that Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris were regularly called ''faggots'' in the corridors
and classrooms of Columbine High and that nothing was done to prevent or
stop the harassment. This climate of hostility doesn't excuse the actions of
Klebold and Harris, but it does provide a more plausible context. If they
had been black, had routinely been called ''nigger'' in the school and had
then exploded into a shooting spree against white students, the response to
the matter might well have been different. But the hate would have been the
same. In other words, hate-victims are often hate-victimizers as well. This
doesn't mean that all hates are equivalent, or that some are not more
justified than others. It means merely that hate goes both ways; and if you
try to regulate it among some, you will find yourself forced to regulate it
among others.
It is no secret, for example, that some of the most vicious anti-Semites
in America are black, and that some of the most virulent anti-Catholic
bigots in America are gay. At what point, we are increasingly forced to ask,
do these phenomena become as indefensible as white racism or religious
toleration of anti-gay bigotry? That question becomes all the more difficult
when we notice that it is often minorities who commit some of the most
hate-filled offenses against what they see as their oppressors. It was the
mainly gay AIDS activist group Act Up that perpetrated the hateful act of
desecrating Communion hosts at a Mass at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York.
And here is the playwright Tony Kushner, who is gay, responding to the
Matthew Shepard beating in The Nation magazine: ''Pope John Paul II endorses
murder. He, too, knows the price of discrimination, having declared
anti-Semitism a sin. . . . He knows that discrimination kills. But when the
Pope heard the news about Matthew Shepard, he, too, worried about spin. And
so, on the subject of gay-bashing, the Pope and his cardinals and his
bishops and priests maintain their cynical political silence. . . . To
remain silent is to endorse murder.'' Kushner went on to describe the Pope
as a ''homicidal liar.''
Maybe the passion behind these words is justified. But it seems clear
enough to me that Kushner is expressing hate toward the institution of the
Catholic Church, and all those who perpetuate its doctrines. How else to
interpret the way in which he accuses the Pope of cynicism, lying and
murder? And how else either to understand the brutal parody of religious
vocations expressed by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of gay
men who dress in drag as nuns and engage in sexually explicit performances
in public? Or T-shirts with the words ''Recovering Catholic'' on them, hot
items among some gay and lesbian activists? The implication that someone's
religious faith is a mental illness is clearly an expression of contempt. If
that isn't covered under the definition of hate speech, what is?
Or take the following sentence: ''The act male homosexuals commit is ugly
and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink
and take drugs to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and
they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.'' The thoughts
of Pat Robertson or Patrick Buchanan? Actually that sentence was written by
Gertrude Stein, one of the century's most notable lesbians. Or take the
following, about how beating up ''black boys like that made us feel good
inside. . . . Every time I drove my foot into his [expletive], I felt
better.'' It was written to describe the brutal assault of an innocent
bystander for the sole reason of his race. By the end of the attack, the
victim had blood gushing from his mouth as his attackers stomped on his
genitals. Are we less appalled when we learn that the actual sentence was
how beating up ''white boys like that made us feel good inside. . . . Every
time I drove my foot into his [expletive], I felt better?'' It was written
by Nathan McCall, an African-American who later in life became a successful
journalist at The Washington Post and published his memoir of this ''hate
crime'' to much acclaim.
In fact, one of the stranger aspects of hate is that the prejudice
expressed by a group in power may often be milder in expression than the
prejudice felt by the marginalized. After all, if you already enjoy
privilege, you may not feel the anger that turns bias into hate. You may not
need to. For this reason, most white racism may be more influential in
society than most black racism -- but also more calmly expressed.
So may other forms of minority loathing -- especially hatred within
minorities. I'm sure that black conservatives like Clarence Thomas or Thomas
Sowell have experienced their fair share of white racism. But I wonder
whether it has ever reached the level of intensity of the hatred directed
toward them by other blacks? In several years of being an openly gay writer
and editor, I have experienced the gamut of responses to my sexual
orientation. But I have only directly experienced articulated, passionate
hate from other homosexuals. I have been accused over the years by other
homosexuals of being a sellout, a hypocrite, a traitor, a sexist, a racist,
a narcissist, a snob. I've been called selfish, callous, hateful,
self-hating and malevolent. At a reading, a group of lesbian activists
portrayed my face on a poster within the crossfires of a gun. Nothing from
the religious right has come close to such vehemence.
I am not complaining. No harm has ever come to me or my property, and
much of the criticism is rooted in the legitimate expression of political
differences. But the visceral tone and style of the gay criticism can only
be described as hateful. It is designed to wound personally, and it often
does. But its intensity comes in part, one senses, from the pain of being
excluded for so long, of anger long restrained bubbling up and directing
itself more aggressively toward an alleged traitor than an alleged enemy. It
is the hate of the hated. And it can be the most hateful hate of all. For
this reason, hate-crime laws may themselves be an oddly biased category --
biased against the victims of hate. Racism is everywhere, but the already
victimized might be more desperate, more willing to express it violently.
And so more prone to come under the suspicious eye of the law. And why is hate for a group worse than hate for a person? In Laramie,
Wyo., the now-famous epicenter of ''homophobia,'' where Matthew Shepard was
brutally beaten to death, vicious murders are not unknown. In the previous
12 months, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found east of the town with 17
stab wounds. Her 38-year-old boyfriend was apparently angry that she had
refused an abortion and left her in the Wyoming foothills to bleed to death.
In the summer of 1998, an 8-year-old Laramie girl was abducted, raped and
murdered by a pedophile, who disposed of her young body in a garbage dump.
Neither of these killings was deemed a hate crime, and neither would be
designated as such under any existing hate-crime law. Perhaps because of
this, one crime is an international legend; the other two are virtually
unheard of.
But which crime was more filled with hate? Once you ask the question, you
realize how difficult it is to answer. Is it more hateful to kill a stranger
or a lover? Is it more hateful to kill a child than an adult? Is it more
hateful to kill your own child than another's? Under the law before the
invention of hate crimes, these decisions didn't have to be taken. But under
the law after hate crimes, a decision is essential. A decade ago, a murder
was a murder. Now, in the era when group hate has emerged as our cardinal
social sin, it all depends.
The supporters of laws against hate crimes argue that such crimes should
be disproportionately punished because they victimize more than the victim.
Such crimes, these advocates argue, spread fear, hatred and panic among
whole populations, and therefore merit more concern. But, of course, all
crimes victimize more than the victim, and spread alarm in the society at
large. Just think of the terrifying church shooting in Texas only two weeks
ago. In fact, a purely random murder may be even more terrifying than a
targeted one, since the entire community, and not just a part of it, feels
threatened. High rates of murder, robbery, assault and burglary victimize
everyone, by spreading fear, suspicion and distress everywhere. Which crime
was more frightening to more people this summer: the mentally ill Buford
Furrow's crazed attacks in Los Angeles, killing one, or Mark Barton's murder
of his own family and several random day-traders in Atlanta, killing 12?
Almost certainly the latter. But only Furrow was guilty of ''hate.''
One response to this objection is that certain groups feel fear more
intensely than others because of a history of persecution or intimidation.
But doesn't this smack of a certain condescension toward minorities? Why,
after all, should it be assumed that gay men or black women or Jews, for
example, are as a group more easily intimidated than others? Surely in any
of these communities there will be a vast range of responses, from panic to
concern to complete indifference. The assumption otherwise is the kind of
crude generalization the law is supposed to uproot in the first place. And
among these groups, there are also likely to be vast differences. To equate
a population once subjected to slavery with a population of Mexican
immigrants or third-generation Holocaust survivors is to equate the
unequatable. In fact, it is to set up a contest of vulnerability in which
one group vies with another to establish its particular variety of
suffering, a contest that can have no dignified solution.
Rape, for example, is not classified as a ''hate crime'' under most
existing laws, pitting feminists against ethnic groups in a battle for
recognition. If, as a solution to this problem, everyone, except the white
straight able-bodied male, is regarded as a possible victim of a hate crime,
then we have simply created a two-tier system of justice in which racial
profiling is reversed, and white straight men are presumed guilty before
being proven innocent, and members of minorities are free to hate them as
gleefully as they like. But if we include the white straight male in the
litany of potential victims, then we have effectively abolished the notion
of a hate crime altogether. For if every crime is possibly a hate crime,
then it is simply another name for crime. All we will have done is widened
the search for possible bigotry, ratcheted up the sentences for everyone and
filled the jails up even further.
Hate-crime-law advocates counter that extra penalties should be imposed
on hate crimes because our society is experiencing an ''epidemic'' of such
crimes. Mercifully, there is no hard evidence to support this notion. The
Federal Government has only been recording the incidence of hate crimes in
this decade, and the statistics tell a simple story. In 1992, there were
6,623 hate-crime incidents reported to the F.B.I. by a total of 6,181
agencies, covering 51 percent of the population. In 1996, there were 8,734
incidents reported by 11,355 agencies, covering 84 percent of the
population. That number dropped to 8,049 in 1997. These numbers are, of
course, hazardous. They probably underreport the incidence of such crimes,
but they are the only reliable figures we have. Yet even if they are faulty
as an absolute number, they do not show an epidemic of ''hate crimes'' in
the 1990's.
Is there evidence that the crimes themselves are becoming more vicious?
None. More than 60 percent of recorded hate crimes in America involve no
violent, physical assault against another human being at all, and, again,
according to the F.B.I., that proportion has not budged much in the 1990's.
These impersonal attacks are crimes against property or crimes of
''intimidation.'' Murder, which dominates media coverage of hate crimes, is
a tiny proportion of the total. Of the 8,049 hate crimes reported to the
F.B.I. in 1997, a total of eight were murders. Eight. The number of hate
crimes that were aggravated assaults (generally involving a weapon) in 1997
is less than 15 percent of the total. That's 1,237 assaults too many, of
course, but to put it in perspective, compare it with a reported 1,022,492
''equal opportunity'' aggravated assaults in America in the same year. The
number of hate crimes that were physical assaults is half the total. That's
4,000 assaults too many, of course, but to put it in perspective, it
compares with around 3.8 million ''equal opportunity'' assaults in America
annually.
The truth is, the distinction between a crime filled with personal hate
and a crime filled with group hate is an essentially arbitrary one. It tells
us nothing interesting about the psychological contours of the specific
actor or his specific victim. It is a function primarily of politics, of
special interest groups carving out particular protections for themselves,
rather than a serious response to a serious criminal concern. In such an
endeavor, hate-crime-law advocates cram an entire world of human motivations
into an immutable, tiny box called hate, and hope to have solved a problem.
But nothing has been solved; and some harm may even have been done.
In an attempt to repudiate a past that treated people differently because
of the color of their skin, or their sex, or religion or sexual orientation,
we may merely create a future that permanently treats people differently
because of the color of their skin, or their sex, religion or sexual
orientation. This notion of a hate crime, and the concept of hate that lies
behind it, takes a psychological mystery and turns it into a facile
political artifact. Rather than compounding this error and extending even
further, we should seriously consider repealing the concept altogether.
To put it another way: violence can and should be stopped by the
government. In a free society, hate can't and shouldn't be. The boundaries
between hate and prejudice and between prejudice and opinion and between
opinion and truth are so complicated and blurred that any attempt to
construct legal and political fire walls is a doomed and illiberal venture.
We know by now that hate will never disappear from human consciousness; in
fact, it is probably, at some level, definitive of it. We know after decades
of education measures that hate is not caused merely by ignorance; and after
decades of legislation, that it isn't caused entirely by law.
To be sure, we have made much progress. Anyone who argues that America is
as inhospitable to minorities and to women today as it has been in the past
has not read much history. And we should, of course, be vigilant that our
most powerful institutions, most notably the government, do not actively or
formally propagate hatred; and insure that the violent expression of hate is
curtailed by the same rules that punish all violent expression.
But after that, in an increasingly diverse culture, it is crazy to expect
that hate, in all its variety, can be eradicated. A free country will always
mean a hateful country. This may not be fair, or perfect, or admirable, but
it is reality, and while we need not endorse it, we should not delude
ourselves into thinking we can prevent it. That is surely the distinction
between toleration and tolerance. Tolerance is the eradication of hate;
toleration is co-existence despite it. We might do better as a culture and
as a polity if we concentrated more on achieving the latter rather than the
former. We would certainly be less frustrated.
And by aiming lower, we might actually reach higher. In some ways, some
expression of prejudice serves a useful social purpose. It lets off steam;
it allows natural tensions to express themselves incrementally; it can
siphon off conflict through words, rather than actions. Anyone who has lived
in the ethnic shouting match that is New York City knows exactly what I
mean. If New Yorkers disliked each other less, they wouldn't be able to get
on so well. We may not all be able to pull off a Mencken -- bigoted in
words, egalitarian in action -- but we might achieve a lesser form of
virtue: a human acceptance of our need for differentiation, without a total
capitulation to it.
Do we not owe something more to the victims of hate? Perhaps we do. But
it is also true that there is nothing that government can do for the hated
that the hated cannot better do for themselves. After all, most bigots are
not foiled when they are punished specifically for their beliefs. In fact,
many of the worst haters crave such attention and find vindication in such
rebukes. Indeed, our media's obsession with ''hate,'' our elevation of it
above other social misdemeanors and crimes, may even play into the hands of
the pathetic and the evil, may breathe air into the smoldering embers of
their paranoid loathing. Sure, we can help create a climate in which such
hate is disapproved of -- and we should. But there is a danger that if we go
too far, if we punish it too much, if we try to abolish it altogether, we
may merely increase its mystique, and entrench the very categories of human
difference that we are trying to erase.
For hate is only foiled not when the haters are punished but when the
hated are immune to the bigot's power. A hater cannot psychologically wound
if a victim cannot psychologically be wounded. And that immunity to hurt can
never be given; it can merely be achieved. The racial epithet only strikes
at someone's core if he lets it, if he allows the bigot's definition of him
to be the final description of his life and his person -- if somewhere in
his heart of hearts, he believes the hateful slur to be true. The only final
answer to this form of racism, then, is not majority persecution of it, but
minority indifference to it. The only permanent rebuke to homophobia is not
the enforcement of tolerance, but gay equanimity in the face of prejudice.
The only effective answer to sexism is not a morass of legal proscriptions,
but the simple fact of female success. In this, as in so many other things,
there is no solution to the problem. There is only a transcendence of it.
For all our rhetoric, hate will never be destroyed. Hate, as our
predecessors knew better, can merely be overcome.
We know all these details now, many months later. We know quite a
large amount about what happened before and after. But I am still drawn,
again and again, to the flash of ignition, the moment when fear and loathing
became hate, the instant of transformation when King became hunter and Byrd
became prey.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
An article on page 50 of The Times Magazine today about hate and
hate-crime laws misstates the year that James Byrd Jr., a black man, was
dragged to his death by white supremacists in East Texas. It was 1998, not
1997.
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