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Unmasking the State: Racial/Gender Terror and Hate Crimes

As part of my organising activities in graduate school, I helped coordinate a forum on Native women in prisons. As part of the outreach for that forum, I sent out a series of email notifications of the event to people at school. In response to the event notifications I sent, I received an email from a white student threatening me with bodily harm. Concerned by this correspondence, I forwarded his email to the campus Women of Color and Native listserve. Almost as soon as I sent out the email, I was deluged by responses from people I did not know, offering support to have this student disciplined for hate speech. What was interesting about this outpour is that in the previous year, I had sent an email to the same lists alerting people to the fact that the Dean of the University said he would not support Native American studies as he considered it a ‘squandering of resources.’ However, there was virtually no response or outcry to this email. Why were people so quick to mobilise around a student who ultimately had relatively little power to impact their lives but were reluctant to organise against an administration that had the power to dismantle Native studies completely? This incident is symptomatic of the politics of hate crime organising within the U.S. as a whole. A strategy taken by organisers against racialised and gendered terror is to articulate this terror as ‘hate crime.’ The publicising of a hate crime can often quickly mobilise even relatively complacent citizens to ‘fight the hate.’ From James Byrd to Matthew Shepherd to Vincent Chin, we see even conservative sectors of the U.S. public responding to cries to ‘teach tolerance.’ In this article, I will assess some of the political effects of hate crime organising. When organising against racial and/or gender terror adopts the strategy of making this terror a ‘crime,’ it actually serves to reproduce patriarchy and white supremacy by masking the sexism and the racism of capitalism and the nation-state. This article will examine how the articulation of racial and gender violence as ‘hate crime’ becomes an apology for the racial and gender violence of the State. This articulation is inherent in the phrase ‘hate crime’ itself. I will explore both parts of this phrase -‘crime’ and ‘hate’ -to assess the (re)productive power of this rhetorical strategy.