By Clara S. Lewis B.A., 2003, Smith College a Dissertation Submitted
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
TOUGH ON HATE? ADDRESSING HATE CRIMES IN A POST-DIFFERENCE SOCIETY By Clara S. Lewis B.A., 2003, Smith College A Dissertation Submitted To The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 31, 2010 Dissertation Directed by Thomas Guglielmo Associate Professor of American Studies The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Clara S. Lewis has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of May 27, 2010. This is the final approved form of the dissertation. TOUGH ON HATE? ADDRESSING HATE CRIMES IN A POST-DIFFERENCE SOCIETY Clara S. Lewis Dissertation Research Committee: Thomas Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Director William Chambliss, Professor of Sociology, Committee Member Melani McAlister, Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, Committee Member ii To Mary Lewis, for inspiring me towards curiosity iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Among the scholars whose close reading and insightful commenting have informed the direction of this dissertation, I am particularly indebted to Professors Thomas Guglielmo, William Chambliss, Ivy Leigh Ken, Melani McAlister, and Joseph Kip Kosek. In the role of Dissertation Director, Dr. Guglielmo’s critical insight, generous comments, balanced attitude, and personal warmth were an invaluable resource. In conducting research for this project, I received the assistance of a number of librarians and archivists. Cynthia Rufo from The Northeastern University Libraries Archives and Specials Collections Department, Malea Young from The Library of Congress’ Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, Matthew E. Braun from The Law Library of Congress, and Janet Olson from The George Washington University’s Gelman Library each made crucial contributions. I was also fortunate to be part of a writing group. I cannot image completing this dissertation without the careful close reading, kind commenting, and unflagging support of Charity Fox, Joan Fragaszy Troyano, Jeannine Love, Jennifer Cho, and Anne Showalter who have all been reading this dissertation since the proposal phase. Special thanks are in order for the Studio Serenity tribe, particularly Katja Brandis, and the 3215 19th Street crew. Finally, I thank my family. My parents, Wendy and Paul Lewis, model how to balance discipline with play and have been unflaggingly supportive. I credit both of them with the healthy work habits that enabled me to complete this project with a minimum of fuss and chaos. iv ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION TOUGH ON HATE? ADDRESSING HATE CRIMES IN A POST-DIFFERENCE SOCIETY In Tough on Hate?, I analyze the cultural politics of hate crimes across a range of social fields, primarily news media production and national politics, and to a lesser extent law making, advocacy, and academia. Counterintuitively, I observe that mainstream discursive performances about hate crimes tend to undercut the salience of contemporary minority and civil rights concerns. These widely distributed depictions not only narrowly define bigotry as a law enforcement problem, they also create opportunities to celebrate American exceptionalism and tolerance, further stigmatize the white underclass, and give voice to members of minority groups who actively disavow identity politics. In each of these three areas, individuals and organizations that are defined by their recognition of ascriptive differences — including both white supremacists and minority rights advocates — are marginalized through demonization, criminalization or, more subtly, invisibility. In grappling with the significance of these findings, I develop the construct post- difference ideology. Post-difference ideology describes the cultural tendency to condemn hate crimes in terms that disavow the continued significance of ascriptive differences. The saturation of post-difference ideology within mainstream representations of hate crimes has implications for how hate crimes are understood as a policy field, political issue, news theme, and site of minority and civil rights activism. I surmise that anti-hate crimes legislation functions as a sound criminal justice practice while representations of hate crimes share the same damning consequences for minorities as other expressions of color-blind racism, new homophobia, and Anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment. The dualistic cultural tendency to condemn hate crimes while ignoring these crimes’ social and v historical imbrications indicates that the ideological pattern termed “new racism” has come to characterize, not only racial thinking, but also other forms of identity-based difference and even mainstream efforts to combat bigotry. The result being that the bigotry manifest in hate crimes is unequivocally defined as criminal, while the differences that initiated these crimes in the first place are rendered moot. Bigotry appears deviant, while the status of being in a minority group is viewed as either neutral or irrelevant. The myth of the color-blind society transmogrifies within these narratives into the myth of the post-difference society. As a transdisciplinary endeavor, Tough on Hate? contributes to ongoing conversations within scholarship on the post-civil rights era, race-class-gender studies, and hate crimes studies. Beyond academia, my dissertation speaks to minority and civil rights advocates interested in cultural futures for anti-hate crimes policy. Ultimately, this dissertation generates new theory on the role of political discourse and cultural production in reifying the post-civil rights era’s identity-based social harms. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iv Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………v The Cultural Politics of Hate Crime: An Introduction.........................................................1 Chapter 1. “A More Modest Start”: The Invention of Hate Crime....................................26 Chapter 2. “A More Perfect Union”: The Nation and Post-Difference Ideology in Representations of Hate Crimes………………………………………………….56 Chapter 3. “Only the Hater Loses”: The Cultural Criminalization of the Bigot…………87 Chapter 4. “I Wish We Were All The Same Color”: Covering Difference within Representations of Hate Crimes Victims.............................................................128 Conclusion: Cultural Futures for Challenging Hate Crimes ...........................................157 References........................................................................................................................170 vii At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly visible agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generate such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance. -Slavoj Zizek, Violence viii THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF HATE CRIMES: AN INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION My first personal encounter with a hate crime lacked what theorist Slavoj Zizek describes as a “clearly visible agent.” Indeed, the persistent absence of any kind of accountable criminal subject made the incident all the more hauntingly nasty. As with the majority of all hate crimes committed in the United States, the crime itself was a simple act of graffiti.1 Die Dyke, Die! Scripted with matter-of-fact tidiness on a first-year student’s dry eraser board, the threat surfaced like a withering, long-suppressed resentment. More a death rattle than a battle cry, it unhinged us nonetheless. The victim and I lived in the same undergraduate residence hall at Smith College. Located in Western Massachusetts, Smith is one of the country’s oldest women’s only colleges. Where many of its contemporaries went co-educational, Smith maintained its commitment to single-sex higher education. The resonance of this particular hate crime only becomes comprehensible if understood within Smith’s distinct social milieu. As with hate crimes generally, both context and subtext matter. A micro-universe of homosociability, Smith houses students within a dormitory system that engenders a remarkable degree of trust and togetherness. During the four years I lived on campus, every meal was eaten with the same group of women, at the same table. It was prepared by the same staff who always listened to the same radio station. Throughout the year, we held hands, wore ugly hats, sang songs of dorm loyalty, and skinny-dipped. On more than one occasion, women who had previously defined themselves as straight would find something newly erotic about a close female friend and 1 the terms of sexual self-identification would slide towards passionate re-naming. “BDOC”: Big Dyke On Campus. “LUG”: Lesbian Until Graduation. These were terms of endearment and known categories within Smith’s unique sexual typology. Homosexual sex was in some, arguably confined, ways pervasive on Smith’s campus. The acceptance of lesbian desire was presupposed, if not lavishly indulged. We held dear a mythology about ourselves as a progressive community: we liked to tell ourselves that, having transcended mere tolerance, we had created an idealized diverse