I won’t bore you with the blow by blow; I’ve had it out on a different thread. Suffice it to say that I don’t accept the “racism = racial predjudice + power” definition. As far as I’m concerned (and as you point out, as far as most people are concerned), racism means a thought/act/etc. based on race. If a black man rapes a white woman with no concern towards her race, that’s not racism. If a black man rapes a white woman because he has a hatred towards white people, that’s just as racist as if a white man rapes a black woman because “she’s just a n—–”. YMMV, but that’s my opinion.

I wonder if that will work. Sorry to all for trying this out on commenting space!

Thanks!

You use italics through codes.

You “turn on” italics by enclosing an “i” within arrows. You “turn off” the italics by enclosing an “/i” within arrows.

You should look here for an example:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/how-to-use-blockquotes/

This shows you how to turn on/turn off the “blockquote” function. It worls the same way for italics, which is “i” and bold, which is “b”. If you look at that example and replace ‘blockquote’ with the letter ‘i’ you get italics.

Sorry I can’t post an example but the example will show up as italics and won’t be of much use :)

In the case of male-female rape, women are always members of an oppressed group. Hence, rape in this case is always a hate crime.

Is that more clear?

I think this same line of thought can be applied to the quesiton you asked of Ginmar. I don’t think that all crimes in which the perpetrator is a different race than the victim are racist crimes. I think - and I understand that this is completely contentious and many people don’t agree with me - that racism is oppression, and as such, involves relations of power. In my view, racist crimes are those in which the perpetrator is 1) in a position of racial power, and 2) targets the victim because he/she is of an oppressed racial category (which could be compounded by membership in another oppressed category). So, this rape is a gender- and race-based hate crime, because the perpetrator is a white male and the victim is a black female. (Ginmar, is this what you’re thinking? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. By all means, please let us know your thoughts.)

RonF, I know what you’re thinking: what about a black man raping a white woman? My answer to this, and it might be bullet-biting, is that this is a gender-based hate crime but not racism - even if the victim is chosen based on her white skin. Because on my view racism is OPPRESSION - this is important - and oppression involves POWER that is built into social structures and institutions (much in the same way as patriarchy is built into social strucutres and institutions), thus, there is no such thing as “reverse racism”. A black person cannot OPPRESS a white person - unless we are dealing with other factors like gender, in which case it is gender-based oppression and not racism. A black person can dislike, hate, despise, and act prejudicially towards a white person - but I sincerely believe that this is not racism (because it is not oppression).

I’ve thought about this extensively for a couple of years now. I welcome your comments, but ask that you consider the argument carefully before attempting to rebut. (I ask this out of experience with people who instinctively give a knee-jerk reaction based on the idea that any hate of a person because of their race is racism. I am challenging the popular definition of racism.)

Disclaimer: I use CAPS because I don’t know how to post with italics - I’m not trying to yell. :)
Also, I use “black” and “white” because of convenience and easy recognition. I realize other non-white groups are also oppressed by white people.

You know, it’s weird that even with an interracial rape case you have people going, “But where’s the racism?”

Is it your contention that any crime that involves a victim of race different from that of the perpetrator is automatically a racist crime?

Thinking Girl:

I’m trying to figure out why you think all male-female rapes are hate crimes, but not all male-male rapes are.

My apologies to everyone for not giving my link.

The above statement is an excerpt from the following:

A MODEL HATE CRIME PROTOCOL
SAN DIEGO COUNTY REGIONAL HATE CRIMES PROCEDURE MANUAL
OCTOBER, 1999

To get to the full procedure manual, follow my instructions:

1. Go to Alas’s thread “On Hate Crime Statutes”;
2. Scroll down until you see, “I agree with David at “Orcinus”; click on Orcinus;
3. You are now at http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/. Scroll down through Orcinus’s thread until you see, highlighted, the words “what steps law-enforcement professionals recommend”. Click on that.
4. You should now be at the website which gives examples of hate crimes and hate incidents to help the police (in this case, the San Diego Police Department) in gathering information and proper procedures to follow in investigating alledged hate crimes.

Hope that helps.

I used the Conclusion because it says very plainly what a hate crime is.

Nothing complex.

Nothing convoluted.

Just plainly stated in simple terms.

I am sure Occam would agree.

I’ve been absent about much of this discussion about rape being a hate crime. Sorry I’m late getting back to it.

I’m not confused about what a hate crime is, I don’t think. Hate crimes are perpetrated by people who are members of one group against other people because they are members of another specific group. Hate crimes are about relations of power, same as oppression is about relations of power. Maybe I’m being a bit simplistic about that, but I think that is the general idea behind the legal theory. Am I wrong?

My position is most clearly that all male-female rape is a hate crime. Women are raped because they are women, members of an oppressed class. I also said that some male-male rape can also be considered a hate crime. When I originally made that comment, I was thinking of primarily prison situations in which rape is used as a tool for promoting power - particularly situations in which straight men rape homosexual/transsexual men as a means of domination. It depends on who has the power and why, I think. I’m still thinking about this one, so it’s not a complete theory, but I didn’t want to exclude the possibility that some male-male rape is also a hate crime.

So in short, this case seems most definitely a hate crime, because it is male-female rape, and also because it is a rape in which the white rapist actually stated his belief that his black victim was worthless. Double power differential. Whether it is legally recognized as such is of concern to me, of course, but my major point is that is certainly should be.

I wonder whether under many circumstances building a fire of any size in someone’s yard might be construed as attempted (or negligence leading up to) arson or attempted murder/manslaughter. In other words, the threat to the safety of the people involved is in the act itself as well as any further acts it may symbolize.

Speaking of vagueness and the fear of prosecutorial abuse, “We’re going to construe that as a crime because something bad could have happened” hardly seems like a fair, thoughtful application of the law, does it? If your concern with hate crimes is that officials will invent crimes that weren’t, your concern is rather inconsistently applied.

As for context, you should read the whole newspaper story, which explains why law enforcement classified this crime as a hate crime. It wasn’t, as you suggest, simply because the men wanted to hurt somebody they thought beneath them.

APPENDIX A.A. MODEL

CONCLUSION:

“Hate crime victims are usually targeted not because of anything they have said or done to the suspects or for financial gain, but because of who they are or what they believe in. As such, hate crimes violate the very basic tenets of our democracy by targeting the right of every resident to be himself or herself and live safely and freely.

“Perpetrators of hate crimes seek to send a message to the victim and his or her community that they are unwanted, that they do not belong, and that the community at large does not care about what happens to them.

“Although it is unrealistic to believe that we can eliminate all hate crimes, we in law enforcement can drastically diminish their impact by the approach we take when dealing with hate crimes.

“We can send an even stronger countermessage.

“We should communicate to the victim, the community and to the defendant that we will do everything we can to apprehend those who seek to terrorize any member of our community.”

This is a part of the hate crime protocol that law enforcement are to follow and adhere to when investigating hate crimes.

William of Occam, c. 1837: A scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities,

OR

with all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best explanation.

To those who obviously did not read Jeremy Sweat’s comments (”[she] was somebody society wouldn’t care about, wouldn’t be missed”), I consider that you re-read his comments, and try and apply Occam’s Razor to his comments.

There is an elephant in the room, and stepping all over it won’t make it go away.

Sorry, mythago: i was in an unusually bad mood for reasons unrelated to the blog, and it spilled over into my post.

That was seriously condescending. You know Mythago is a lawyer too, yes?

It is difficult to answer that within the constraints of the no-personal comments. but legal theory is fairly complex, and your inability to recognize it as “good” or “sensible” or “not good” is in all likelihood due to a lack of training and knowledge in the field, not due to the actual theory. You might not believe me–that much is obvious–but your comment is as silly as it would be if I attacked a branch of feminist or race theory based solely on a layman’s perspective of what they were saying.

You keep trying to simplify it–things “seem simple” to you apparently, but they’re really quite complex. Which isn’t really a problem, other that you don’t seem that interested in understanding HOW they’re complex, or WHY they’re complex.

I don’t mind explaining things to you, if you ask. but it gets pretty tiring, actually, to write a reasonably complex explanation (it is not that easy to simplify the topic) and have it dismissed as “ridiculous.” If you’re going to argue that your opponents stance is “ridiculous” it is helpful, usually, to have more backing than you appear to possess.

I’m sorry, Ron, but you’re really reaching here. Arson is burning a building, not a cross; you’d have a hard time showing attempted murder if all you could prove was ‘they set fire to a cross to scare these people’. You’re also forgetting that the threat of hate crimes is not just to the intended target, but to people like them. When the KKK burned crosses, it wasn’t done merely to scare off one family; it was a threat to everyone like them and everyone who might have taken their side.

But anecdotally based on my memory, there have been at least a few crimes of blacks against whites where the criminal has expressed racism connected with the crime, only to have the prosecutors refuse to bring hate crime charges.

And since this is anecdote and based on your memory, we have no way of disproving your claim, and no way of checking whether the prosecutors refused to bring charges for some other reason–for example, lacking sufficient evidence, or the evidence of the racist intent being unreliable or inadmissible in court. Handy, that.

Regarding selective prosecution; I cannot quote or give links to specific stories. But anecdotally based on my memory, there have been at least a few crimes of blacks against whites where the criminal has expressed racism connected with the crime, only to have the prosecutors refuse to bring hate crime charges.

As far as “the problem is not the hate crime laws” in such a scenario, I would tend to agree with you. But IIRC, one of the reasons the Supreme Court overturned all then-existing capital punishment statutes in the 70’s was not the content of the laws themselves, but the fact that they were being unjustly used. Proportionately far more death sentences were being handed out to minorities than to whites. So there is precedent for calling a law unconstitutional, at any rate, based on the pattern of it’s enforcement. This was overcome in those juristictions that now have capital punishment laws by including a mechanism for ensuring that they were fairly and evenly enforced. Something similar might be needed for hate crime charges.

With all due respect, it’s not a very *good* legal-theory perspective. The ’some people consider them thought crimes’ is ridiculous, when you realize that we already criminalize certain ‘thoughts’, in the form of intent. You’re claiming that hate crime is different, because it goes to motive. I assume you’re aware that there are already crimes where we look to motive: the obvious example is assault, where the motive is to put another person in fear of harm. That’s separate from the intent. If I deliberately say “I’m going to kill you,” I intended to say that–but if I said it because it was a line in a play, that’s different than if I walked up to you on the street and intentionally said it with the motive of putting you in fear of your life.

Hate crimes would be ‘thought crimes’ if merely holding hateful opinions were criminal; it isn’t. The reason for hate crimes is the recognition that the harm done goes beyond the mere act, and is caused by the bad actor’s motive. A KKK member who burns a cross on a black family’s lawn is not simply polluting the air or damaging their lawn; the intent is to intimidate and frighten, and not just that family, but black people in general. The harm goes beyond some burned grass.

As for fear of selective prosecution, you’d really have to argue that, say, prosecutors would eagerly punish those who beat up Jews, but would turn their backs on a gang of Hispanics who beat up a white guy. Other than your gut feeling, I really don’t see any evidence that this would be the case. And if it were, the problem is not the hate-crime laws.

I’m not your fuckin’ mommy. I’m not gonna draw pictures for you. Get a feckin’ clue. You’re an adult? Then start acting like one.