Of Hate Crimes, Livable Lives, and Taking a Stand

On Wednesday, December 6, 2012, at 5:44am, a white guy leapt on a South Asian man in the train station in Champaign, IL, shouting something about this being his (the white guy's) country—exact verbiage hasn't been clear.

The white guy, identified by local news outlet the News-Gazette as 23-year-old Joshua Scaggs of Fithian, IL, then proceeded to choke the non-white guy, identified as University of Illinois law professor Dhammika Dharmapala, and cut him with a utility knife, opening a "six-inch cut on his throat which bled profusely."

Scaggs was arrested for a hate crime, but ultimately charged with "attempted murder and two counts of aggravated battery"; the prosecuting attorney "opted not to file it [the hate crime charge] because the other charges carry heavier penalties and he's confident he can prove the aggravated battery based on the information he has."

Clearly, the hate crime law is not written in a useful way here. It's not an add-on that increases the severity of any crime, but a separate charge. Somewhere, in an article I can't find now, somebody involved on the prosecutorial side of this said that usually the hate crime gets prosecuted with misdemeanors like vandalism or theft, indicating that the penalty attached to a hate crime is worse than that but less than aggravated battery.

This was surprising to me, because I feel like most hate crime laws are written as the tack-on variety—"Now, with 15% more sentencing!" And, I don't know how I feel about that.

I mean, on one hand, the things one is doing while committing a hate crime are generally already illegal. And, as the prosecutor noted in the quote above, it's often hard to prove intent enough to get a conviction.

Therefore, I'm not totally on board with hate crime legislation. I certainly don't think that attempts to put it on the books should be the be-all and end-all of activism (you hear me, LGBT nonprofits?), not least because I'm wary of constructing such positions as inherently, unlivably vulnerable to violence in the process.

Though of course, this case seems pretty clear cut. It's quite evident that "this is my country" meant "it's not yours" or "you don't belong here"—and that it was racially motivated. Dhammapala was visibly different from Scaggs' idea of "his country." It's not plain xenophobia, that is, because a German-born person, say, wouldn't have produced that same visual trigger. And neither would a person of African descent, whether first generation or eighteenth (Slavery in America estimates 12 generations from the first Africans to the end of slavery; Racematters.org says there have been 6 generations since).

So, even though a racist imaginary would think of the default "American" as white, it would also readily identify a black person as American in a way that East Asians, South Asians, Arabs, and Latinos don't get—as my Asian-American friends who get drunk fratboys ching-chong-ing in their faces or assuming they don’t speak English can attest. So, race is more complex than the usual American reduction to black and white, but it's still pretty relevant and this was still an attack motivated by racial hatred.

Moreover, the fact that juries apparently don’t buy it when prosecutors argue that crimes were prejudice-based deserves critique as an instance where attempts to redress structural inequalities become figured as "special rights."

This, then, brings me to the other hand, which is that it is structural inequality that makes hate crime possible. Some people are seen as less important, less worthy, and indeed less human than others, and—when you get somebody crazy enough—members of certain groups make more cultural sense as targets. Given that, a structural solution seems reasonable.

That is, though I'm not sure anyone has ever shown that increased hate-crime penalties serve as a deterrent for people who for whatever reason translate social devaluation into a hunting license, it does make a statement that, as a society, we don't find such hunting acceptable.

In this way, hate-crime legislation, simply by existing, perhaps lessens the devaluation that starts the cycle. The challenge, then, is to prevent that devaluation from being replaced by a pervasive, uninhabitably-terror-inducing sense of vulnerability. We also have to not let the framing of a group in the law as not-attackable be framed as "special rights" rather than as a corrective to actual special rights already enjoyed by other groups.

And we certainly have to contest the response to such incidents in platitudes—the email from University of Illinois President Michael Hogan to the so-called campus community ways called for a renewal of "our commitment to tolerance" and requested that "we all take a moment to remember that compassion is our greatest virtue and that we are united together in a wish for healing and understanding in the wake of such a tragic incident."

This is real. This is serious. It demands more of a response than this. "We," whoever we are, are quite evidently not "united" and don't have "understanding." It's not an" incident" but the product of a system. And don't even get me started on the implicit superiority of the tolerate-r over the tolerate-d (because I know I go on about it all the time; just check out Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion).

With vapid and condescending responses like this, hate crime laws start to look better and better.

Herman Cain and Sexual Harassment, Or: Why we Still need Intersectionality

Reports that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexually harassing some women in the mid-1990s, accusations that were settled out of court at the time, have been at the top of Google News for at least a week now.

The headline slid down a little when Andy Rooney died and to make way for election results, but never "below the fold," not least because the number of women allegedly harassed has continued to grow—four at last count. This has seemingly become the only story in the 2012 campaign.

My first instinct is to be sick to death of sex scandals. Far too often (and ever doing it is too much for me) people's fitness to hold office is assessed on the basis of having sex other people disapprove of. I get annoyed when substantive issues get shoved aside in favor of tabloid-esque coverage.

Of course, it's not a great first instinct, since that's not what's going on here, as sexual harassment is categorically different from an affair or sexting or gay sex with consensual adult partners—the things other politicians have found to end their careers.

Indeed, some of the coverage, in particular one opinion piece that got me fired up enough to write this blog in the first place, shows why, as much as it shouldn't be the only story, the accusations against Cain should be a story. Joe Klein of Time argues that "fleeting moments of human frailty, especially of the testosterone-addled kind, are inevitable and should remain private, absent extenuating circumstances (like physical assault). I’m generally opposed to the press setting moral standards that most of us can’t meet"

No, no. No no no. Just, no.

Assuming you have a right of access to other people's bodies is not "human frailty," nor is it "inevitable." Nor is refraining from doing so a "moral standard" that anyone should have trouble meeting as much as what's required by basic human decency. Having testosterone, however much it might "addle" you, does not give you a free pass. Physical assault is not the only kind of inappropriate behavior for which one should be called out, and keeping abuses of power private does little to discourage them.

Klein adds, "Yes, sexual harassment is different from general poking around since it is a form of aggressive behavior–but it is also more difficult to prove (although the two women in question received cash settlements from the Restaurant Association, which means that we’re probably dealing with some form of industrial-strength obnoxiousness here)."

Seriously, you're going to defend something you call "general poking around" as not a form of aggressive behavior? See above re: assumption of a right of access.

That's before we even get to the echo of the old assumption that women tend to make up sexual assault, and the fact that Klein contains this with the mention that there were settlements and "industrial-strength obnoxiousness" doesn't make up for that suggestion. Yes, of course women might say this happened even if it's not true, because they are treated so well when they come forward and being violated is so easy to talk about.

All of this points to why it's vital that this conversation be had, not just with Cain, but with any case where there's this sort of question of coercion or hostile work environment or power differential. First, if people hear this often enough, they'll get the idea that it's not an acceptable way to behave. And second, if it's true, it's something people have a right to know before they go electing someone to the highest office in the land.

Because yes, I'll come out and argue that if Cain is, in fact, a harasser he's not fit to run the country. Importantly, again, it's not just because there's a sex scandal—I am a firm believer in the fact that any kind of sex anybody wants to have with other consenting adults is perfectly acceptable even if I personally find it revolting.

But there aren't consenting adults here; what makes a sexual harasser unfit for duty is the abuse of power it represents. That's where the problem lies. That's why that person shouldn't be given any more power and should possibly lose the position they had that they decided to abuse in the first place.

Of course, it is totally reasonable to argue against the way in which the news has come to focus on this to the exclusion of all other topics. As Klein points out, "there is far more important business–like Herman’s Cain prohibitive lack of knowledge about almost every relevant issue–to be discussed." There needs to be more substantive debate about Cain—and someone needs to remember that there are other candidates, two or three of them still serious contenders.

But then there's the elephant in the room (har, har). This sexual harassment case isn't just an issue of gender (which isn't to imply that it ever is, but it sometimes gets treated as such); it's also bound up in issues of race.

"The notion of black man as sexual predator is a particularly toxic stereotype–and it may intensify the self-righteous satisfaction some Republicans are getting from supporting a conservative black man for President. As in: those liberals pretend to be pro-black, but every time a Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain comes down the pike, they throw sex at him."

On one hand, I'm deeply uneasy with the ways in which that "toxic stereotype" probably has a whole lot more to do with the wall-to-wall coverage of this Cain story than the journalists and readers want to admit. The story makes sense to run and catches people's attention because it meshes with this idea.

There is something deeply worrisome about this being the basis on which African-American republicans are undermined. That's a reason to resist the frenzy—though as stated above I don't think there's any reason not to talk about the issue altogether.

On the other hand, there's a problem when race and gender get pitted against each other like this. Thinking back to Clarence Thomas—an obvious precedent—there was this weird thing where somehow Anita Hill had to either have solidarity with (implicitly white) feminists and call out Thomas's misconduct or have solidarity with African-Americans and keep quiet so that there could be a black Supreme Court justice.

Here again, there's some implicit demand to either not critique Cain—what the right is implicitly saying "liberals" ought to do if they are really "pro-black"—or be take a stand against sexual harassment if one is really "pro-woman."

The problem is that, as many an intersectional theorist and woman of color feminist has argued, you can't separate out those things. You're not black plus a woman, so it's not one or the other. It's also not one or the other in critiquing the behavior of such an African-American man.

The weight of history makes this tricky to navigate: the "myth of the black rapist" relies on the assumption of black men as less civilized, less controlled, and having outsized sexual urges, and I know that this is bound up, to greater or lesser extent, with the Herman Cain Sexual Harassment Extravaganza of 2011. I don't want to perpetuate the myth even as I say Cain's not fit to lead if the accusations are true.

We have to call out the racist logics that make this a "good" story—i.e. exciting—even as we insist that it is still an important story. A pretty tall order, but I think it's possible.

Fandom and the Myth of Oppressed People Points

Tagging the archive of P3 entries made me realize I have a lot fewer blogs about fandom—you know, my primary academic interest—than just about anything else. Now, the fact that I often blog on the basis of current events that catch my attention (next week, Herman Cain and sexual harassment) has something to do with this, of course, but it's still an unfortunate situation.

And then, just as I was thinking this and wracking my brains for something not only timely but interesting to say about fans, a fan-related blog topic fell into my lap. And that would be awesome if it weren't for what it was.

To start, I love fans. I am a fan. I'm totally aware that fans are often misrepresented through a focus on the fan practices that are most nonnormative in relation to non-fan culture, and it makes me want to protect them. But sometimes fans do something awful and indefensible—and, in this case, racist—and it makes me feel terrible but I have to call them out on it.

It all started when I saw something about the "We're a culture, not a costume" project. I feel like it was on Twitter, but I can't find it now so maybe I saw it on Google News. (If I got it from you, tell me so I can give you credit!)

In this campaign, the Students Teaching Against Racism in Society (STARS) organization at Ohio University produced a series of posters urging people to rethink their Halloween costume choices. Each had a student who's a member of a particular racial or ethnic group holding up a picture of a Halloween costume that purports to allow people to pretend to be a member of that group.

Predictably, we see Asian woman = geisha, Middle Eastern or Muslim man = terrorist, and a "gangsta" white girl in blackface (or black-body, as all of her visible skin is brown-ed). The captions say, "This is not who I am, and this is not okay." Bonus: @BobbyBigWheel made a handy flowchart to help you decide whether to wear blackface on Halloween (via the ever-fabulous @Halfrican_One)

The STARS campaign is a really powerful statement about the harm done by stereotyping and reducing an entire group of people to the most offensive denominator. (There is, a typo showed me, revealing wordplay in there somewhere about demon-inator.) I think one of these posters should be made and distributed at my campus to jolt the student body out of their largely unreflexive support of the retired Chief Illiniwek mascot.

And then, some science fiction fans turned around and made a "This is not who I am and this is not okay" poster showing a Dr. Who dalek and some women dressed as "sexy daleks."

To suggest that "misrepresenting" a fictitious species of villains is equivalent to misrepresenting an actual group that has materially suffered as a result of white supremacy, as tumblr user tarynaria notes, "undermines the impact of the original campaign: namely pointing out racist Halloween costumes (or costume party costumes) as racist."

She adds, "it’s rude and disrespectful to those involved in the campaign," because to make this joke is to "tell them that their voices don’t matter." This poster, as a response to the STARS set, indicates that its maker doesn't care about the message the original was trying to get across. It frames the racism of the costumes as either as trivial or as made up by people who are overly sensitive.

(Also, bonus awfulness points for reinforcing the idea that women's science fiction costuming is always insincere or "pandering" and attempting to be sexy. I don't think the these things are unrelated.)

Implying that racism is trivial or a product of excessive sensitivity are classic tactics of white dismissal of race as a relevant category. They're even on the Fantasy and Science Fiction Bingo, No Racism in Fiction edition card! And the fact that this poster as a response to an important argument about racism in costuming made sense not only to produce but to reblog across fandom (it got to me via a tweet by a scifi fan) makes the assumption of default whiteness within fandom glaring.

This, of course, is at odds with the way that fandom is frequently characterized as a space where the culturally downtrodden can make media work for them. Though there have certainly been critiques of the argument and attempts to nuance it, mostly what we hear is that fandom is resistant to norms. Fans are the heroic underdog rebels struggling against the Evil Corporate Empire.

And there's a certain amount of truth to this. Fans are actually perpetually under threat of legal challenge from corporate media capital.

In addition, the fans who engage in the kind of fandom most often noticed in fan studies are mostly women. Fairly often (at least, out of proportion with the rest of the population), they're queer, either in the sense of having same-sex desire or by breaking norms of sexuality more generally. Fans do absolutely resist and rework norms of gender and sexuality from a subordinate position in the schema of normativity.

In these ways, yes, fans are underdogs and resistant and available to champion. The problem comes when we have an insufficiently intersectional understanding of what constitutes oppression. Yes, fans are downtrodden in some ways, but that doesn't excuse them from treading on others by other criteria.

That is, if Glee creator Ryan Murphy has a case of Gay White Man Syndrome, lots of fans and fan scholars have White Fan Syndrome, and we need to call it out.

Here's where the Myth of Oppressed People Points comes in. There's a pervasive sense that if a person is her- or himself oppressed in any way, they get a pass for oppressing others. As I put it when discussing Glee, this is like saying “I understand what it’s like to be discriminated against as a woman because I’m gay” or “I can’t be racist, I’m gay!”

Those statements are patently absurd, but so is it absurd to claim "I can't be racist, I'm downtrodden as a fan!" Because clearly people can.

There's fairly widespread awareness and critique of the default maleness of fandom in the popular and industrial imaginary and the ways in which that's exclusionary for women. I raised it in my blog about Comic-Con 2011's "Sexy Geek" Panel. Suzanne Scott pointed it out when blogging about that incident before me as well as in her excellent dissertation Revenge of the Fanboy: Convergence Culture and the Politics of Incorporation (especially the conclusion).

You can also see this in Henry Jenkins's discussion of fan viding vs. fan films in Convergence Culture and in Julie Levin Russo's careful articulation of the specificity of femslash fandom in her Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities. The point (besides a chance to show off that I've been reading a lot lately), is that people get that gender is a factor in fandom.

However, race has not received anything like the same attention. I actually had to put down a fan studies article recently lest I fling it across the room because it so totally ignored the obvious role race played in the phenomenon it was discussing.

In fact, so far the only academic attention to this that I've seen is a 2009 Symposium section in Transformative Works and Cultures called Pattern Recognition: A Dialogue on Racism in Fan Communities, though I know that there's a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on Race and Ethnicity in Fandom coming out later this month because I'm published in it.

The dalek poster reemphasizes why this work is necessary. We can love fans and celebrate the way that they are resistant, sure. What we can't do is get so caught up in our love and our underdog narrative that we can't see when they aren't so lovable or downtrodden. It's our responsibility to critique fan practices when that's necessary. There are no Oppressed People Points, just intersecting systems of privilege.

Surprising Revelations from the Casey Anthony Outrage Machine

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Casey Anthony, accused of killing her two-year-old daughter Caylee, was found not guilty of murder one on July 5 (she was convicted of lying to police). In response, there was widespread outrage, as the court of public opinion had long since convicted her.

You can see how this reaction came about. It was a high-profile trial involving a dead child—that always gets people’s dander up. There also wasn’t a really compelling alternative explanation for how Caylee Anthony died.

And, perhaps most importantly, most people don’t really understand that the American legal system relies on the principle of “reasonable doubt." That is, it’s not enough that it seems most likely that the accused did it. In order to prevent convicting the innocent, the system is set up so that, as Wikipedia puts it, “the proposition being presented by the prosecution must be proven to the extent that there could be no ‘reasonable doubt’ in the mind of a ‘reasonable person’ that the defendant is guilty.” That standard wasn’t met, and Casey Anthony walked—whether she did it or not.

But in the midst of all that indignation and sense that justice had not been served was a peculiar pattern. Twitterer MC Thumbtack (pun alert!) hit the nail on the head when s/he said:

@inthefade I haven't seen this many people outraged over something that has no affect on their lives since OJ's glove didn't fit.

Suddenly, it’s 1995 again. I’m sitting in my eighth grade science class watching the O.J. Simpson verdict come down. (No joke, we did this. I think we had a substitute teacher that day.) And, it’s not like I was reading a lot of news when I was twelve, but the reaction in that room indicated that people were mad.

But aside from the outrage factor, I can’t see what on earth Casey Anthony has to do with O.J. Simpson. However, I seem to be the only one.

When @KimKardashian tweeted “WHAT!!??!! CASEY ANTHONY NOT GUILTY!!!! I'm speechless!!!” O.J. was the go-to response:

@HaHaWhitePPL So was Nicole Brown Simpson's family when your dad got OJ off.

@elibraden ME TOO!! ITS LIKE WHEN YOUR DAD HELPED GET O.J. OFF!!

Granted, the O.J. link makes a little sense here, as Ms. Kardashian is, in fact—as the tweets note—the daughter of a member of Simpson’s team of lawyers.

But she’s also, as Wikipedia describes her, a “socialite, television personality, model, and actress” who’s “known for a sex tape with her former boyfriend Ray J as well as her E! reality series that she shares with her family, Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” That is, she’s not someone whose opinion on legal matters should be considered terribly important. And yet, people felt compelled to respond and point out the O.J. Simpson parallel.

I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except that it wasn’t just a couple of responses to a tweet by a “she’s famous for what?” celebrity.

It was Venn diagrams over at GraphJam of “People who have murdered” and “People who can get away with murder” with Simpson and Anthony in the tiny overlapping area.

It was OJ captioned as pulling a Kanye West and saying “Yo Casey, I’m really happy for you. I’mma let you finish . . .” followed by “…but I had the best ridiculous acquittal of all TIME.”

It was a five-picture series of “Totally Looks Like” photos with matching facial expressions between Anthony and Simpson, which must have taken ages to compile.

And it was a deployment of the Bed Intruder Meme. It ran “Hide Yo Kids” with a picture of Anthony and “Hide Yo Wife” with a picture of Simpson. Later, a version added Lorena Bobbitt and “Hide Yo Husband.”

So why so consistently OJ? Why not other people with similarities to Anthony? There’s a parallel with Scott Peterson, who killed his own kid. And Melissa Huckaby was one of those (relatively rarer) women who kill children—that seems relevant. Everyone was similarly sure Michael Jackson was guilty of child molestation, but he was acquitted, too.

But Casey Anthony hasn’t been compared to any of these people by user-generated humor. It’s all OJ, all the time. And it doesn’t make any sense.

That is, the particularity and consistency of Simpson has to mean something.

And it seems to me that if, as the tenor and sheer volume (quantity and loudness) of the outrage suggests, a mother (allegedly) killing her own child and (apparently) getting away with it is one of the most heinous offenses for our culture, the “the OMG, OJ!” response suggests that a black man (allegedly) killing a white woman and (apparently) getting away with it is right up there alongside it.

So, if the response to Anthony says a lot about gender (OMG, women shouldn’t kill! Mothers inherently have a link to their children, is she a monster?), the consistent linkage to Simpson says a lot about race. Particularly, the ways race in the U.S is to this day freighted with the project of “protecting” white women from black men.

Even when, as in this case, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything.