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it's hard to see through all the straw men...
"hate crime" legislation seems to me well-intentioned but also to somehow miss the point in that it reduces racism to a subjective state--which is obviously incomplete....racism is also a social phenomenon, and the most dangerous dimension of that phenomenon is that context can "normalize" racism. such legislation has nothing to say about that. but i frankly dont know how legislation could be fashioned that would outlaw the normalization of racist or homophobic attitudes. and it is pretty obvious that the production of political arguments that resonate with such attitudes--that presuppose them, that de facto legitimate them---are a working feature of petit bourgeois conservatism. but this is separate...it does follow, so far as i am concerned anyway, that a political movement (or individual politicians who speak to or about the constituency of such a movement) that relies on racism or homophobia to sell itself (or to sell an individual politico) is unacceptable. or should be.
that said, i dont see the problem with such laws--i would imagine that they function to define a particular type of intent--which is always to some extent a construct built backward from an act. if you have some guy who kills someone with premeditation and is an avowed homophobe--say--and the victim is gay and the evidence points to homophobia as a motivation, then why not treat it more severely than other types of intent in that it strikes directly at the individuals who commit crimes across such motives and indirectly at the context(s) within which such attitudes are understood as acceptable.
the entire right liberatarian misinterpretation of the notion of intent--which results in the notion of "thought policing"--seems to me fundamentally wrong in that it assumes that intent is not constructed across evidence and imputed to the accused on that basis--there is no claim that this construct accounts for intent itself (the subjective state of the accused in a trial) itself, and if such was anything like the working definition of intent it would be impossible to establish it ever. an action is what provides the logical center of arguments ABOUT intent that attempt to fit evidence into a type of explanation for the action.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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