Deadly Words: State Power and the Entanglement of Speech and Violence in Hate Crime |
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Authors: | Rosga AnnJanette |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, 219 Ketchum Hall, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA |
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Abstract: | Any analysis of hate crime that attempts to separate speech from action, language from violence, faces epistemological difficulties
that limit the range of conversations about laws responding to identity-based injury in the United States. Active debates
have raged over the implications of bias crime sentence enhancement laws for the protection of ‘freespeech’, thus addressing
the inextricability of language and meaning from hate crime. Those in favor of legal responses to identity-based injury tend
toward essentialist claims which assume the stability of identity and of meanings inherent in words or actions. Those opposed
assert the impossibility of codifying the meaning of words or actions in the law, and/or they worry about the reification
of (victimized) identities accompanying bias crime statutes. This article argues that the focus on language and speech in
these debates simultaneously enables an evasion of discussion about the law's response to bias-related violence, and misleadingly
assumes too much stability in the functions of law and the nature of state power. Interviews conducted by the author with
individuals involved in a 1992 racist hate crime are used to show the diverse elements of state power suffusing the incident
and its aftermath. An analysis of the crime's investigation and prosecution under a Maryland hate crime statute suggests that
law enforcement officers are primarily using hate crime laws as public relations tools in a fight against community perceptions
that they are themselves bigots.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
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Keywords: | bias crime free speech hate crime identity law narrative police racism semiotics violence |
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