| Abstract: | Leung’s article re-examines the political and legislative history of the debates that led up to the passage of the 1990 Hate Crime Statistics Act, in particular the 1980 House committee hearing on Increasing Violence against Minorities and a 1983 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report entitled Intimidation and Violence: Racial and Religious Bigotry in America. Both identify organized white supremacy as the cause of the nation’s epidemic of racial intimidation and violent bigotry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many significant recommendations were made, but data collection became the first piece of legislation to address the national problem of hate violence. Leung seeks to explain why. By analysing the relationship between committee hearings, the key report and the political context of the Reagan administration, he demonstrates how ‘hate crime’ became an object of knowledge, and how its definition had implications for policy development. |
