| Jack_ |
22-03-2018 08:16 PM |
There are some really interesting reflections on the drawbacks of hate crime/anti-discrimination legislation in Dean Spade's Normal Life
Quote:
Critical race theorists have developed analyses about the limitations of anti-discrimination law that are useful in understanding the ways these all reforms have and will continue to fail to deliver meaningful change to trans people. Alan Freeman's critique of what he terms the "perpetrator perspective" in discrimination law is particularly helpful in conceptualizing the limits of the common trans rights strategies. Freeman's work looks at laws that prohibit discrimination based on race. He exposes how and why anti-discrimination and hate crime statutes do not achieve their promises of equality and freedom for people targeted by discrimination and violence. Freeman argues that discrimination law misunderstands how racism works, which makes it fail to effectively address it.
Discrimination law primarily conceptualizes the harm of racism through the perpetrator/victim dyad, imagining that the fundamental scene is that of a perpetrator who irrationally hates people on the basis of their race and fires or denies service to or beats or kills the victim based on that hatred. The law's adoption of this conception of racism does several things that make it ineffective at eradicating racism and help it contribute to obscuring the actual operations of racism. First, it individualizes racism. It says that racism is about bad individuals who intentionally make discriminatory choices and must be punished. In this (mis)understanding, structural or systemic racism is rendered invisible. Through this function, the law can only attend to disparities that come from the behavior of a perpetrator who intentionally considered the category that must not be considered (e.g., race, gender, disability) in the decision she was making (e.g., hiring, firing, admission, expulsion). Conditions like living in a district with underfunded schools that "happens to be" 96 percent students of color, or having to take an admissions test that has been proven to predict race better than academic success or any of a number of disparities in life conditions (access to adequate food, health care, employment, housing, clean air and water) that we know stem from and reflect long-term patterns of exclusion and exploitation cannot be understood as "violations" under the discrimination principle, and thus remedies cannot be won. This narrow reading of what constitutes a violation and can be recognized as discrimination serves to naturalize and affirm the status quo of maldistribution. Anti-discrimination law seeks out aberrant individuals with overtly biased intentions. Meanwhile, all the daily disparities in life chances that shape our world along lines of race, class, indigeneity, disability, national origin, sex, and gender remain untouchable and affirmed as non-discriminatory or even as fair.
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(pp. 83-85)
Quote:
Hate crime laws are an even more direct example of the limitations of the perpetrator perspective's conception of oppression. Hate crime laws frame violence in terms of individual wrongdoers. These laws and their advocates portray violence through a lens that oversimplifies its operation and suggests that the criminal punishment system is the proper way to solve it. The violence targeted by hate crime laws is that of purportedly aberrant individuals who have committed acts of violence motivated by bias. Hate crime law advocacy advances the fallacy that such violence is especially reprehensible in the eyes of an equality-minded state, and thus must be punished with enhanced force. While it is no doubt true that violence of this kind is frequent and devastating, critics of hate crime legislation argue that hate crime laws are not the answer. First, as mentioned above, hate crime laws have no deterrent effect: people do not read law books before committing acts of violence and choose against bias-motivated violence because it carries a harsher sentence. Hate crime laws do not and cannot actually increase the life chances of the people they purportedly protect.
Second, hate crime laws strengthen and legitimize the criminal punishment system, a system that targets the very people these laws are supposedly passed to protect. The criminal punishment system was founded on and constantly reproduces the same biases (racism, sexism, homphobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia) that advocates of these laws want to eliminate. This is no small point, given the rapid growth of the US criminal punishment system in the last few decades, and the gender, race, and ability disparities in whom it targets. The United States now imprisons 25 percent of the world's prisoners although it has only 5 percent of the world's population. Imprisonment in the United States has quadrupled since the 1980s and continues to increase despite the fact that violent crime and property crime have declined since the 1990s. The United States has the highest documented rate of imprisonment per capita of any country. A 2008 report declared that the United States now imprisons one in every 100 adults. Significant racial, gender, ability, and national origin disparities exist in this imprisonment. One in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are imprisoned. While men still vastly outnumber women in prisons, the rate of imprisonment for women is growing far faster, largely the result of sentencing changes created as part of the War on Drugs, including the advent of mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions. An estimated 27 percent of federal prisoners are noncitizens. While accurate estimates of rates of imprisonment for people with disabilities are difficult to obtain, it is clear that the combination of severe medical neglect of prisoners, deinstitutionalization of people with psychiatric disabilities without the provision of adequate community services, and the role of drug use in self-medicating account for high rates.
In a context of mass imprisonment and rapid prison growth targeting traditionally marginalized groups, what does it mean to use criminal punishment-enhancing laws to purportedly address violence against those groups?
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(pp. 87-88)
https://biblio.csusm.edu/sites/defau...ith_rights.pdf
It's (that chapter especially) definitely worth a read |
