Document Type
Article
Publication Title
New York University Law Review
Publication Date
1998
ISSN
0028-7881
Page Number
564
Keywords
hate crimes, race, ethnicity, relition, immigration
Disciplines
Civil Rights and Discrimination | Law | Law and Race
Abstract
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed an extraordinary amount of police, legislative, judicial, scholarly, and community activity around hate crime. Such activity was attributable to a new "anti-hate-crime movement," conditions for which were created by the convergence in previous decades of two very different social movements - civil rights and victims' rights. This anti-hate-crime movement has been radiply assimilated into the institutions of criminal justice, with the result that anti-hate-crime measures now reflect the culture and priorities of those institutions. The civil rights and victims' rights movements created collective beliefs, structural resources, and political opportunities that facilitated the emergence of a social movement organized around hate crime and its victims. Hate crime laws were the most visible manifestation of the movement's legal impact, but represent but one aspect of a larger legal and societal response. Much of the success of the movement is attributable to the fact that anti-hate-crime measures fit easily into the values of the criminal justice system; however, that system remains weighted against hate crime victims and their communities. For target communities, the desire to be free from hate crime is inseparable from the desire to be free. Anti-hate-crime measures too frequently address the former but not the latter. To acheive its goal of systemic transformation of criminal justice, the anti-hate-crime movement must engage in critical self-reflection, invest in movement infrastructure, and recommit to challenging the very institutions of criminal justice with which it now cooperates.
Recommended Citation
Terry A. Maroney,
The Struggle Against Hate Crime: Movement at a Crossroads, 73 New York University Law Review. 564
(1998)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/764