"Hate Crimes" as Propaganda
On state power and who gets called a terrorist
One of the ways that people talk about my academic work (e.g., White Lies, Cyber Racism, “The Algorithmic Rise of the ‘Alt-Right’”) is to categorize it as studying “hate” or “hate crimes.” If given the chance, I’ll correct them. What I study is the ideology of white supremacy, and increasingly, settler colonialism. That’s a significant shift.
It’s important to make this distinction because it allows for a more critical view of state power. And, along with it, the power of organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who use their non-governmental status to shore up state power by expanding the definition of “hate crime.”
One way into thinking about all this more critically is to ask: what do organizations that are “tracking” hate crimes do with that information?
In April of 2023, I attended the International Conference on Hate Studies, where there were several panels that included speakers from organizations engaged in the work of “tracking” neo-Nazis and other bad actors on the far right. Time after time the solutions offered by these panels were some version of “refer them to law enforcement.” In one session where panelists were presenting their new “Community Guide for Opposing Hate,” when a woman in the back from a small town in Northern Idaho raised her hand. She asked the panelists, “what do you suggest I do when I go to the police, as recommended in your guide, and they either don’t care about the far right or are part of themselves?” There was lots of uncomfortable silence following her question. Then, apologetic noises as the panelists acknowledged that “police” are part of the problem with the far right but they had to leave that out of their guide in order to get the cooperation of local law enforcement who had signed on to their report. This exchange helped me understand something in a new way about the far right and “hate crimes.” That is, the policing and incarceration are still viewed across the field as the primary solution to the problem of the far right, and the thinking doesn’t go much beyond that.
Take, for example, the January 6 insurrectionists, widely reported to include many from white supremacist groups, who are currently doing time for their role in laying siege to the Capitol. Just yesterday, New York Magazine reported that these white men are all locked up together and are being further radicalized in their political views.
Of course, this is not new. There is a long and well-documented history of the Aryan Brotherhood in the U.S. prison system, which radicalizes white men as a means of survival. To suggest that incarceration is any part of a solution to white supremacy is, perhaps, the ultimate example of the adage that we can’t incarcerate our way out of social problems. Just as jails and prisons are not the solutions to poverty, addiction or being unhoused, so too, are they not the solution to white supremacy.
Many times, this issue gets muddled and misidentified as “infiltration” or “recruitment.” For example, four years ago (2020), a former FBI agent released a report claiming that “white supremacists and militia have infiltrated police across the US.” The report, from the Brennan Center, was called Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement. The main flaw in the report, and the scores of others like it, is that it configures law enforcement as somehow devoid of white supremacy until it has been “infiltrated” by the far right. In reality, the modern police force began as slave patrols. As W.E.B. DuBois writes in Black Reconstruction:
“The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of poor whites...it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters.”
What DuBois understood so clearly, and what we seem to have forgotten, is the way that the state is interested in perpetuating white supremacy. It is a crucial, ideological element in the continued smooth operation of racial capitalism. We cannot section off “hate crimes” and prosecute them within a state apparatus that is rooted in white supremacy. It will always, inevitably, harm people of color. For instance, in the Cyber Racism book, I wrote about how the first case of a person being charged with a “hate crime” for online activity was a young man at UC-Irvine who was Latinx. As I tried to show in that book, the move of this ideology to online spaces (in the early 1990s) means that white supremacy is a globally-networked problem, outside the reach of individual nation-states.
So, how do “hate crimes” become propaganda in this context? Well, one way to do that is to get a non-governmental agency like the ADL to keep shifting the definition. In a report from the ADL that is getting repeated by news agencies around the world, “antisemitic incidents” in the U.S. “surge to record-highs.” Such reports would be concerning, if true. However, if you read further, you read that the so-called “surge” is due to the expanded definition of what the ADL considers a “hate crime,” as this article from the BBC explains:
Part of the overall increase comes from a change in methodology to include "expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism", the ADL said.
It seems so clear, now. Here, in the ADL’s use of it, “hate crime” is part of the propaganda, the hasbara, used to defend the Zionist entity known as “Israel.”
Just as the state gets to decide who is a “terrorist,” and this somehow always defaults to a Black or Brown person, almost always a Muslim person, the state also gets to decide who is committing a “hate crime” and who is a victim of one. Because of this, the FBI and Homeland Security, completely ignored the massive amount intelligence leading up to January 6, dismissing the threat of people descending on the Capitol because they didn’t “fit the profile” of who they assumed to pose a threat.
That’s why I think it’s imperative to study white supremacy. Once you start to understand that, more of the world comes into focus. And that, for me, is easier than not knowing.