On Wednesday October 28, President Obama signed hate crimes legislation into law. The “Mathew Shepard Act” expands the current definition of federal hate crimes to include those based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.
No doubt many will be celebrating this bill as a “great achievement for gay rights.” However, maybe it is important to consider Kai Wright’s assertion that “Hate crimes are not a criminal justice problem.”
Quoting him at length: “Cops and courts have their place, but they aren’t a panacea. We like to think if we just ‘get tough’ on social problems we don’t want to meaningfully address, it’ll go away. But that hasn’t worked for drugs, it hasn’t worked for teen pregnancy or STDs, and it’s not gonna work for hate, of gay people or anybody else. Fixing those things takes a lot more work--work we don’t want to do... Supporters named the measure after Matthew Shepard, the young Wyoming man who’s brutal murder caught the nation off guard back in 1998. As me and other Root writers have noted, an uncounted number of black young people have since been tortured, killed and driven to suicide for being queer; not to mention the grisly violence transgender people in urban communities face routinely. Those crimes don’t make national headlines--even within the gay community--and the victims thus don’t qualify as hate-crime poster children. Which is the first sign that there’s not much honest about the discussion.”
Wright alludes to something of major importance. If society is to meaningfully address hate, we must critically reflect on ourselves and recognize that perhaps everyone, to varying extents and for different reasons, is complicit in the problem. As far as I am concerned, for us to resist homophobia, and other forms of hate such as racism, we need to, first and foremost, interrogate ourselves by trying to locate harmful prejudices and biases within us so that we can struggle against them. In many ways it is these biases and prejudices when gone unchecked that propel us to hate or privilege, often unknowingly, some people over others.
It is telling that this piece of legislation is commonly known as the “Mathew Shepard Act” when its official title is the Mathew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. James Byrd, Jr. was an African-American man who in 1998 (the same year Mathew Shepard was murdered) was chained to the back of a truck by three white men and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas.
Maybe it is wise to treat the passing of hate crimes legislation not as a “triumphant victory” but as only one element of social change, which also requires us to engage with what some philosophers call “work on the self by the self” to become better people.
