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The accent is
still strong after over 40 years and I had to listen carefully; the man
patiently repeated himself whenever I asked. I asked often, not wishing to miss
a word.
He had left a
message with my editor, fervent to discuss my column on hate crime. His grammar
and spelling limits him on paper, he explained, but I had asked for feedback and
now I was going to get it.
He escaped to
this country after the Hungarian Revolt of 1956. When local authorities failed
to stem student and labor protests, Soviet armored divisions and infantry moved
against insurgents as they had earlier in Poland. Hundreds were executed,
thousands imprisoned. Nearly 200,000 refugees fled, including my caller, a
freedom fighter against Communist rule.
He came seeking
the rights and liberties that had been crushed in his homeland and he found
them. But he found something else too: derision and discrimination. It came,
he said, because of his accent, his foreignness, and the Star of David he wore
on a chain around his neck. Perhaps most galling, in 1950s America it came
because people assumed that as a Hungarian he was also a Communist.
But the defense
of hate crime legislation I expected didn’t follow. Instead, he said, he chose
America because he thought we all lived under the same rules; he’d seen too much
legal inequality in his youth. And though he had suffered from bias here, it
came at the hands of individuals, not the law. Authorities, he said, should
fight social disparity, not encode it.
I found passion
and reason on the other side of the argument as well. The most concise,
articulate support of hate crime laws I have come across arrived via email from
a reader who gave no name. “Hate crimes don't occur in a vacuum,” he or she
wrote. “They succeed in terrorizing precisely because they don’t simply
function to hurt individuals, but to make a deadly statement to already
vulnerable populations. We lie to ourselves if we say that the statement hate
crimes make against certain groups has not received tacit approval in this
society, and that these groups continue to suffer disproportionate levels of
hate crime.”
The writer also
noted as an analogy that “motive constitutes the sole distinction between 1st
degree murder, 2nd degree murder, and manslaughter.” It is an interesting
point, but misses the mark. I have fortunately had no occasion to become
personally familiar with homicide law, but I believe the distinction is intent,
not motive. That is, whether or not the perpetrator willfully intended to kill,
as opposed to their reason for committing the act, lethal or not.
A reader who
opposes hate crime laws made an interesting invitation. “Most (hatemongers are
not isolated) and we have encountered their ugly thoughts. Deal with them when
they come on your turf. Dare to engage them in other forms of thought ... there
might well be casualties in the war on hate, but are we willing to accept the
alternative?” I find the notion of boldness in the face of hate and bigotry
appealing. Perhaps our silence is just tolerance of the intolerable.
Another wrote
that hate laws “seem to have been invented to further the federalizing of local
and state crimes,” a cynic’s view, but not without precedent. The same writer
observed that hate crimes tend to become media events. Indeed, explaining
intense national coverage of a brutal attack on a white South Dakota man by
Native Americans that occurred after my column ran, a deputy managing editor of
the Associated Press said “If authorities identify it as that (a hate crime), we
cover it.” Facts be hanged, apparently; the hate motive supposed by the local
sheriff turned out to lack support.
As I wrote before, it will take a pretty convincing argument before I believe
that institutionalizing discriminatory justice is preferable to vigorous
prosecution of all crime. I haven’t heard one yet, but I do have greater
understanding of the thoughts on both sides of the debate. My thanks to all who
responded.
© 1997 – 2002 Brent Morrison
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