It Didn’t Begin in Hate: Why a Hate Crimes Framework Can’t Take Us to Abolition

Abstract

Hate, naturalized as a universal human emotion, is an increasingly popular analytical container in which to put terrible crimes of violence, crimes that are ineluctably racial. Hate as analytic does not offer a promising path towards understanding the oppressive systems and structures, war-making, race-making and colonial projects that produce and require considerable violence. There is, however, obvious political capital to be gained by employing hate as analytic, capital related to the work hate performs in turning our gaze away from the structural and from historical injustice and towards the psychosocial and even the biological. Through a focus on exceptional perpetrators with unique characteristics, hate as analytic establishes the innocence of the state and of dominant collectivities. Significantly, those contesting colonial dispossession can be deemed hateful, as Palestinians protesting the occupation of Palestine have been considered. Hate as analytic achieves its finest political utility when it provides the rails along which liberal solutions travel. If the hateful few are the problem, then empathy and tolerance are the answer, a “corrective liberalism” that takes us far away from the abolition of unjust systems.