FIRST GENDER-BASED HATE CRIME CONVICTION

[David Cruz]

On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, James Maule wrote (in response to Leslie Goldstein):

> I think we're on different channels. I don't dispute that certain speech
> can foster violence toward members of a typed group, or that certain
> speech can make a person intimidated or can make a group of persons feel
> threatened.
>
> What I am saying is that if there is a crime of "societal disruptive
> speech" (of which "hate speech" would be a category) it must stand on
> its own and not be swept into the crime of assault, the crime of murder,
> the crime of theft, the crime of embezzlement, etc.  [snip]

I think Jim is right that Leslie and I are on a different wavelength.  I
don't see the issue as being the harms of SPEECH, but maybe that's what
Jim meant to be addressing in his original post and my confusion stemmed
from what I took to his assimilating all hate crimes to hate speech.  It's
not the speech involved in lynching that terrorized black people; it was,
I thought, not only the violence but also the TARGETING of them for the
violence, which is where systemic subordination comes in.  That said, I
would agree that one should not presume race-based motivation from the
fact, e.g., that the victim of an assault is black.  But this is a
separate point from Jim's nearsightedness argument, which is what I took
Leslie and myself to be disputing.

-David B. Cruz, USC Law (Cal.)