Last updated 2024 June 18.
Hate crime laws are an easy way for the government to act like it is on our communities’ side while continuing to discriminate against us. Liberal politicians and institutions can claim “anti-oppression” legitimacy and win points with communities affected by prejudice, while simultaneously using “sentencing enhancement” to justify building more prisons to lock us up in. Hate crime laws foreground a single accused individual as the “cause” of racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or any number of other oppressive prejudices. They encourage us to lay blame and focus our vengeful hostility on one person instead of paying attention to institutional prejudice that fuels police violence, encourages bureaucratic systems to ignore trans people’s needs or actively discriminate against us, and denies our communities health care, identification, and so much more.
Anything that expands the power of a system that damages our communities so severely is against our long-term and short-term interests. Any legal weapon that’s created to make our justice system more harsh and punitive cannot be trusted in the hands of institutions that have shown their prejudices and corruption time and time again. Because of the way this legislation has been turned against the communities they were intended to protect, we regard “sentence enhancement” hate crime laws as one of the greatest follies of late-20th-century liberal politics.
— Sylvia Rivera Law Project & others, 2009
Against Equality, an archive of radical queer politics, was massively influential for my own development as a teenager coming into my identity during the legalization of gay marriage in the US. They organized their critiques along three themes: marriage, military, and prisons. Within those critiques of prisons was a series of late-1990s/early-2000s texts against hate crimes legislation, many of which have turned out to be enormously prescient.
Almost a decade has now passed since the most recent texts in their archive. Given its relevance to the current political moment, I wanted to put together a new reading list on anti-hate laws and policing, including replacing some dead links with Wayback captures. However, this blog isn’t an archival project. Unlike Against Equality, I’m not aiming for a comprehensive list of writing on the subject. There are some texts, even early and foundational ones, that I’ve chosen not to include. Rather this is just a list of resources that I found valuable and hope other people will too. They include both general critiques and write-ups of specific incidents of repression.
Some Foundational Critiques
Black and Pink, “A Compilation of Critiques on Hate Crimes Legislation.” 2009, Against Equality.
Shepard Byrd Act / United States / 2009
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, Peter Cicchino Youth Project & Audre Lorde Project, “SRLP Announces Non-Support of The Gender Employment Non-Discrimination Act.” 2009 April 6, Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
GENDA / New York / 2009
Naa Hammond, “Illusions of Safety: Policing Hate Crimes Won’t Make Us Safer.” 2013 June 9, The Bilerico Project.
Queer / New York / 2009
Liliana Segura, “Do Hate Crime Laws Do Any Good?” 2009 August 3, AlterNet.
Shepard Byrd Act / United States / 2009
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “SRLP On Hate Crime Laws.” 2009, Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
Shepard Byrd Act / United States / 2009
Canada
Anonymous, “On “Hate”, the Hamilton Police, and Mexican Food.” 2018 May 21, North Shore Counter-Info.
Anarchism & G20 / Hamilton / 2009
Evan Vipond, “Trans Rights Will Not Protect Us: the Limits of Equal Rights Discourse, Antidiscrimination Laws, and Hate Crime Legislation.” 2015 September 8, Western Journal of Legal Studies 6, No. 1.
Queer / Canada / early 2010s
Florence Ashley, “Don’t Be So Hateful: The Insufficiency of Anti-Discrimination and Hate Crime Laws in Improving Trans Well-Being.” Winter 2018, University of Toronto Law Journal 68.
Queer / Canada / 1990s to 2018
Anonymous, “Fuck the Parole Board, Fuck Hate Crime Policy, and As Always Fuck the Police.” 2019 July 8, North Shore Counter-Info.
Queer & anarchism / Hamilton / 2019
T.Y. Kui, “Anti-hate: the new face of political policing.” 2024 February 7, Briarpatch Magazine.
General / Canada / early 2000s to 2024
United States
Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. August 2015, Duke University Press.
Queer / United States / 1990s to 2015
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “SRLP Statement on the Passing of GENDA.” 2019 January 25, Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
GENDA / New York / 2019
Kay Whitlock, “Policing “Hate” Supposedly Protects People — But It Really Fuels More Violence.” 2021 July 26, Truthout.
General / United States / 2010s to 2020s
Dylan Rodriguez, “How the Stop Asian Hate Movement Became Entwined with Zionism, Policing, and Counterinsurgency.” 2024 April 10, Critical Ethnic Studies.
Stop Asian Hate / United States / 2020 to 2024
Transgender Law Center, “We Keep Us Safe: Interrogating Hate Crime Legislation.” Transgender Law Center.
Queer / United States / no date
Other Compilations
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “Hate Crimes Legislation References.” 2009 April 6, Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
Against Equality, “Prison.” Against Equality.
Micah Herskind, “Hate Crimes and White Supremacist Violence.” Micah Herskind.