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45 Chapter 3 The Nation and Post-Difference Politics The prevailing common sense of the post–civil rights era is that race is the province of an unjust, irrational ascription and prejudice, while nation is the necessary horizon of our hopes for color-blind justice, equality, and fair play. —Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country Unlike other vexing social problems, hate crimes have been burdened with the chore of telling us who we are as Americans. “We can embody our values by passing hate crime laws,” urged Vice President Al Gore.“[Hate crimes are] not the American way,” asserted President Bill Clinton in his 2000 State of the Union Address. More recently, President Barack Obama posited,“At root, this isn’t just about our laws, this is about who we are as people.” As these statements highlight, the fight against hate crimes is shrouded in national mythology. This elevated rhetoric about shared values suggests that, even when these kinds of crimes happen in the United States, they are deemed un-American.1 Not only are hate crimes defined as un-American, but in marking these boundaries the nation becomes a central character within narratives about these crimes, taking the stage alongside perpetrators and victims.The nation enters into hate crimes stories through two primary themes:In the first theme, the nation plays the role of external moral agent who stands in judgment of hate crimes and signifies the illusion of ethical consensus. These narratives participate in the production of the myth that hate crimes are un-American. In the second theme, the nation is positioned as the real victim of hate crimes. In these alarmist narratives, an “epidemic” of hate crimes afflicts the nation, which implicitly casts the fight against hate crimes as a matter of national survival.While logically incongruous—how can the nation possibly be both removed from and victimized by hate crimes?—many narratives simultaneously utilize both themes. 46 To u g h o n H at e ? Descriptions of hate crimes being un-American and of the nation itself being victimized by these crimes can be found starting from the very beginning of the problem’s public life through to current debates. Even as the historical context shifted around the issue, these themes remained remarkably fixed in their reiteration; the exact same phrases, terms, and metaphors used during congressional hearings in 1988 resurfaced unaltered in news broadcasts aired in 2012. These themes and the politics they engender appear to have hegemonic tendencies, or what social theorist Pierre Bourdieu describes as a quality of“taken-for-grantedness.”2 Yet,they are not perfectly universal.Political actors and media figures tend to reproduce this rhetoric, refuse to speak on the topic of hate crimes, or, as the case of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright highlights, accept the sundry labels of extremism. President George W. Bush is a clear outlier. As one of the rare national political figures to oppose federal anti-hate-crime legislation prior to 2008, President Bush had a limited range of rhetorical options with which to legitimately express his stance. Instead of challenging the nationalistic rhetoric used to promote federal anti-hate-crime legislation, President Bush simply did not speak on the topic unless asked directly during public debates or in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. When unable to remain silent on the topic, President Bush framed his opposition in terms of states’ rights, which left the dominant frame largely unchallenged. Significantly, these narratives reveal that as public visibility of hate crimes increased during the late 1980s and 1990s, said publicity surprisingly created opportunities for revisionist history, assertions of American exceptionalism, and celebrations of the nation’s alleged accomplishment of color-blind ideals. New scholarship on the spatial dynamics of bias-motivated victimization highlights the political utility of fictitiously locating hate crimes on the “outside” of mainstream politics and everyday life. This “handy fiction,” geographer Colin Flint explains, “clouds the pervasiveness of identifying ‘others’ and discriminating against them.”3 As Flint’s choice of the verb “clouds” suggests, the nation’s aggrandizement within hate crimes discourse overrides more probing interrogations of the localized grievances of specific minority communities. In addition to being socially constructed, spaces of hate and their proverbial inverse, spaces of tolerance, have a cultural nexus. As geographer Rini Sumartojo argues,“The notion that hate crimes and the reactions they provoke are part of the production of place is another important subject for investigation . . . such crime contributes to...

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