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65 Chapter 4 Cultural Criminalization and the Figure of the Hater Do you find any element of humanity in him? Do you find any explanation for what happened? —Charles Gibson inquiring about hate crime perpetrator John William King In his foundational study of deviance in Puritan New England, Wayward Puritans, sociologist Kai Erikson explodes the seeming divide between the figure of the conformist and the figure of the deviant.“The deviant and the conformist,” states Erikson,“are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination.”1 Erikson’s choice of the words “invention ” and “imagination” draws our attention to the layered acts of creation that produce society’s images of both criminality and obedience. But “same” is the more important word, repeated twice. Erikson’s sense of sameness, of shared origin and shared terrain, is perhaps the single most essential insight into understanding the figure of the American hater. As a deviant being, the hater betrays secrets about the nature of the conformity that faces him.Yet, the work of our culture seems entirely geared toward erasing any trace of the hater’s sameness.The hater is invented to be expelled, interpolated, or called into being, only to be rejected. But we must ask why.Why create to punish? The figure of the hater, or more specifically the white hate crimes perpetrator , is a creature of the post–civil rights era’s distinct criminological imagination . During the 1990s, when hate crimes were becoming both a widely recognized social problem and a source of moral panic, publicity surrounding the most sensational hate crimes and these crimes’ perpetrators dramatized the issue in ways that skewed its political potential and aroused public interest. The contours of the hater’s public persona, the visual impression stirred by the hater’s appearance, can be located firmly within the overarching national debates that characterize the post–civil rights era. As Erikson argues, deviant figures are inherently social beings. 66 To u g h o n H at e ? The hater’s story is that of a “new” folk devil coming into being during the ascendance of victim’s rights sympathies, the institutionalization of tough-on-crime politics, the emergence of widespread belief among whites in reverse racism, and, I would argue, a significant ideological divestment from state-sponsored racial justice initiatives. I qualify“new” here because if the figure of the hater is read as a new folk devil, then it is important to observe that he,and it is almost always a he,arrives wearing hand-me-down clothes.Representations of haters reincarnate depictions of lynchers from the 1930s, which described members of lynch mobs as “out-of-towners” and “white trash,” and of the civil rights era’s most violent white villains.As journalist H. L. Mencken wrote for the Evening Sun on December 17, 1931, communities where lynchings had occurred had regrettably “succumbed to poor white trash.”2 Paradigmatic modern-day haters refigured these historically entrenched images of extreme racists to suit the post–civil rights era’s novel identity-based formations , ideologies, and practices. Indeed, cultural fascination with this figure peaked between the late 1990s and September 11, 2001, a period of continued backlash against civil rights era achievements and before the figure of the terrorist become the national icon of evil. Portraits of the most notorious American haters trade in dehumanizing suppositions about the character of the bigoted individual. Prominent American haters have been described varyingly as “skinheads,”“cowards and nuts,”“criminal thugs,”transients,”“troubled high school dropouts from broken homes,” “ex-cons,” and “dysfunctional losers.”3 As this bleak menagerie of deficiencies underscores,the figure of the hater occupies the role of peripheral evildoer. His embodiment of modern-day bigotry is made legible through the reiteration of potent stereotypes. In representing haters, the mainstream news media and national political figures perform their own tolerance by circulating familiar stereotypes about class, mental health, masculinity, and criminality. Beyond being a historically specific cultural construct, the figure of the hater and the degradation rituals performed upon him also play an essential role in framing the problem of hate crimes within a “post-difference” worldview.The figure of the hater’s very familiarity, the tropes that have come to define his strong cultural presence, convey to mainstream audiences that bigotry is an individual criminal or mental health problem that is best handled by law enforcement authorities. In conversation with new scholarship from cultural criminology and whiteness studies, this chapter argues that the...

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