well this is...:carl:

L.A. times article

and of course it is not a "hate crime" if the victim is white... or rather, ginger.

This sounds like anti-Scottish sentiment, which I surely take offense to as someone with Scottish ancestors.

ignore the fact that I have brown hair and brown eyes

I don't see how this isn't a hate crime. Assaults took place based solely upon ones ancestry/whatever you wanna call it.

I didn't kick a ginger, but I friendly-fire'd a ginger in MW2 today. True story.

Similarities with things normally called "hate crime":

-Violence done to individuals selected on the basis phenotypic characteristics


Differences from things normally called "hate crime":

-Motivated by a messed up sense of humor & South Park rather than racial bigotry
-Targets not members of a group systemically disadvantaged by society


So can we get over our semantic hangups and agree that this isn't a prototypical case, regardless of whatever we choose to call it?

I'm confused as to what you mean by that. If a group has to be "systematically disadvantaged by society" for it to qualify as a hate crime, does that mean a black man killing a white man for being white doesn't qualify?

I don't like hate crime laws, but they should enforce them equally.

no. as long as there are groups of people who are excluded from being victims of "hate crimes" based solely on their skin pigmentation i dont think the discrepancies should be swept under the rug.

or if we can agree that all crime is bad and if you are shot in the face for money it is just as bad as being shot in the face for being member of a systemically disadvantaged group... then yeah we can go ahead and toss those semantics right off a third story balcony.

i dont know why this gets to me but it really does.

(...waits for mort or jonc to tell me i am a secret bigot but dont realize it yet)

Ok. Fair enough. Perhaps I could save my intended point by saying that this crime "had nothing to do with the power dynamics of racial identity," which would cover violence going either way.

In this case (at least how it was presented in the article, which... well, who knows...) it seems pretty clear that the violence had nothing to do with racism and everything to do with idiots with a bad sense of humor. If that's not the case, then yes of course it should be considered a hate crime.

i was, just going to post this

are you watching NBC?

and poor red heads

OH FINE.

Search youtube for Tim Minchin - Prejudice while I learn how to inline youtube videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLLYO8Hd_sE

Word.

bigot <_< >_>

Bull****.


Jewish people are FAR from systematically disadvantaged. If you pull a Mel Gibson that will be considered a hate crime. In fact quite a lot of them are VERY prosperous.

Also it doesn't mean two ****s about how "systematically disadvantaged" you are. Slander against race is slander against race. Period.

Again, this statement is bull****.

is it a hate crime if the person is half black/half white and ginger? if not, my friend ashley better watch out.

hahahaha, oh wow.

that's why black men hating on the white man is called 'reverse racism,' yes?

...?

plz to read whole thread?

[edit: and yes, in some academic circles, there's been an attempt to distinguish between the theory of "racism" which has to do with oppressive power structures and various types of xenophobia/racial hatred/bias/bigotry]

It's important to observe the forms discrimination can take but everything you mentioned is variously synonymous with "racism."

Which group of postmodernist/deconstructionist literary critics are busying themselves with this?

Because I couldn't fix it before, and nobody will appreciate this otherwise.

[/QUOTE]

The subject of the OP was pretty messed up. But to be honest, doesn't this happen all the time. We've had 'happy slapping' in England, 'Turk/Moroccan vs. Dutch' fights here in Holland, and now we've got 'kick a ginger' in America. Kids are stupid, they're gonna stay stupid until they're 15-20, depending on how fast they're becoming more mature (if they even become mature at all...).

The video was pretty frickin' amazing

1. I was talking about sociologists, not literary theorists. (Although, to be honest, literary theorists are probably more likely to know what they're talking about than sociologists, at least within their respective disciplines.)

2. Pomo/deconstructionism takes a lot of flak from people who don't really get what it's about; the fact that you use "postmodernist" like Wookie uses "liberal" suggests to me that you're one of them. (Then again, lots of crappy "scholarship" has been published by dunces who think that the label is an excuse for plain gibberish, so I guess it's a forgivable misunderstanding.)

3. Words are only words: how I gerrymander the distinctions between them doesn't really matter, as long as my interlocutors know what I mean by them. Words aren't true or false; statements can be true or false. My original post to this thread was an attempt to make this statement: "Although 'kick a ginger day' targets individuals based on their appearance, it doesn't seem that it's actually based on any sort of racial bias or hatred. That's probably why the authorities involved aren't treating it as a case of hate crime."

Do you disagree with my assessment of the motivation of the individuals involved? Do you disagree that those motivations are a fairly central aspect of the concept of hate crime? Then say so.

Darth Alran suggested that perhaps the motivation behind criminal behaviors shouldn't factor into how they're prosecuted. That's a reasonable and clearly-articulated position, which we could have a discussion about if we wanted.

What isn't helpful is sniping at whatever someone's last post said.


My only point in bringing up the more limited academic use of "racism" was to point out that there are meaningful distinctions between the forms that racism can take; I think that the colloquial term "reverse racism" acknowledges the existence of one such distinction. Is bigotry morally repugnant in any person, regardless of race? Of course. But racial discrimination against disadvantaged classes is more pervasively oppressive, which is why it gets more attention.

That is because Tim Minchin is AWESOME

I would like to take this moment to remind RogerSpruce that I am blond, NOT a redhead.

Yes, I do disagree with the claim that this crime was not racially-motivated. The reasons are intensely obvious.

Reductio ad absurdum. If you lynch a black man 'for the lulz' is it still a hate crime?

Edit: w.r.t. the bulk of your post, I'm not really too interested in the chance to compare literary criticism techniques with someone who is destined to either be a lawyer or manage a starbucks based on gpa but thanks

The said thing is, people will blame the creators of South Park, or the creators of the Facebook group.

Well, thanks for warning us that your argument is going to be fallacious.

Context matters. Lynching has a long history, and the very fact that you chose that manner of murder (and used it on a black person, no less) suggests that you're aware of your connection with that history. So "for the lulz" is no longer an adequate characterization of the criminal's motives.

(I also still think that social power dynamics are relevant to the categorization of hate crime: if a serial killer targeted exclusively left-handed victims, or unibrowed victims, I probably wouldn't consider it a hate crime because "sinistrophobia" isn't a thing in our society. Now, if people started making a trend of targeting left-handers, at some point I'd have to reconsider and ask myself what's causing the pattern. At some point, the pattern itself, regardless of cause, becomes a societal problem that makes life more difficult for left-handers in general. Which is generally the reason we treat hate crime specially.)


wrt litcrit: your loss, but if you ever change your mind, we can discuss it over discounted grande skim lattes sans foam.

RAA isn't a fallacious argument, it's how 99% of math works.

You're right, context (and history) is important. For example, why do you assert the long history of American racism against black people makes a murder of a black person an ipso facto hate crime, but the long history of American racism against the Irish makes "Kick a Ginger Day!" battery?

Sounds good

Thats debatable.

Thanks; didn't know that.



I didn't quite mean to say this. A murder of a black person for being black is a hate crime; I meant my last post to suggest that it's very difficult to imagine that someone would murder a black person just for the lulz. Especially if that murder is framed in terms of previous hate crimes (you used the word "lynched"), the suspicion of racial motivation gets even stronger. Obviously not every crime against a minority is automatically a hate crime.



I was wondering if this would come up. My answer is that I don't think that racism against the Irish has survived, and that this incident isn't related to that history. But I'll admit to some ignorance on this issue: if you want to make a historical argument that anti-Irish sentiment has indeed persisted in our culture, I'm willing to listen. And if that's the case, then yes, I would be more likely to consider this incident a hate crime.

(I had this in mind when I made up the lefty serial killer example. Many ancient societies--and indeed some present-day ones that aren't our own--discriminated against left-handed people as cursed or what have you. But I don't think that that history has any meaningful connection to our modern Western social climate.)

Must... stop... reversing... "gin" ... in ... "ginger"

Reminds me that I should get my hair dyed, that bloody red is starting to break through again.

Hmm, the point of 'hate crime' legislation is about likeliness of reoffending. If you murder a black man because he slept with your wife, you're certainly a murderer but your only intended target was that black guy (and your likeliness of reoffending depends on the slutiness of your wife). If you murder a black man because he's black, you're just as much a murderer but you're also a threat to all black people and there's a much higher threat of reoffending.

I suppose there's a philosophical question of the role of the courts and prison system. Should the courts just respond to criminal actions, or should they actively seek to reform and prevent crime as well? It's not a trivial question, and I can make good arguments for either.

Taking the latter position, then I guess these attacks against gingers do constitute hate crime as the perpetrator is likely to attack any and all gingers (but only for one day of the year, apparently).

Then again, gingers have no souls.

no one is going to prosecute middle schoolers for a hate crime

thats like the definition of middle school

oh i beg to differ. if it had been kick a *ehem... nasty word for black person* day, and several young black kids got beat up, you can bet there would be prosecution.

I can't believe I missed Kick A Ginger Day.

Thanks, now every time I see "Kick a Ginger Day" I keep thinking of that.

Does that mean I am a secret bigot?

Nah, it means you like anagrams.

Kids totally get beat up for that too though.

Isn't every day Kick a Ginger Day?

We call them rangas over here

Firetruck

Matchstick

Tampon?

If you didn't get to kick a ginger, there's always Kick a Jew day.

can we have a "kick a gold day"???

Gold is a common Jewish name.