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Overview
Brandzel's focus on three legal case studies—same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization—exposes how citizenship confounds and obscures the mutual processes of settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. In this way, Brandzel argues that citizenship requires anti-intersectionality, that is, strategies that deny the mutuality and contingency of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation—and how, oftentimes, progressive left activists and scholars follow suit.
Against Citizenship is an impassioned plea for a queer, decolonial, anti-racist coalitional stance against the systemized human de/valuing and anti-intersectionalities of citizenship.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252040030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2016 |
| Series: | Dissident Feminisms |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Against Citizenship
The Violence of the Normative
By Amy L. Brandzel
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08150-7
CHAPTER 1
The Specters of Citizenship
Hate Crimes and the Fear of the Repressed
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived. Its history drives the violated into violence and, one of these days, violence will literally signal the end of violence as a means. — June Jordan (1981)
In the patriotic fervor that swept throughout U.S. national culture after the events of September 11, 2001, declarations of loyalty such as "United We Stand" and "God Bless America" became pervasive. Marking identifications on bodies via T-shirts and spaces such as houses and automobiles, there was a way in which U.S. nationalism had an almost desperate tone. But as the space for left critique shriveled within the national public sphere, there was another bumper sticker pronouncement that allowed for a more complex reading: "These colors don't run." Most often this slogan was placed on top of an image of the American flag, suggesting that the reference to "colors" might correlate to the red, white, and blue of U.S. patriotism. However, the reference to "color" cannot help but bleed outside of these particular containers. Considering the violence against people of color, especially in times of fervent U.S. nationalism, the reference to "color" directs our attention to the racialized violent border maintenance of normative citizenship.
The patriotic demand that "These Colors Don't Run" is complicated by the various forms of racial profiling that were institutionalized at both governmental and civilian levels on behalf of the "war on terror." These profiling techniques were aimed at, as well as productive of, the consolidation of Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, and Middle Easterners into an amorphous racialized category of "Muslim-looking" people as potential terrorists. For example, immediately after September 11, 2001, U.S. federal and state-level governments implemented several mechanisms to track, locate, and detain potential terrorists, including Homeland Security dragnets aimed at collecting "Muslim-looking" peoples for interrogation and indefinite detention, the reinstitutionalization of explicit racial profiling at various levels, and transformations in immigration and student visa policies. Importantly, civilians operationalized racial profiling policies through a wave of violent physical and verbal attacks against "Muslim-looking" peoples in the days, weeks, and months after September 11, 2001. Reports vary, but some organizations suggest that there were over one thousand "hate crimes" against "Muslim-looking" peoples in the weeks immediately following the September 11th attack. These ranged from verbal harassment, to violent physical assaults, to murder. Many incidents barely registered in the news, including a Pakistani store owner who was threatened by a "Caucasian" male in Norwich, Connecticut, to leave the country; an East Indian male who was stabbed in the arm by a group of white male perpetrators who accused him of being a "terrorist"; a South Asian woman who was spit on while riding the New York City subway; and a Sikh grocery store owner who was shot to death in Long Island. One of the few stories that did make the national news was the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh in Mesa, Arizona, who was shot five times by an assailant (Frank Roque) who declared "all Arabs had to be shot." When we consider the long history of "patriotic" violence against people of color, alongside the post-September 11, 2001, consolidation of "Muslim-looking" peoples into "potential terrorists," we are forced to consider a wholly different reading as to which colors are forced to run — run to protect their bodily integrity, their communities, and their lives.
Violence against "others" has long been part of the boundary-marking apparatus of U.S. citizenship. As much as the discourse around hate crimes suggests that these are rare acts perpetrated by castigated (white, male, heterosexual) supremacists, many critical theorists have argued that hate crimes are extensions of state de facto and de jure discriminatory practices, with perpetrators acting as vigilantes in service of maintaining and enforcing the national imaginary of the normative body politic. These scholars have rightfully implicated the nation-state in maintaining — if not producing — the conditions for civilian hate crimes. In his groundbreaking analysis of hate crimes after September 11, 2001, Muneer Ahmad argues that the U.S. nation-state has "projected violence against Arab, Muslim, and South Asians as a social norm" through government practices of racial profiling, immigration policies and detention programs, and Homeland Security dragnets that detain and interrogate the loyalties of, literally, countless "Muslim-looking" citizens and noncitizens. His analysis demonstrates that civilians who perpetrate hate crimes against "Muslim-looking" people are merely being "good citizens" and doing their part of enacting the violent boundary-maintenance work of citizenship.
Building on the idea that hate crimes are one of the enforcement mechanisms of normative citizenship, this chapter considers the violent maintenance of citizenship and the uses of hate crime legislation to both name and disallow any recognition of this violence. My intervention into how we understand citizenship to be violently organized functions at two interconnected levels, that is, at the structural level of state violence, and at the social level of identity categories. At the level of the state, hate crime legislation offers us important information as to how the violence of citizenship is managed, controlled, and directed. Many left scholars point to the ways in which hate crime legislation serves to give further license to state violence. In the name of "protecting" the nonnormative, the U.S. police state is given freer reign to violate vulnerable populations and continue the escalation of an already out-of-control prison industrial complex and border patrol. Hate crime legislation perpetuates the erroneous understanding that civilian forms of violence are more common, and more heinous, than state-sanctioned forms of violence. Through the rhetoric of hate crimes legislation, hate crimes continue to be tied to the extraordinary, the heinous, and the past (most often, the organized vigilante white supremacy of the segregated South), while the ordinary, everyday violence of structural racism, especially as perpetuated via state and federal governance, is obscured. These are the connections that are deferred, if not denied: that hate crimes take place on a spectrum, from governmental actions, governmental inactions, organized groups, vigilantes, and individuals. There has been a dangerous discontinuum in which hate crimes and the violent operations of citizenship are individualized while state-sanctioned police violence is systemically assuaged. And yet, as much as hate crime legislation serves to distract people from seeing state-sanctioned violence as a "hate crime," there are also very important ways in which community groups have used hate crime legislation as a means to critique the state. Holding state actors accountable for the production of difference, hate crime legislation activists and community members use the language and laws of hate crimes to teach state actors (especially the police) about structural difference and the violations of bodily integrity from both state and nonstate actors.
Because politicians, activists, and scholars are increasingly debating as to which identity classifications should be included as "protectable," hate crime legislation is an especially ripe site for analyzing how identity categories function at the level of the social. As I demonstrate here, hate crime legislation and the surrounding debates allow us to see how categories of difference and intersectionality function — or to be more accurate, dysfunction — within the nation-state. Scholars rarely, if ever, apply an intersectional analysis to hate crime legislation. By deploying such a framework, I showcase how the debates on hate crime legislation are informed by, and contorted through, what I refer to as the logics of comparative anti-intersectionality, whereby the categories of race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality are segregated and set in opposition to each other. Individuals across the political spectrum consistently deploy comparative anti-intersectional ways of knowing. These epistemologies are used in order to safeguard normative citizenship by denying the possibility of intersectional identities and intersectional connectivities. Moreover, these epistemologies reflect and perpetuate the ways in which categories of race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality are understood as having very different relationships to violence, citizenship, and the right to bodily integrity.
Through combining an analysis of what hate crime legislation does, at the level of the state and at the level of social categories, this chapter argues that hate crime legislation exposes an ongoing and simultaneous recognition and denial of: (i) the violence of citizenship and (2) the fear that the oppressed will seek revenge and retaliate for this experience by using violence themselves. As the June Jordan epigraph that begins this chapter points out, "A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived. Its history drives the violated into violence and, one of these days, violence will literally signal the end of violence as a means" Therefore, hate crime legislation serves as an outlet for managing the specters of citizenship — the disenfranchised, the excluded, the Othered — their experience of violence, and their possible retaliation for this experience. My readings of hate crime legislation and the rhetoric surrounding it locates the state as the instigating conduit of normative violence and hate crime legislation as a strategic pressure release valve that keeps the violent mechanisms of citizenship operational.
The Evolution of Hate Crime Legislation
Hate crime legislation is a hotly contested site, whereby scholars, activists, and politicians argue over whether it protects or causes more harm to disenfranchised peoples and whether it works to excuse the state or hold it accountable for hate crimes. A liberal reading suggests that hate crime legislation is the successful manifestation of civil rights activism's goal to promote and protect the bodily integrity and rights of historically disenfranchised peoples. Meanwhile, conservatives rail against hate crime legislation, arguing that it is a form of "special rights," which works to mark certain kinds of victims (read: nonnormative citizen-subjects} as more worthy of protection than others (read: normative citizen-subjects}. And many critical left scholars and activists have adamantly opposed hate crime legislation, mostly on the grounds that it bolsters the discriminatory criminal justice system and furthers the vulnerability of young men of color to police violence. This left critique suggests that hate crime legislation works to distract the populace from recognizing and confronting state violence and governmental practices of intimidation and harassment.
With this left critique in mind, we can conceptualize hate crime legislation as a complicated paradox; hate crime legislation is both a dangerous, yet valiant, response to the everyday experiences of violence for many people of color, Indigenous, LGBT folks, disabled communities, and women. Left activists and scholars certainly "cannot not want" (in Gayatri Spivak's famous phrasing} the right to bodily integrity and safety for the disenfranchised, the nonnormative, and the noncitizen. Yet at the same time, they cannot afford to support any legislation that reinforces the discriminatory and brutal police state. While I certainly delve into this quagmire, I hope to move the conversation away from the common pro/con setup, and, instead, use hate crime legislation to expose the state's investment in anti-intersectional epistemologies.
As the scholarship suggests, the exact definition of "hate crime" is a source of controversy amongst advocates and opponents of hate crime legislation. Most commonly, hate crimes are described as physical violence and/or physical intimidation that are motivated by the perpetrator's recognition of and hatred toward the victim's perceived difference. Tom Streissguth, for example, describes hate crimes as "selecting other humans for assault, injury, and murder on the basis of certain personal characteristics: different appearance, different color, different nationality, different language, different religion." The reoccurring terms of hate crimes tend to emphasize an individual perpetrator's motivations (i.e., "hatred," "bias," or "prejudice"} as well as their recognition and categorization of difference (i.e., "race," "color," "nationality," etc.}. Importantly, these reoccurring definitions delimit hate crimes by individualizing them and obscuring societal contexts. And, of course, which differences matter is a central concern in the debates on hate crime. While most hate crime legislation readily recognizes hate crimes predicated upon perceived racial, ethnic, national origins, and religious grounds, the recognition of sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity have been much more contested. And as hate crime legislation has become increasingly commonplace in the U.S. political landscape, some activists have pushed for the inclusion of other categories, such as "the homeless," "the elderly," or "immigrants," or asked for more differentiation within the categories of inclusion, such as adding a specific subcategory for Sikhs, Arabs, and Hindus.
The federal legislation on hate crimes tends to come in a few different forms. Some suggest that the earliest form of such legislation connects back to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which criminalized the act of interfering with, intimidating, or threatening a person's performance of a civil right (such as serving on a jury or voting) on the basis of "race, color, religion, or national origin." One could, however, connect hate crime legislation to even earlier incarnations of civil rights legislation, particularly from the Reconstruction Era, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act), which aimed to provide civil remedies for African Americans who were intimidated or terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. The first official "hate crime" legislation focused on data collection and the search for "proof" of hate crimes. For example, the first federal law using the language of "hate crimes" is the Hate Crime Statistics Act. Passed in 1990, the law requires that the federal government collect statistics on hate crimes involving "race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity." In 1994 it was modified to include counting acts aimed at people with disabilities, and in 2009 it was amended again to include data on gender and gender-identity–motivated hate crimes, as well as track the number of juveniles involved at either end of the incident.
These statistical acts follow the conservative impulse to, first, count and prove that hate crimes are an existing social problem before state and/or federal actions will be considered. When alleviation is deemed appropriate, it most often comes in the form of a "sentence enhancement" law, which increases the sentences of persons who are prosecuted for previously defined criminal activity (such as vandalism and/or assault) alongside what can be deemed as a hate crime. In 1994 Congress passed the Hate Crime Sentencing Enhancement Act as part of one of the most expansive crime bills in U.S. history. The law directed the U.S. Sentencing Commission to create a three-tier guideline for sentence enhancements for hate crimes. Here, hate crimes were defined as, "a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person." These earlier incarnations of hate crime legislation laid the foundation for fixing hate crime within the national lexicon, and marked the transition from data collection to sentence enhancement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Against Citizenship by Amy L. Brandzel. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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