Week 12: Ethnicity and victimisation

"I think we should consider the possibility that this attempted murder was a hate crime."
"What, as opposed to one of those 'I really, really like you' type of murders?"
- Life on Mars

This week we took the approach of radical victimology, with its stress on power and injustice as the context for crime, and applied it to a different area: ethnicity and 'race'.

Radical victimology starts from the basis that some people hold power over others, and do so in ways that are unaccountable and unjust. Is this a useful way of thinking about ethnicity? It's certainly not true to say that every member of an ethnic minority is less powerful than every White person. Nor is it true to say that all White people would discriminate against Asians (for example) if they had the chance - any more than all Asians would discriminate against Whites.

The point is more about the relationship between prejudice and power. This country, like many others, has a long history of discrimination against ethnic minorities: fifty or a hundred years ago it would have been completely routine and unsurprising to see positions of power reserved for White people, and to see those people using their power in discriminatory ways. This is no longer normal or acceptable, but it still goes on - and it's no secret that there are people who would like it to be normal and acceptable again. Because of that history, and because those discriminatory values do still survive, the White majority - on the scale of society as a whole - has a power that ethnic minorities don't have: the power to discriminate, in ways that have a major effect on people's life chances. It's not a coincidence that black and minority ethnic people are significantly more likely to live in poorer areas - and, as a result, significantly more likely to become victims of crime, including 'normal' crimes with no racial motivation. This is the sense in which ethnicity, and the more-or-less imagined categories of 'race', has to do with power and injustice.

Whether it's useful to talk about racist crime in terms of 'hate crime' is another question; the police certainly think it is. Personally I'm sceptical; this is partly for the reason given by Gene Hunt, partly because I think the 'hate crime' label is too general. If members of any group can be a victim of 'hate crime', then 'hate crime' is purely about irrational prejudice - and not about power and histories of injustice. I think losing that background makes racist crime harder, not easier, to explain and to challenge.