And we can all agree that the Camp Fire Girls and neighborhood stamp collectors club are not.
But for the remaining 98 percent of the spectrum of organizations out there, it is usually a matter of opinion as to who is and isn’t a hate group. And the criteria are so subjective that labeling a group as such usually has no value; i.e. one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
But wait -- some groups, like the Aryan Nations, are natural perfect fits for the designation “hate group.” That’s an empirical finding.
Yet, when we place that label on even the most indisputably deserving, we are certain to start sliding from the high ground down the slippery slope of “what about” equations run amok.
"What about Stalin and Pol Pot?" conservatives are fond of asking. How can Marxist-Leninist parties not be designated hate groups if the Hitlerian genocidists are? Well, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supported Pol Pot, so there go the Democrats and Republicans as well.
By unleashing such absolute standards, we could become paralyzed by a realization that every group is a hate group. I mean the Camp Fire Girls and stamp collectors drove to events with oil made more available by the U.S. and U.K forcing a dictatorship on Iran in 1953. The hate implicating process could never end.
An important distinction in this issue: the designation of a “hate crime” is a different matter than a hate group. Presuming hate crimes laws apply equally to all people and don’t infringe on free speech or peaceable assembly (which the Supreme Court has ruled must be the case), legally defining a criminal act a hate crime is proper, and helpful to achieving justice.
But either the state or private organizations designating groups “hate groups?” In the U.S., the state has no such power, because of the longtime doctrine of free association.
Non-governmental social justice organizations do have the right to express the opinion that a group is a hate group. But to see why doing so is fraught with hazards, check the history of that term.
The Southern Poverty Law Center leader Morris Dees largely popularized the concept of the “hate group.” Critics, including writers for The Nation, The New Yorker magazine, and James Madison University researcher Mark Purington, have asserted that Dees has actually neglected social justice causes by focusing the SPLC ‘s efforts on glamorized lawsuits against klansmen, in order to raise millions.
Purington’s JMU thesis said Dees raised $9 million for his Montgomery, Ala. based SPLC via impassioned, shockingly illustrated fundraiser letters about his winning a civil judgment against klan members in the 1980s. Yet that courtroom victory resulted in just a $52,000 payout to the mother of Michael Donald, who was murdered by the klansmen.
Purington acknowledged that Dees had told her in advance that the killers’ destitution meant she would never get more than a pittance of the multi-million dollar award sought. And in fact, $52,000 of the actual $7 million jury award was all Beulah Mae Donald got. Meanwhile the SPLC shared with her not one penny of its $9 million fundraising haul over her case.
Anti-racist activists within and outside the SPLC have blasted Dees for focusing so narrowly on such high profile cases, instead of the overall racial justice struggles the organization so deftly had waged in the 1970s.
Ken Silverstein, writing in Harper’s magazine, said the SPLC legal staff quit the organization in 1986 to protest Dees’ single minded pursuit of the Klan, which they believed was a minor threat compared to the daily injustices facing poor Americans.
Along with shifting toward cases that make for heroic sounding fund raising letters, Purington in his JMU paper and former SPLC staffer Bob Moser in The New Yorker magazine have written that the SPLC’s yearly release of its list of “hate groups” in the U.S. also is geared to boost fundraising.
And that list has been extended too widely to include groups that don’t lynch, bomb or openly espouse racism.
The SPLC’s web site says: “We define a hate group as an organization that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
But Moser, a former staffer under Dees at the SPLC, wrote in his New Yorker piece: “As critics have long pointed out… the hate-group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by decrying the SPLC’s ‘attacks.’ ”
Seth Andrews examines the related problem of the "extremist" list.
Even though just one organization, directed so centrally by Dees and a very few other people, calls organizations like the Family Research Council hate groups, the bulk of the U.S. left is widely thought of as having labeled them as such.
And the Family Research Council is a group that hates. But opposing its agenda requires examining exactly what is wrong with it, piece by piece. And exposing how the elite corporations' political agenda of exploiting the labor of women and minorities is really what maintains the "religious" right.
Stamping a group with an arbitrary label doesn't inspire us to do these involved tasks. But a gunman said the SPLC’s including the Family Research Council on its hate group list inspired him to enter the FRC’s headquarters in 2012, injuring one person and threatening to kill more. That attack made it seem the whole progressive population was saddled with an unsought image of stoking terrorism.
Dees and other SPLC staffers publicly denied that their issuing the hate group list had the effect of encouraging the attack, adding that the Family Research Council's false and denigrating statements about homosexual people, not the group's opposition to same-sex marriage, is what got it on the list. But such carefully put nuanced points need to lead a justice organization's report, not follow a violent misinterpretation of it.
And that messy episode, combined with mounting accusations first written about in the daily newspaper the Montgomery Advertiser that Dees himself had practiced racial discrimination within the SPLC’s ranks pointed to his days as director being numbered.
Dees was fired by the SPLC in 2019. Moser and other critics said his dismissal alone won’t end the toxic culture of discrimination and elitism within the SPLC.
Much more must be done to fix the mess in its Montgomery HQ.
Too many media sources automatically turn to the SPLC’s yearly list of hate groups as the measure of whether the far right is growing and how fast -- not grasping that the annual list long ago became a self-serving cash-raising trick.
Moser wrote in The New Yorker that since it dumped Dees the SPLC has made small steps to widen its scope, a glimmer of hope that the organization will return to its purpose of fighting injustice. Progressives dropping use of the hazardously open ended term “hate group” would help.
Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, Ky. USA, is a writer, researcher and a resister of fascism.
Very enlightening as usual, Brian. Though I thought the term righteous enough, indeed you have grasped the subtleties of the chilling effect (in the legal fashion) and the divisive implications this term "hate groups" has. And the ease in which we use this phrase as well as the media perpetuation of such a phrase (and others) goads us into taking up sides to fight each other. Who profits? Not us.
ReplyDeleteWe need to step back from being reactionary. We've had 4 years of reaction forced on us by a man who had the power to make our lives miserable at least and kill us at worst.
It's hard not to react, but it's important to understand that, short of life - threatening circumstances, we need not to make a decision on the same day. Let us be deliberate. When we hold others accountable for their actions, let us refrain from reactions that instigators would use to grab money and laugh at us all the way to the bank.
So true. Beautifully put, Ginny!
ReplyDelete