This week, thousands of students at California's Claremont Colleges rallied against the hate crimes that have been plaguing their campuses lately. The crimes themselves consist largely of graffiti: on Tuesday, racial slurs were written on a professor's car; in recent months, racial and homophobic epithets have been scrawled in shower stalls and on public calendars. In January, a group of students who used a dormitory lawn to set fire to a cross they made in art class was put on probation and sentenced to 100 hours of community service. After Tuesday's incident, classes were cancelled Wednesday while the FBI and police launched an investigation. There is a $10,000 reward for information that helps solve the crime.

Meanwhile, things are playing out a bit differently for a white Cornell student who was viciously beaten in a campus parking lot by six black Ithaca residents after a Ludacris concert last November. While they punched and kicked her in the face, the victim reports, they shouted things like, "Get your white hair out my face,î and declared that "they were gonna fuck up my pretty white face." She sustained a ruptured eardrum and required thirteen stitches to repair a torn lip. Her wounds will leave scars and doctors estimate that she will not be fully healed for another year. But it's not a hate crime.

Four of the attackers have been identified, and this week they were charged. Those that were underage (14) were charged with assault in the third degree, a misdemeanor. The 19-year-old and 20-year-old who were arrested were charged with harassment in the second degree, a violation. All four were served with notices forbidding them from setting foot on Cornell's campus in future. That's it. According to both the campus police and the Ithaca P.D., there was not enough evidence to support the claim that this was a hate crime (though there was enough evidence to justify filing a "bias-related incident report"). The victim did not agree: "I still believe it was [a hate crime]-- because that was the whole basis of what they were saying to me," she told the Cornell Daily Sun last November. "That upsets me, that the police determined it was inconclusive, since I definitely think it was [racially motivated]." She and her ruptured ear drum and her thirteen stitches ought to know.

I am not a fan of the category "hate crime"--I don't think hate itself is criminal, and I do think that existing laws can handle crimes we might think of as motivated by hatred. But I still wonder how it is that in one instance, racially motivated graffiti can be labelled a hate crime, while in another, a racially motivated beating can't. Why is there a $10,000 reward out for a vandal while the people who punched, kicked, and beat the Cornell student don't even get punished for the crimes they committed? Cornell and Claremont can't answer for what the other does--but it's worth noting the disparity of response all the same. Events at Cornell are the seamy underside of the campus tolerance movement, which readily converts incidents like the ones at Claremont into opportunities for staging communal denunciations of racism, but which cannot accommodate, let alone acknowledge, that hate is not the exclusive property of white people, and that hate's attendant violence can and does go both ways.

Thanks to Fred Ray for the Cornell link.

First, I should say that I do believe in the usefulness of the "hate crime" category in American jurisprudence. But I also believe that people of color can commit these kinds of crimes -- I myself have sometimes been on the receiving end of racially-motivated verbal harassment from other people of color (though I have experienced harassment by young white men far more often).

In the case of racist graffiti, I think the category of hate crime is indispensible. On the question of the racist graffiti at Claremont College, would you be satisfied with a simple vandalism charge? I wouldn't. It's not the "hate" that is criminalizable, but the violence inherent in the use of language in particular ways. Language can wound (here I generally agree with Judith Butler's approach to hate speech in "Excitable Speech").

Second, I think one should remain skeptical in all claims of racially-motivated violence (whether white-on-black or black-on-white), especially when there is no hard evidence of racism on the part of assailants. Isn't it possible that the police investigation of the incident is accurate, and that the language the victim claims was used was not in fact used, or not used the way she says it was? I do acknowledge that many on the left often tend to believe victims over police when the perpetrators are people of color, while they (we) dismiss incidents like the Cornell case. Here it does seem that the assailants are getting off easy on the basic assault charges, and I extend my sympathies to the victim. But I don't find the author of the Cornell Review piece convincing on the question of whether this incident in particular should be called a hate crime.