Discrimination: it’s more complex

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/07/2023 (806 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEWS reports of antagonistic public statements or actions by one individual or group against another have recently increasingly used hate as the description of such negative behaviour, and major news outlets have now standardized the category of hate crimes.

For example, Ottawa police reported a nearly 24 per cent increase in hate incidents in the first half of 2023 compared to the same time last year. The most frequent targets were the Jewish, LGBTTQ+, and Black communities, in that order. The alleged crimes included mischief to property, uttering threats, assaults, criminal stalking and harassment, and mischief to cultural property.

Patrick Macdonald of Ottawa is the first person in Canada to be charged with hate propaganda offences for advocating violent, far-right ideology. He was charged with facilitating terrorist activity and wilfully promoting hatred for a terrorist group.

The criminality of hate is based on Section 319(2) of the Criminal Code which makes it an offence to communicate, except in private conversation, statements that wilfully promote hatred against an “identifiable group.”

Elsewhere, America is by now obviously rife with open, active hatred of multiple identities. But when an Iraqi Christian immigrant to Sweden burned the Quran outside a Stockholm mosque during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, the debate about whether free speech is absolute exploded. Swedish police say they have now received notifications about demonstrations by individuals who intend to burn the Torah and the Bible as well.

The root reason for such negative behaviour was formerly identified publicly mostly as fear, not hate. Post-9/11, Islamophobia cast every Muslim as a potential personal threat to safety, and all of Islam as a collective threat to societal safety, even before Muslim individuals or communities were met, engaged, and understood.

However, homophobia has been a misnomer since the term was coined in the 1970s. Most who render a negative moral judgment about homosexuality are not irrationally afraid of it threatening their personal safety, though they may be afraid that affirming it threatens societal well-being by altering social norms. Anti-LGBTTQ+ activism is simply a textbook example of conservatives prioritizing what they define as purity over the primary virtues of care and fairness, as moral foundations theory elucidates they are prone to do.

Blackophobia, in turn, is fear of presumed subhumans, and complicated by its history of racism, colonialism, and slavery.

But public explanations have now shifted from the irrational fear of phobias to the immoral hatred of contempt. And public discourse may indeed have become more accurate and honest by describing anti-Islam, anti-LGBTTQ+, and anti-Black statements and actions as hateful, not fearful.

Significantly, fear is self-protectively defensive, while hate is other-attackingly offensive. Also, a person is not ultimately responsible for their emotional fear, but they are responsible for their attitudinal hate. Fear can be lessened by explaining its irrationality; hate cannot. Fear cannot be criminalized and prosecuted; hate can.

Notably, both fear and hate of identifiable groups are forms of prejudice, which is an oversimplified, rigidly held, and irrational pre-judgment of an entire category of persons. Prejudice easily leads to the cultural caricature of stereotyping, the suspicious hostility of social distancing, and ultimately, the degradation of the other in self-fulfilling prophecy.

The attitude of prejudice (what we think) then often morphs naturally into the action of discrimination (what we do) treating categories of people unequally. It begins innocently enough by the preferential treatment we give to persons we like based on their personal, not categorical, characteristics. In this sense, even friendship is discrimination because it is selective, but it is impossible to like and befriend everyone equally.

However, prejudicial treatment is acting toward someone based on the category to which they belong before getting to know them personally, and usually leads to simple avoidance of contact with categorical “undesirables.”

Treatment becomes negative and unfair when it escalates to a denial of the desires of members of a social group, placing restrictions on their aspirations, and withholding positives such as housing, jobs, and voluntary relationships.

Most severely, discrimination is enacting negatives, which is disadvantageous treatment ranging from verbal derogation to outright physical attack. It culminates in oppression, an unjust and cruel exercise of power driven by the extreme enmity and antipathy of hate.

This graduated scale of discrimination is mirrored in the Jewish Anti-Defamation League’s Pyramid of Hate, which builds up from simple stereotyping bias to individual acts of prejudice, to systemic discrimination, to physical violence, and finally to genocide.

Clearly, the earlier that fearful Islamophobia, homophobia, and Blackophobia are corrected, and hateful Islamoppression, homoppression, and Blackoppression are pre-empted, the better.

Dennis Hiebert teaches in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba.