Hate crime and identity politics

Jacobs and Potter’s work is a unique entry into the debate on hate crime. It injects a much needed note of scepticism into the ongoing march toward what Jenness and Grattet (2001) characterize as homogenization, elabora-tion and domain expansion in hate crime policies. We have come a long way in just two decades in terms of the extent to which hate crime has become entrenched as a legal construct. Jacobs and Potter are right to encourage us to be a little more reflective before forging ahead any further. In this sense, I welcome their intervention and especially their caveats about the nature and potential consequences of hate crime legislation. Scholars, activists, policymakers and practitioners should explicitly consider each of the questions that Jacobs and Potter raise. However, they should seek their own answers to these questions rather than rely on the nay-saying ap-proach favoured in Hate Crime: Criminal Law and Identity Politics. This work raises a number of serious reservations about the utility and potential impact of hate crime as a legal concept. I would identify the most salient as follows: the complexity of defining prejudice and establishing motive; the complexity of deciding what classes of conduct and victim to include; the illegitimate construction of a hate crime ‘epidemic ’ that underlies the creation of hate crime legislation; that hate crime invokes identity politics; the futility, and potential unconstitutionality, of punishing ‘hate’; the difficulty of enforcing hate crime legislation; and that hate crime legislation balkanizes society. While I take issue with most of the arguments the authors develop, space does not permit a review of each of these concerns. Instead, I opt to respond to two interconnected themes: the embeddedness of ‘identity politics ’ in the construction of hate crime; and the contention that hate crime legislation is divisive. I refer to these as interconnected because Jacobs and Potter’s analysis suggests that it is the illegitimate insertion o