Citizenship on the Edge

Sex/Gender/Race

Nancy J. Hirschmann, Deborah A. Thomas, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Deborah A. Thomas

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780812298284
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? The questions that animate this volume focus attention on the relationships between liberal conceptions of citizenship and democracy on one hand, and sex, race, and gender on the other. Who "counts" as a citizen in today's world, and what are the mechanisms through which the rights, benefits, and protections of liberal citizenship are differentially bestowed upon diverse groups? What are the relationships between global economic processes and political and legal empowerment? What forms of violence emerge in order to defend and define these rights, benefits, and protections, and how do these forms of violence reflect long histories? How might we recognize and account for the various avenues through which people attempt to make themselves as political subjects? Citizenship on the Edge approaches these questions from multiple disciplines, including Africana Studies, anthropology, disability studies, film studies, gender studies, history, law, political science, and sociology. Contributors explore the ways in which compounding social inequalities redound to the conditions and expressions of citizenship in the U.S. and throughout the world. They give a sense of the breathtaking range of the ways that citizenship is controlled, repressed, undercut, and denied at the same time as they outline people's attempts to claim citizenship in ways that are meaningful to them. From university speech policies, to labor and immigration policies, to a rethinking of the security theatre, to women's empowerment in the family and economy and a rethinking of marriage and the family, we see slivers of possibility for a more inclusive and less hostile world, in which citizenship is no longer so in doubt, so on the edge, for so many. As a whole, the volume argues that citizenship cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good but must instead always be contextualized within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle. Contributors: Erez Aloni, Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Samantha Majic, Valentine M. Moghadam, Michael Rembis, Tracy Robinson, Ellen Samuels, Kimberly Theidon, Deborah A. Thomas.

CHAPTER 1

When Words Don’t Disappear: An Intersectional Analysis of Hate Speech

Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro

University of Southern California student Rini Sampath made history in 2015 as the first Indian American woman to serve as president of Undergraduate Student Government (USG).¹ She and her vice president, Jordan Fowler, were the first all-women ticket to win election at USC. Their historic victory was greatly tempered by an incident that happened early in her tenure as USG president,² as Rini chronicled on her Facebook page the morning after:

Last night, as I was walking back from my friend’s apartment, a student screamed out at me through the window of his fraternity house, “You Indian piece of shit!” before hurling his drink at my friends and me. Once his fraternity brothers realized it was me, they began to apologize. This stung even more. Today, as I try to unpack these events, I couldn’t quite figure out why their after-the-fact apologies deepened the wound. But one of my friends explained it to me the best this morning: “Because now you know, the first thing they see you as is subhuman.” And that’s the first thing some students on our campus see when they look at anyone who looks like me.

I’m still in a state of shock. There’s an indescribable hollowness in me, but I’m going public with this because this can’t continue. Some people don’t believe racism like this can happen on our campus. Some people continue to doubt the need for safe spaces and the need for expanded cultural resource centers or the need for gender neutral bathrooms or the need for diversity in our curriculum or the need for diversity in our professors or the need for diversity in dialogue. And to those who continue to believe we’re just playing the “race” card, I ask you this—what’s there to win here? A sense of respect? A sense of humanity? A sense of love and compassion for others regardless of how they look like? This isn’t an isolated incident. It happens everywhere. Last week, individuals in a pick-up truck yelled racial slurs at Mizzou’s Student Body President, Payton Head. Who knows what will happen to someone who looks like me today?

The post went viral and Sampath joined a burgeoning movement that rocked college campuses across the country. From “I Too Am Harvard” to the controversy about appropriate Halloween costumes at Yale University, university students like Rini continue to experience hate speech. While the speech was condemned by the interfraternity council and university leadership,³ the student who committed the attack suffered consequences but his identity and that of his fraternity were kept confidential.⁴ Notably, this person’s race or gender is not as available for public consumption or critique in the way that Sampath’s are, which is relevant for the intersectional analysis I will pursue.

Two years later, in February 2017, Jose Torres and Kayla Norton were sentenced to a combination of thirty-five years (including a minimum of nineteen in prison) for their actions terrorizing a young African American child’s birthday party in Atlanta, Georgia. The couple rode by the party waving Confederate flags and shouting that one of them had a gun and was going to “kill some niggers.” Prosecutors specifically denied that the flying of Confederate flags triggered the prosecution; instead, the threats made by both Torres and Norton were given as the justification for trying them under Georgia’s Street Gang Terrorism Law. Georgia does not have a hate crime law, but at sentencing the judge expressed his opinion that the pair had committed a hate crime. They were the second and third of fifteen individuals from the Respect the Flag group who were arrested and prosecuted for participating in the incident. At this time we do not know the identities of the children who experienced this instance of racist terrorism.

How, specifically, are we to account for the lingering impact of these incidents in these young people’s lives? In each of these examples, how might we think about what or who is considered “visible,” or “public”? What or who is considered “invisible”? “Confidential”? Understanding these examples in terms of visibility and publicity can help us pursue a broader intersectional understanding of hate speech. These two incidents, and the many like them that have occurred in the United States, are the inspiration for the arguments presented here.

In this chapter I develop an intersectional analysis of hate speech that centers its attention on the harms inflicted on vulnerable raced-gendered bodies. To do so I draw on the analytical framework of intersectionality, which features two core intellectual projects: a project of rendering visible what is invisible to most citizens, and an ontological project that challenges the disaggregative logic of most social scientific and legal approaches in the United States.⁵ Using the normative example of hate speech, I illustrate the distinctions between the conventional democratic frameworks and the intersectional approach. I conclude that an intersectional approach allows for a more expansive conceptualization of what is commonly called the “immediate injury” in legal doctrine.

An Intersectional Framework for Analyzing Hate Speech

Intersectionality is an analytical framework that reshapes how we think about power, broadly defined. Intersectionality-like thought has been traced back to 1831 and Maria Stewart, a protégée of David Walker (Hancock 2016). While intersectionality was once positioned as a unique contribution of gender studies (McCall 2005; Hawkesworth 2006), numerous scholars concur that intersectionality is now an interdisciplinary field of study (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; May 2015) and a mode of analysis (Crenshaw 1991; Collins and Bilge 2016). Though it shares intellectual genealogies with each, intersectionality both predates critical race theory (CRT) and has evolved into an interdisciplinary specialization that is distinguishable from Black and women of color feminism, standpoint theory, and CRT.

Intersectionality can be conceptualized into a two-part intellectual project that has a five-dimensional methodology. The first and most well-known project of intersectionality is its visibility project: researchers and activists alike frame intersectionality as a way of seeing what is traditionally invisible—as a way of bringing previously ignored or unseen policy needs to light. Scholars, activists, and advocates have argued for almost two hundred years that without understanding the ways in which multiple categories are symbiotically related factors in any entrenched social problem, one will render populations whose social locations reside “at the intersection” invisible. When a person is subjected to hate speech, however, the forced visibility is equally pernicious. The kinds of epithets hurled at a college student late at night and at children at a birthday party are rightly called hate speech. The words impose visibility in a particular way that is intended to cause harm. Thus, the forced visibility the victim experiences is the outcome of the assertion of power by the speaker.

Why target a young Indian American woman walking with friends at night? Why a set of African American children? Assertions of forced visibility in an intersectional analysis are not limited to a single category of difference, such as race. It matters that Sampath is a woman, someone perceived to possess less power generally, and that she is out late at night—an immediate context that lowers the chances of a reply either in kind or in escalation.⁶

Scholarship in CRT and feminist theory has addressed this power differential in parallel ways that can and should be in greater conversation with each other, though intersectionality is more than the sum of these parts. Arguments by CRT scholars Mari Matsuda and Richard Delgado suggest otherwise (Matsuda et al. 1993, 18, 89). Specifically, they suggest that two powers, or “two stories,” as Matsuda puts it, are at stake in a discussion of hate speech. Matsuda specifically attempts to put citizens who are the subject or target of such speech in a position of equal discursive and juridical power with the speaker. For his part, Delgado centers the victims of racialized hate speech by outlining the impact of such racism and racist insults on the victims—both children and adults, another move designed to afford victims equal power. What and who is visible shifts on either side of this First Amendment debate. Is it the speaker’s exclusive power to select words and utter them? Can the victim assert their own individual power (whether through tort law, as Delgado proposes, or other means) to live a life free of racial insult?

More recently, feminist philosopher Kate Manne coined the term “himpathy” to discuss the gendered power dynamics at play once a harm has been revealed. Himpathy is a systematic response to a perpetrator of harm that restores the privileges of visibility to the man who commits the harm once the harm has come to light. Instead of attention to the impact of the harm on the person subjected to the hate speech, attention is systematically redirected to the “harm” an accusation inflicts on the perpetrator. What Manne (2018) describes is a feature of what I have defined elsewhere (Hancock 2011) as “movement backlash”—the intentional reframing of privileged groups as “persecuted” or “true victims” in an effort to supplant sufficient attention to and remedy of historical harms against marginalized groups. The intent of movement backlash and himpathy is to preserve power relations as they currently exist, even as harms are revealed (and redress attempted). In other words, they attenuate the kinds of remedies and reforms thought possible or legitimate.

While each line of scholarship is necessary to understand the import of the hate speech, neither is sufficient. An intersectional approach both highlights the power dynamics at play in a way that preserves the impact on the victim and recognizes the ongoing risk of re-invisibility. An intersectional understanding of speech can assist in illuminating the dynamic aspects of speech, specifically the ways in which hate speech as a social practice moves between two interacting scales of analysis: the levels of the parties directly involved with the speech act and the meaning or significance of that speech action in a wider democracy-wide level of analysis.

The intersectional method that emerges from intersectionality’s visibility project corresponds to three of the five analytical dimensions: categorical multiplicity (categories like racism, sexism, and homophobia play equal but not identical roles in shaping access to and exercises of power); categorical intersections (understanding of multiple categories reveals systematic similarities that reveal both additional power dynamics and unseen and/or unlikely allies); and diversity within (systematic variation within a particular social location—for example, among the poor—reveals additional policy needs previously hidden and unseen). To analyze either hate speech incident, we must first determine which categories are relevant. While race might jump out at us, the visibility project’s attention to power identifies at least two others: gender and age. Should we read what happened to Rini Sampath, for example, as solely race driven because neither she, as the speaker regarding the incident, nor the perpetrator explicitly mentioned gender? Sampath herself speaks of the incident without mentioning gender, but she also talks about the “after the fact” apologies as another compelling element of the wound. Such apologies occurred, according to her post, because she was Rini Sampath, the presidential candidate of the first all-female student government ticket to win in both USC and Pacific Coast Conference (Pac-12) history. I would add here that the incident occurred one month into Sampath’s historic rise to power at the top of an all-female student government administration. How can we unpack this in a way that refuses to hide the relevance of gender within a racial story? Even if Sampath did not raise gender explicitly herself, the gender subtext is clear.

For the Georgia incident, although we do not know the gender identities of the victimized children, we do know one of the perpetrators was a woman. An analysis that begins with race and gender for both incidents allows us to see something that is far better known in 2020 than it was just a few years ago:⁷ the weaponizing of white womanhood against people of color, particularly Black people.

The intersectional dimension of diversity within also highlights the ongoing gender power hierarchies within a story that is purportedly about race only. The white male “frat boy” perpetrator preserved his anonymity, resulting in the protection of his reputation and future and a marker of Manne’s himpathy at work. In stark contrast, Kayla Norton was not only named in the Georgia incident but also tried and convicted for her hate speech. This systematic gender variation is intersectional because it highlights power dynamics within white racism. But there are cross-racial and cross-gender similarities as well.

The categorical intersections present in these two incidents are both raced and gendered and speak to visibility in a way that connects speech to broader questions of agency. C. Edwin Baker (1997) suggests that the role of speech in self-disclosure and its concomitant benefit to democracy is contingent on a speaker’s individual autonomy to speak out. But as many have pointed out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. Citizenship on the Edge: Sex/Gender/Race
• 1. When Words Don’t Disappear: An Intersectional Analysis of Hate Speech
• 2. A Trinity of Inequality: Wealth, Marriage, and Masculinity
• 3. New-Old Law in the Postcolony: Regulating Sex in the Anglophone Caribbean
• 4. Institutional Changes and Women’s Citizenship in the Maghreb: Toward a New Gender Regime?
• 5. The Murder of Malcoum Tate: Madness, Violence, and Black Masculinity in the Late Twentieth-Century United States
• 6. From Anomaly to Alarm: Trans and Crip Bodies in the Security State
• 7. It’s Blue and It’s Up to You! Examining Federal Antitrafficking Awareness Campaigns in the United States
• 8. Reproductive Warfare: Enforced Sterilizations in Peru
• Afterword. Citizenship on the Edge in the Age of COVID
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments