Hi,

The law should be based on *actions*, not on thoughts or words. (Which is also why I disagree with "hate crime" legislation - for pete's sake, if you slash someone, how is that different if the victim is white, black, hispanic, or from Alpha Centauri?)

That's generally the way I feel as well. What if someone is killed because they have an annoying speech characteristic rather than their skin color? Which characteristics should be included under hate legislation? People should be equal under the law.

But, I come back to things like the [link|http://www.magenta.nl/EyetoEye/contraste.html|Blue eye/Brown eye experiment]. Words matter. Indoctrination matters. The way people are taught to hate others matters.

[...]

"Who told you to sit down?" "Do I have to spell everything out for you, sit!" One participant of Jane Elliott's workshop walked out after one hour, another never returned from a quick trip to the bathroom'. Their blue eyes did them in. In Elliott's world brown eyed people form the majority and they have the power. Blueys are dumb, inferior, lazy and they steal. To emphasize their inferiority they have to wear a collar. For blueys the rules are always changing, at the mercy of the brown eyes. A blue eyed participant who walked out before attempts to get back in. Elliott is unrelenting, he's out. In the real world people of colour can't just step out. They don't have a choice. They can't take off their colour.

Get Elliott's kids. Elliott developed this behavioural exercise in 1968 after Martin Luther King was killed. As a school teacher in Riceville, Iowa she tried to explain the meaning of King's death to her all white students. Riceville was and is today a white, christian town with a population of a 1000 souls. And no racism according to them. Elliott devised the exercise -this is not a experiment she emphasizes- in which one day the brown eyed children are on top and the next day the blue eyed. "I choose a physical characteristic over which they had no control and attributed negative elements to this characteristic." Elliott choose eye colour because during the second world war eye colour was one of the ways for the nazi's to determine if someone was send to the gas chamber or not. Brown eyes could be fatal even if you had a beautiful German name. "I had no idea how it would work out. If I had known the enormous impact it had on my students and the community, I would not have done it." says Elliott. As a direct result of the success' of the exercise her four children were taunted, spit on and molested by their teachers, their classmates and the parents of their classmates. "From get the Elliott kids it became get the nigger-lover's kids" says Elliott.

Outsider Not only her children got it. The day after her appearance on the very popular Johnny Carson Show, the people in Riceville also decided not to buy from her father anymore. They feared black people would think that they all thought like her' and blacks would think life was good in Riceville and move over there in droves. Father Elliott went bankrupt. Of course this didn't go down very well in Jane Elliott's family. "My mother thought I'd gone crazy and asked me: can't you just stop with this nonsense? She has never forgiven me. My brothers, self-made millionaires and conservative Republicans wondered what the hell my problem was?". Her father, however, has never stopped her. In fact, it was his contradictory attitude that made Jane the odd one out in her family. "My father always said:'never put a stone on another man's path' or justice will never be disadvantageous to man' or a just cause is a good thing'. At the same time he wouldn't have his daughters marry a black man. I thought that wasn't right . I was crazy about my father. It's a shame he was so prejudiced".

Oppressed position. From 68 to 84 Elliott did Brown eyes, blue eyes' with schoolkids. She was surprised every time again, about how the mechanics worked. " I administered this exercise to a group of children with dyslexia. Brown eyed children, who couldn't really read or spell anything without stammering, suddenly could spell words they couldn't before. On the other hand, I had a very smart girl who could multiply very well. The moment she as a blue eyes came in a inferior position, she started to stammer and making mistakes doing her sums. And we had been doing the exercise for less than two hours!"

[...]

A few years ago I heard an NPR discussion show about reparations and discrimination law. Some guest on the show argued that only blacks and american indians should have special treatment under discrimination law due to their historical disadvantages in this country. He made a lot of sense to me. But the devil's in the details. And how could you exclude women (who are certainly underrepresented in many fields and certainly suffer from the "glass ceiling" and "the old boys network")? And gays certainly are unfairly discriminated against. Is there any fair way to make distinctions under the law (when "making the law is like making a sausage - if you love them you don't want to watch them being made...")?

So while I strongly disagree, at a gut level, with hate crime legislation, perhaps something needs to be done to more strongly discourage incitement, unfair discrimination, and hate and distrust between people. I don't know how you'd do it, though, without trampling on the First Amendment. :-(

Cheers,
Scott.