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Hyman Kaplan would not approve. For Kaplan, the indomitable, albeit English-challenged immigrant immortalized by writer Leo C. Rosten, the goal was to become an American. Rosten’s fictional character never overcame his propensity to mangle English, what he called a “sleeping of the tong," but he was resolute in his desire to adopt the ways of his new country. As he put it, “I said to minesalf, ‘Keplen, you in America, so tink like de Americans tink!’"
That attitude no longer prevails. “Important pockets of new American immigrants are not assimilating, not learning English, not becoming or thinking of themselves primarily as Americans,” writes social commentator Roger Kimball. American education may have something to do with this. Sociologists Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut reported in 2001 that four years in an American high school left immigrant youth less likely, not more, to regard themselves as Americans. But as the authors of the recently published Bradley Project on America’s National Identity state, “This is not their fault; it is ours.”
Tribalism in America
Not just some immigrants, but even native-born Americans are identifying themselves as members of an ethnic, national, or racial category first and foremost. What some would call “the Balkanization of America,” is being swept forward and supported by so-called hate crime legislation.
Hate crime statutes codify legal distinctions based on race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, and sexual behavior. They alert all Americans to these distinct identities and reinforce, magnify, and fix in place group conflict by using the law to make them legitimate. The media reinforce these divisions by showering attention on crimes purported to be motivated by prejudice.
Clearly, hate crime laws are a vehicle for “identity politics”—a state of affairs in which individuals see themselves as members of factions that are competing for special privileges and positions in American society. Based on differences in race, gender, religion, or sexual conduct, such factionalism is moving our society toward the “disuniting of America.” Some are calling this a “new tribalism.”
“We’ve moved from ‘we, the people,’ to ‘we, the peoples,’” according to the Bradley Foundation report. Multiculturalism and the ideals of diversity have replaced once commonly held assumptions about what it means to be an American. A 2008 poll commissioned for the Bradley Foundation found that while 84 percent of respondents believe in a unique American identity, 63 percent think this common identity is weakening. Twenty-four percent think our divisions have advanced past the point of a return to a broadly shared national identity.
A New Ethnic Gospel
Liberal scholar Arthur Schlesinger warned about all this in 1992 in his book, The Disuniting of America. According to Schlesinger,
The new ethnic gospel rejects the unifying vision of individuals from all nations melted into a new race. Its underlying philosophy is that America is not a nation of individuals at all, but a nation of groups….
This “separatism,” Schlesinger writes, comes at a cost. It “nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences, and stirs antagonisms.”
Hate crime laws expedite the process of disuniting by harnessing the power of the law. When the law exalts group identities and grants special status to victims based on their membership in certain privileged groups, justice becomes the right of a few. This is very much like the legal circumstances under the Code of Hammurabi where justice was apportioned on the basis of social status and served to sustain a caste system.
A Return to the Medieval Period
Hate crime laws are a return to the medieval period, “which was based upon status, caste and privilege,” according to Morgan Reynolds, Director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis. Medieval criminal penalties, he writes, varied, based on the victim’s status.
Bias crime legislation also shares traits with pre-Christian law in England, where the clan, not the man, took precedence in the law. Under this system, as Attorney Daniel Troy explains, “A murder was regarded as an affront to the clan, not to the individual murdered. Recompense took place among groups.” It was the influence of Christianity that brought a shift in view, and as Troy stated, “punishment came to be assessed without regard to the status of the victim within the group.”
Hate crime laws reverse this. They make group status a salient factor in the administration of justice and “ultimately erode the core unifying values of our country,” as Troy points out. For example, the addition of “sexual orientation,” greatly offends Christians and conservative Jews. This term presumes a fixed identity for those who, as a matter of choice, engage in same-gender sex. The Bible calls such behavior “sodomy,” and condemns it. Giving special protection under the law to homosexuals by including “sexual orientation” as a protected category in hate crime laws serves as a flashpoint for social conflict and is an assault on the values of America’s civic culture.
Victimhood Brings Political Power
Hate crime legislation also creates a perverse incentive to seek victimhood, since victimization enhances a group’s “moral claim on the larger society” and, therefore, it leverages political power. Interest groups that claim to represent racial minorities, women, or homosexuals, have a vested interest in gaining special status under hate crime laws. Ironically, victimhood is a path to power. As Shelby Steele writes, “The power to be found in victimization, like any power, is intoxicating and can lend itself to the creation of a new class of super-victims who can feel the pea of victimization under twenty mattresses.”
The special power of the victim to command attention and social benefits is traceable to the 1960s when, as Charles Sykes writes, “the political and moral stature of the victim was transformed and made attractive to an increasingly wide array of groups” seeking access to an “elaborate array of programs, privileges, and entitlements that were specifically attached to various groups’ victim status.”
But social tensions ensue when the logic of affirmative action works its way into criminal law. The law gives rise to conflict when it grants special status, “special protections and special handouts” to groups which claim the status of victims.
Balkanization
Another perverse outcome of hate crime laws is to transform concern over crime, typically a source of social cohesion, into a cause of social friction. “It reinforces differences rather than uniting us all, regardless of identity, into Americans who are together repulsed by crime.”
America was uniquely founded on a set of ideas, not an ethnic identity. As the French-born farmer, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, said in 1782 of his adopted nation, America is a place where we leave behind all “ancient prejudices and manners,” and “are melted into a new race of men.”
But hate crime laws are beginning to undo that American experience and transplant ancient enmities, as well as introduce new ones. “Down this road, of course, ultimately lies disaster,” writes Morgan Reynolds. He points out that the Balkan countries of Europe, where identity politics prevailed, went through four stages on the road to disaster: “ethnic awareness, separatism, mysticism, and cleansing.” The first three stages, he writes, are pushed along by hate crime laws.
The movement to recognize aggrieved groups in the law is alien to the American idea and will only advance the Balkanization already taking place in our land. It serves to make many of one. As the Bradley Foundation warned in its own recent E Pluribus Unum report, “We should not adopt policies that perpetuate division or that compromise our national allegiance.”
Such policies have already been adopted outside our borders, and the consequences have been chilling. |