Get Used to It: Ep. 60, "Hate Crimes"

is [Music] hi i'm sheila kuala welcome to get used to it as you know we do this show on issues of interest to the gay and lesbian community but i think issues important to everybody i'm really glad you tuned in today we're going to talk about a fairly difficult i think complicated and horrendous topic and that is hate crime especially hate murder as you know we've been reading in the paper over the past several months and if this is a rerun it will now be further in the past the the terrible murder of james byrd in texas the trial concerning that kind of an uproar which i thought was a a positive one eventually although my guests may have other ideas the the murder of matthew shepard in our gay from our gay and lesbian community and several murders that have followed that we've been reading about a young african-american woman i think on the east coast who was shot allegedly because she was sitting in a car with a white man another young gay man who was murdered by two men who claimed he was coming on to them but planned for quite a while to murder him men he thought were his friends and i think it's time for us to look at the issue of why this might be happening and what it is that causes it to happen and what we might be able to do about it i'm very pleased today to have two wonderful people as my guests first dr greg herrick who is a research psychiatrist at uc davis author of several books on heterosexism and homophobia aids and stigma hate crimes welcome greg happy to have you here thanks for inviting me and our second guest connie rice who for nine years was at the naacp legal defense and education fund as a civil rights attorney and last year became the co-director of the advancement project which is one of those projects that i think the hopes of the next millennium are pinned on to move from just thinking about good policy to making good action in a whole host of issues and more importantly maybe showing the relationship between and among those issues that we don't even know are related the relationship between transportation and housing and quality of life and discrimination etc so welcome connie glad you're here glad to be here um greg i want to start with you i know that you're in the midst of writing a book about these hate crimes and we are more and more i think upset and don't really know what to do we all know there's hatred against gay and lesbian people fear or hatred or whatever you want to call it but often people especially in the in the legislature where i serve say you know why do we need to call something a hate crime isn't it a bad thing if anybody kills anybody what's the difference why do we have to single this out and point to this where we seem to be balkanizing society here what do you think well that's that's an ongoing debate and uh i've tried to address it in my own research in one small way which is to ask if maybe there is something different about hate crimes in terms of their impact on the victim i've recently completed a study in the sacramento california area with about 2 300 lesbians and gay men and bisexuals in which we asked people about their experiences with criminal victimization we pulled we found the people who had reported that they had been the target of a crime in the last five years because they were lesbian or gay or perceived to be and we compared them to the other lesbian and gay people who'd been the target of a crime in the last five years but a crime that wasn't based on their sexual orientation what we could call maybe a random crime and what i wanted to see was whether there might be differences between those groups in the psychological trauma that they were experiencing and what i found was that there was there is a problem that that hate crime survivors seem to experience more psychological distress in the form of more symptoms of depression more symptoms of stress more symptoms of anxiety and anger compared to other lesbian and gay crime victims so there's something it seems there's something about being the target of a crime because of your sexual orientation that has more of a psychological impact on the victim than just being a victim of a random crime maybe it's the fact that it isn't random that is part of the the issue i mean imagine yourself in the world and you think well i could be the target of a random crime but that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that's going to happen all the time whereas if you know that you are a constant soon-to-be victim because at any given time people are going to get you because you're gay or lesbian you're really you feel more at risk don't you yeah there there's uh a need that we all have to be able to walk around in the world and feel invulnerable you know if we if we couldn't do that we wouldn't be able to leave our house in the morning you know if you think about the risks that you run just by getting into a car or getting walking down the street we need to not think about those things we need to have a sense of invulnerability crime victims lose that sense of invulnerability because they have been the target of an attack it's a very dramatic demonstration to them that they are vulnerable all crime victims all crime victims feel that yeah what what i saw in in my study was that the uh people who were the targets of an anti-gay or anti-lesbian crime experienced an even higher level of vulnerability a higher sense of being at risk they they felt less safe they felt more likely to be the target of a crime in the future and i think that we can expand out from the people who were the specific victims and talk about the community as a whole and what typically happens when we hear about someone who's been the victim of a crime again this is sort of a defensive move that a lot of us take is to say well that couldn't happen to me because i'm different in this way or that way you know i don't live in that city or i don't walk on those streets or whatever uh but for lesbians and gay men or for other people from minority groups that are targeted in hate crimes when they hear about one of these crimes happening well it's very difficult to say that couldn't happen to me because in fact the reason they were picked out was because they have a particular characteristic that i share with that victim so it it probably does make people feel more vulnerable in general although we do that in our community you know we say well this is these are rednecks i mean this is where this happened these these murders although would we say that that was the case with matthew shepard that i mean that it's so rural that you know we're not at risk in a city well you know i think that's one of the problems of of all of the attention that was paid to the matthew shepard murder not without acknowledging that there were also uh several other murders of lesbians and gay men in 1998 and 1997 and 1996 all over the country not only in rural areas not only in the west or the south but uh on the coasts in new york in in san francisco uh when people know about that then they they aren't able to quite distance themselves from it so much and the thing to keep in mind is that this is going on all the time you know a lesbian or gay person is continually seeing uh reports in their newspapers or hearing about it on the news media that someone was targeted because they were lesbian or gay and a similar experience for for other other people from other minority groups they're they're continually hearing about this victimization in a way that i think people who don't belong to one of those groups are able to just not notice it it gets blended in with the rest of the news and they don't remember it but the person that it's very relevant to remembers it and carries it with them and they for them it's a fact of life but we're seeing some more attention paid something happened with this matthew shepard murder and i don't know i don't know if it's a sea change in public opinion but the horror factor um the the negative feeling factor among a larger group of people about this murder uh it just seemed to shift a notch do you see that as i know what you mean yeah um and i don't know exactly why that happened i know some people have speculated it was because matthew shepard seemed to be uh so um pure isn't quite the right word but he was this he he looked like a kid you know he looked very young younger than he actually was he seemed to be someone who had a great future ahead of him he was intelligent he was a college student probably a lot of people in the u.s public could relate to him directly as someone like the kid next door and that may have had that may have been part of the explanation for it uh for why his his murders seem to affect people so so directly now your research also is about perpetrators right right and what do you find about perpetrators i mean we say to ourselves how could anyone do that i mean how could anyone do that i always feel that when i when i read about people who torture people in militaristic governments or whatever i think how could anyone lose all of their humanity and do that uh and yet there's this sort of sense that we have and that some of us have even spoken about that that person may be a really horrible you know off the wall person but that a great deal of permission is given for perpetrators to act like that by a much larger body of homophobia what do you find about perpetrators well i have to say i i ask myself that question too how can they do that it even even though i've been looking at uh perpetrators and looking at homophobia and heterosexism for for 15 years now i still ask myself that question all the time um i think that one of the things that it's important for us to remember is that there isn't a single explanation that uh there are a lot of different scenarios uh some some crimes happen uh out on the street someone's uh two gay men or two lesbians are walking down the street and a bunch of kids drive up and attack them um but other crimes happen like matthew shepards did where there was a certain entrapment and these and it seemed also to not be something that these guys had planned but just it happened because of the situation it did the opportunity arose and they took advantage of it but there are other scenarios too um uh lesbian and gay and bisexual kids get beat up in their homes by a family member or in the school by what we you know would maybe call bullies but but these are still hate attacks lesbians have the experience frequently of being harassed by one or more men in what they perceive initially anyway to be a harassment based on their gender not on their sexual orientation over time in the course of the attack it escalates and frequently what the stories that are told is that that this attacker started he was calling her all the different names he could think of and maybe the worst thing he could think of was to call her a dike or to call her a lesbian and somehow perhaps figured out that actually you know she was a lesbian and then it turns into an anti-lesbian attack well you know a lot of men if women turn them down in the in the course of rape will say they must be lesbian and if they're not it doesn't count as a hate crime yeah but it is a hate crime yeah and of course we've been trying to say for years that rape itself and domestic violence and crimes against women are hate crimes and this doesn't seem to get into the public consciousness because men say no no i love women you know it's not a hate crime and in that sense there is kind of a difference but what do you think about this theory that perpetrators are at least given more permission by attitudes in society because that's another difference about hate crimes where society says this is a bad kind of person and a person who wants to commit a crime feels there's more permission to commit that kind of crime yeah this person is less than me or worse than me and and that no one's going to care if i do this uh that's frequently something that perpetrators will will say after the after the attack after they're arrested uh they'll express surprise that they were actually arrested or that the police actually cared because they expected that no one was going to care if they went out and beat up this guy or this woman because they were homosexual they they do perceive that they have this permission or what arthur don in his movie called the license to kill they have a general sense that there is a permission to do this and in fact that gets to another scenario uh it's not uncommon in hate crimes for the perpetrators not to really uh fit maybe the expectation that a lot of us have that they're these hate driven people who went out looking for a person to to bash because of because the person was gay a lot of times what we'll see is that there will be a group say of adolescent males they're around together they're hanging out somebody just throws out different ideas for what are we going to do tonight and then they decide to go out and maybe cause some trouble find somebody to harass find somebody to rob and over the course of of events it turns out that they come across a gay man or a lesbian and that's the person that they attack so it's not as though they started off planning to do that but once they found themselves in that situation they perceived that they had permission that this wasn't a high cost sort of thing for them to do it's just a who's going to care so that's another pattern that we frequently see and there is that sense of permission there's also that pattern of the escalation of the violence itself this this overkill yeah kind of aspect that that is very strange don't you think yeah the uh it's been something that's been commented on by police a lot over the years that that frequently homosexual murder victims seem to have been uh more brutally murdered than a lot of heterosexual murder victims and there's even been an objective study done by some forensic pathologists in in florida who systematically went through the autopsy reports and records of heterosexual and homosexual murder victims and found that the homosexual murder victims had more injuries to more parts of their body showing more brutality than the heterosexual murder victims these are homosexual murder victims who were killed by heterosexuals yeah presumably okay yeah the shield to get back to your original question um for me there's an aspect to this when you said the horror the reaction of society was was one of a heightened horror and focus for both the james byrd dragging death and jasper texas and for matthew shepard and i think you've heard both of you hit on something that i think is pretty important here the these are lynchings when you have this level of brutality and a public display on a on a ranch post tying someone to a ranch post like matthew shepard was and then leaving james bird's body parts along a road that runs right along the edge of the black community in jasper texas the purpose one of the purposes of these murders as a lynching is to terrify the hated community we're saying what what the what the killers are saying or what the what the batterers and and and the hate crime perpetrators are saying is that you as a community look at this this is what's going to happen to you stay in line or go back in the closet or don't try to integrate or whatever it is that the message is to that hated community so when we're talking about these these displays that are meant to tear to to to terrorize and to suppress that's the purpose of a lynching and that gets back to your other question which was why hate crimes we already have murder statutes we already have battery and assault and aggravated assault we don't need any hate crimes why do we have to have a special uh politically correct crime i've heard it on on conservative talk radio you know there they go again pcpc well the purpose of of having a special crime is because this is a special type of injury to society not just the person who's been beaten or murdered or hung up in a tree and left for display to terrorize the community it's a crime against our social system because it is meant as a message to an entire sub-population be it african-americans be it gays and lesbians be it jewish americans be polish americans that it's meant as a signal and so that's the injury that the hate crime statute is meant to get at that's a crime against the larger social system it goes beyond the injury to the individual and and i think that even when you even when it isn't displayed there was just um uh who was it in the california prisons i think his name is corona who just admitted to having murdered uh 10 other gay men right but he was a serial killer and he focused solely on gay men but his victims weren't displayed they were hidden and no one quite knew who had done it so that's i guess that's another branch of it but but the lynching aspect because i don't think people knew who matthew shepard was when the horror was expressed they didn't know i mean the original news reports didn't didn't go into what a what a what a charming and winning and talented young man that he was it was the display that that originally uh triggered the horror and the same thing for for mr bird's horrendous death uh that was very clearly that road was picked uh it there have been other lynchings along that road in the past it was very much linked up with terrorizing that particular community we've been working against i'm sorry i was just going to say in that case too that you even have this conscious i don't know if well of course we still don't know a lot about the matthew shepard murder it it's not clear that that the perpetrators or if it's the two men who are alleged to have done it that they might have consciously had that in mind so much but it seems that in the bird murder that that was very much consciously in mind that you don't tie somebody to a fence unless you want somebody to see them i mean that's really is that what you mean by didn't have display in mind yeah but i think it's a it's a question i i think that one thing that happens in a number of murders and other crimes is um it's not always the case that the perpetrator thinks ahead or thinks through the implications of what they're doing and is very much in the moment the bird murder though it seemed as though this was a guy who actually hoped that this was going to help him start a local chapter was it at the kkk or something like that so there it seems as though it very much was a conscious thing well connie you've spent you know most of your professional career working against discrimination and uh not only in the african-american community but the experience of the naacp has really sort of led the way for all of us on the definition of kind of the parameters of hate of discrimination of uh phobias and and the relationship sort of among them um it seems to me that murder is the most extreme form obviously of discrimination but is there a theory that there's a relationship because a lot of times people say you know what i'm doing and saying i don't want you to bring so and so home for dinner it's really i mean please that's not murder you know i have no relationship to those people that do that awful thing and yet it seems to me there there's more history i think in such a long-standing organization and i wonder if that's been part of the developed experience um that the naacp has tried to sort of teach us i think it is uh the to the history we're talking about very primordial emotions and reactions um i i for example grew up in an all-white air force world and it wasn't the first time i lived in a black community there was something missing and i couldn't figure out what it was and it it was because of being different in the other and the outsider in a community and in a country where anti-african-ness is a is a very broad theme and is it the foundations of this country that even with very very friendly and receptive that bird very receptive communities for the most part of course i experienced racism but it wasn't it wasn't anything we couldn't overcome but even with a fairly benign experience for the first time being in a black community the mantle was lifted there's an enormous burden of being the other and we all carry it and so if it's a straight community and you're gay you're the other and it's the dominant culture that can make the other culture feel endangered so when people say let's joke and so forth i agree there's a role for humor but i also assume that all of us can be taken from the sort of benign end of recognizing the other targeting the other making fun of the other the jokes and the stereotypes and everything from polish jokes and jewish jokes and gay jokes and african-american jokes all the way to genocide at the other end it's a spectrum it's a spectrum of behavior and reaction to people who are different from us and depending on the dominant culture any dominant culture is capable of annihilating a minority culture i don't care whether it's protestants and catholics in ireland or whether we're talking about jews in germany gays and lesbians in the united states african americans in the united states or any other group that can be dominated given that so so i guess the template is that we all we come crowbar programmed i think it's pretty primordial i don't care where you go in the in the world you're going to have this this ability to target others look at the hutus and the tootsies i don't care where you go i've seen it and all of us know it if you listen to the jewish survivors of germany they will all say we just could never have believed that our neighbors we went to weddings and funerals we'd lived there for generations together same thing in bosnia you had croatians and and and serbians going living side by side and being in each other's weddings and all of a sudden because you had demagoguery and hatred and propaganda same thing in rwanda all of a sudden genocide so given that we're capable of this and none of us should be smug enough to think that we aren't capable of it you've got to be very careful about how you deprogram it and cope with it because my assumption is that we all have racist thoughts we all have homophobic thoughts we all have anti-semitic stereotypes in our heads we all have these pictures of the other and they're negative my question so when people say well connie i'm not racist i say we're all racist and people tell me connie i'm not homophobic because we're all homophobic my question is what are you doing to cope with it deprogram it and challenge it in your day-to-day life and what are you doing in response to the more extreme expressions of it in the extreme expressions of it or murder genocide and discrimination move along the spectrum to the more benign end of it and you do have you do have the jokes you've got the morning talk shows where african-americans are i mean the jokes about stupid african-americans on the imus and the morning program everyone i mean listen to it uh it's laugh lines that doesn't have to necessarily be unhealthy that can actually help us pull out that stuff and laugh at it and make it a healthy make a healthy reaction to it it depends on how it's done and it's very contextual you've got to be very very careful about who does it and who has the credibility and who has the trust but it is a spectrum and the first step defamation is the first step to annihilation on the other end and we need to come out of denial about that and start coping with it you know it's interesting too right here we have three people who are both majority in one way and minority in another way and it's it is not just theoretical with us or at least it shouldn't be about how we deal with being the in the class that is likely to be annihilated and also being in a class that can do the annihilation um i mean you know you're you're straight right you're african-american you're a man you're gay you know i'm white i'm a lesbian it's uh it's it's interesting because you do have to deal with how these stereotypes play out in the majority stereotype how to unlearn kind of what we know how to how to accept it as you said how to admit it how to deal with it and it's a duty i think for us to do it and we have to really i think insist that other people do it too i mean it's as always people don't like to be saying what other people should do or what they shouldn't say but i i'm interested too in an aspect that we haven't totally explored and that is you started talking i mean from the strange fruit point of view about the public display of lynching the publicness of so many of these crimes and the way in which the victim is left the impact on people who are not crime victims i mean you say there's a message there and you talked about the impact of the crimes on the victims themselves are there studies or i mean our own experience about how how do you feel when you're not you haven't been the victim of a crime but you're in that class or category or uh group yeah this is where we have to go with our feelings i think there there are not a lot of empirical data you have to think about it in in order to systematically study this you'd have to find people from that minority group who don't have the experience you know to be able to say that after this experience you know one group is feeling more pressure or more anxiety or more uh defenseless you'd have to have another group that didn't and and we just can't come up with that uh you know but certainly just think about our own experiences you read the paper or you know you hear the news about about a murder or about uh maybe you know in a way maybe a murder even seems so far away just because it's so awful but just think about the you know the lesser crimes you know the immediate beatings and muggings and the harassment that we know it go on all the time uh all of those things inevitably i think make us feel more vulnerable well because i've had a bill to try to protect gay and lesbian students in california public schools now this is my third time bringing this bill i've as you might imagine talked to a lot of students there are some very interesting experiences and battered women have had these experiences too where there will be a threatening gesture made by killing or hurting someone's pet for instance and you know the american humane association is actually interested in this aspect of it because a lot of times same kind of thing i'm going to send you a message but this message is you're next i'm going to hurt you know this animal which among all of these classes is thought to be the lowest i mean we can hurt and kill animals we don't care right as a as a kind of a message so you get the message and i think that what happens is we live you said you can't find a test group why because no one has lived their life without the message you couldn't find african-americans who who wouldn't respond to a burned cross that's right you couldn't find uh you just you couldn't find uh jewish uh americans who wouldn't respond to a swastika i mean i wouldn't you can find people like me who wouldn't respond to a swastika so it's it's i think it'd be a pretty difficult study to do the um the perpetrators it's always you well almost always i i in my experience people who feel they have absolutely nothing in terms of their futures in terms of their stake in society uh marginal characters who feel like whatever privilege or expectations they have just are never going to come about very insecure uh usually very macho very fragile senses of an easily shattered senses of masculinity and um the what what strikes me is how how um strong the fear of gay men is by by heterosexual men and and and when and it doesn't take very long in heterosexual company for the gay jokes to start and i will often i will often have to say well you can't bond with me through through the jokes i'm sorry we're just you're just gonna have to change it i mean of course i'm completely uninvited the next time social pariah time but but it just the anti-semitic jokes and homophobic jokes and and often with whites who forget that i'm black you'll you'll hear the the the black jokes as well start start coming out or just comments or stereotypes start coming out but the but the visceral fear and i've always thought and i i i upset this group of heterosexual men one time and i just said what is it you know i said are you afraid that you're gay too i mean what is because usually that level of fear reflects some fear that you may have the characteristics of the person that you're supposed to hate that's usually or you're you're fearing that they're going to contaminate your bloodline which is usually the africa you don't want it god knows you can't have anything african in your bloodline if you're white i mean that whole purity of blood has just was taken to an extreme in this country and in south africa uh but the goal but but with but with homophobia there seems to be a really visceral fear and i understand you know the most adolescent boys have homoerotic dreams at one point and that does not mean that your orientation is going to permanently be gay and and and most of us are somewhere in the middle on the spectrum um uh could maybe bisexual very few people at the clearly heterosexual end and very few people at the all gay end and all lesbian end most of us are in the middle and have a little mixture of both and that that seems to absolutely terrify uh heterosexual men and when i said i said what is it are you afraid that that that that you're gay well the room exploded and it was obvious that that was it they wouldn't have reacted that way if it hadn't been it they would have been kind of quizzical about it well you know i don't think so but it was just i mean people got up out of their chairs and the table almost went over and it was i think i i hit a nerve are you doing the nerve yeah well and you know it um you know certainly that's that's there in in uh in many cases um but there's another whole side to it which is is the equation of um sexual orientation and gender you know that that uh gay men are assumed to uh because of the fact that they're homosexual that that not only has to do with sexual behavior but it has to do something with masculinity and being a man and uh in my research actually that was a more common theme when i was uh you know looking at heterosexual adults and and just getting them to to disclose about their attitudes it was more common um to look at to see ideas that that the concern had to do less with sexual behavior and more with the idea of gay men is effeminate and to a lesser extent lesbians is masculine but there's something about the the gay men being assumed to be effeminate in behavior but but something about being feminine uh that was that and that was where a lot of the threat comes from well i think it depends on where you get your sense of superiority if you need one um i know that any society that in which the first and usually only question that anyone asks when a new human baby is born is did you have a boy or a girl it must mean and you know we we know the question is gender-based because mostly we just say what you have what you have and everyone knows the question means only one thing did you have a boy or did you have a girl and if that's the first and usually only question then we have to know a lot rides on it and there is enormous um i don't even know what the right word is but just a sense of horror among men who would be thought in any way to give up that privilege or want to be willing to to come down a class same with race everyone understood african-americans straightening their hair everyone understood certainly white people would say this everyone understood lightening your skin or valuing lighter skin more than darker skin because white had power and black didn't no one understood a person wanting to be a black person if they were white no one would understand a man wanting to be a woman everyone can understand why a lesbian if this were the case and it isn't might want to be a man that's a great thing to be in charge the best etc you know in the service or in athletic teams you want to insult the guys you say you play like a girl right or you just say girl come on out on the field girls that's the worst thing you can say to them right but it's it me i mean it's you can be horror struck to be thought that you would in any way be giving up that privilege and we've drawn the lines so stringently that i think men are terrified of anything that i mean terrified of anything that looks like it's it's tending to give up that that privilege why would anything or anyone do that and that terror translates into real uh hatred more than just disapproval but real hatred yeah the reactions are extreme the uh and it's it's it's a visceral physical it's not just verbal and it's visceral and um which which which leads you to think well if if people are capable of reacting this way and to to gays and lesbians and they're also capable of reacting that way to other groups as well but but i really think that the homophobia is outside of white supremacist uh elements and in groups um that it's on that level it really is on that level and uh when i examine both they're the same and the consequences are the same so you start to think well yes we have hate crimes and then you start to think at the other end of the spectrum where the where you start to deal with younger children and you know the whole tinky winky you know just even toys the idea that toys might send a subliminal message that tells you how how threatening this this this is that that the notion of gayness the the notion of having an orientation that isn't heterosexual is so viscerally threatening and it it it it requires some really thoughtful and careful antidotes and we have to start thinking all right if this is the next ism that's going to be legitimate and i really do think that that homophobia is still legitimate in this country it is still okay to be anti-gay uh it is not okay at least people don't want to admit i mean even even trent lott who goes to the what used to be the white citizens council says they're not racist i mean it's just absurd uh but he'll say that that homosexuality is like kleptomania well like kleptomania is a sin right and that's not a problem right right so it isn't okay to acknowledge uh uh being racist that that we've at least moved that far and who knows it may become fashionable again but right now people will run from it a mile a minute even if even at the cost of really dealing with it honestly and saying look it isn't the point of being racist everyone has racist thoughts and racialized thinking it's it's what are we doing to think about is he can't even have that discussion nowadays we haven't even gotten there with homophobia it is still legitimate and um i'm concerned because i see i see bonding between for example african-american fundamentalist churches and christian fundamentalist churches around homophobia they're bonding through hate and it you know it's it's so you get infused with religion and i've heard some very very interesting um theological discussions about you know well you know of course the bible isn't isn't justifying homophobia i mean you may as well say the slavery still has to happen if you're going to go to the bible and justify this stuff they're also not willing to push very hard than the notion of adultery which was a higher sin than this and uh it's it's it's it's an epidemic and you know adult recent epidemic evidently in the congress so so they're very carefully chosen biblical notions and some very good pastors have heard some very good sermons countering those religious um justifications for homophobia but we're going to have to be very it's it's you know you talk about textbooks you talk about trying to deprogram children so they don't pick up these messages and it's okay to hate gay people and you should fear this god knows what it does to the children who are gay and lesbian um we're not even thinking about the impact on on on the orientation issue on children and so i i'm wondering you know how do we help people to connect the dots heterosexual people to connect the dots so that the fear level goes down how do we talk about it's been an interesting reaction that i felt was different and i'd be interested in your response to it these murders happened in small towns almost all of them that we're starting to hear more about now the law enforcement agencies in these towns appear to take these murders more seriously than i had heard in the past and a a an instant response um some reporting of the the horror of the town's people now i would expect it in the dragging death these days of an african-american man though i don't know in texas whether we can still count on a sheriff to really care but it seemed to me it was more than just oh my god the new york times is here i better do something that there was some genuine notion and that isn't a set of people that was not engaged in caring do you see a difference well you know i think this goes back to the question of of why hate crime laws you know even even people who maybe say that it's not the best way to go or it's not it's not that necessary i think would have to concede that a big change that we've seen in the last 10 years or so is that hate crimes have begun to be taken seriously by law enforcement personnel in a way that they never used to be you know now and i think that at least in part this has to be attributed to the hate crime statistics act that was passed around the turn of the decade and that that suddenly said we want to start collecting statistics on this now the statistics are still probably very unreliable and way under count the problem but still it's it's the case now that police departments have people who are trained to know about hate crimes they have forms that they fill out they have procedures and policies that when they encounter something that even could be a hate crime they they have something to do and that seems like a big change and i think that's as a result of all of the activism that occurred during the 1980s around the whole issue of hate crimes and getting some consciousness raised among law enforcement personnel if this had happened 40 years ago if the dragging death of james byrd had happened 40 years ago we could have had an emmett till verdict remember the young african-american boy in mississippi who was uh oh the picture of him with his head swollen so big from the beating uh no jury we couldn't get a white jury to convict the perpetrators you also couldn't get a white jury to um convict the murderers of cheney schwerner and goodman so there has been a sea change it is no longer the good old boys sheriffs who simply protected certain citizens and were actually riding with a clan at night which was the story of the south any african-american family knows that including mine in alabama so yes that absolutely changed and it's a very the jasper texas story is a fascinating story of the community how far we've come out of denial but how far we're still in it um here you have a community where the african-americans and the and the white residents said together we're going to heal we're going to let our law enforcement work justice is down there he went immediately the sheriff went immediately to get the fbi would never have happened 35 40 50 years ago not in never uh so that that is a huge huge step that's huge progress put that on the table and let's celebrate it but at the same time 1999 there was a wall in the cemetery a wall after death to make sure that the molecules don't mix under the ground or something but whatever you have you segregated cemeteries in 1999 it took this for people to come out of denial about the symbolism of needing to separate african-americans and whites and death and and also while the high school seems to be okay in jasper texas there's serious problems in the middle school a lot of racial fighting interracial fighting over the confederate display of the confederate flag and what it means um and that was slowly coming out and there is deep deep hurt in the african-american community in jasper texas there they're now looking for people to come in and help with the healing but there's a deep deep hurt that that a son from one of their white families in that community was capable of harboring such hate and having it developed in the prisons which is a whole other topic what happened how we generate we create we have little engines incubators of this kind of hate in our prisons um and and and that's where this was was nurtured but that those ideas and that that capacity for hate was still possible in 1999. i mean mississippi voted to end slavery uh february 1995. what was that about and yet we want to pretend that that we're fine we haven't even gotten that far we can't even get anti-discrimination laws passed to protect case and lesbians not not giving gays and lesbians any privilege but simply giving them the equal justice under law that african americans and jewish people and everybody else have uh religious and racial and gender discrimination um and uh uh so we're we're we're not even that far along with uh with anti-discrimination laws very well i guess i brought up the sheriff because the what you were saying connie is is so true and it's also a question how do we move this along i mean someone who's the co-director of something called the advancement project addresses these issues how do we move this along or does it move along kind of on its own i mean the the same man who who won the pulitzer prize for writing [Music] martin luther king's biography wrote a book called liberty and sexuality which is about the uh uh pro-choice well actually pro-contraception anti-contraception pro-choice anti-choice and a little bit gay and lesbian sort of pro and con movements and about how there are sea changes in public opinion and how you can see them coming and he identified three major institutions that seem to begin to change before you get a sea change about these things the pulpit the press and the law and the law is an aspect when we talk about saying something is a hate crime saw this happen with domestic violence it took us seven years in california before we could even get a law passed that said domestic violence was a crime because it was just fine to beat up a woman if she was your woman and that was we shouldn't be interfering in that or well it didn't happen very much which is part of this thing about they're crazy we're not there's a few murders that's not about us and essentially these movements it seems to me have developed into a a really sad but necessary recognition in our society which is just as you've said that we all participate in this and what we need to do is to choose not to somehow so what in your experience seems to work i mean when you look at the victims and the perpetrators do you also look at or can you generalize at all about the trail that's left and what we do to heal or to help each other heal or to prepare not to have society be homophobic or racist well you know one thing that really fits in with what connie was saying earlier from research on prejudice is that it seems to be a very common pattern that [Music] everyone seems to have immediate gut level responses that usually conform to a lot of societal stereotypes so they often fit with racism and homophobia and sexism what seems to be different about the people who are who would not be considered prejudiced is that they probably have that that instantaneous reaction which can be measured now with with technology in terms of looking at physical changes in the body and and reactions to to words that are subliminally subliminally presented and things but what happens with the people who would be considered not to be prejudiced is that they there's a second step for them which is that then they're voluntary cognitive processes kick in and they act on those so i think what we have to do is teach people how to you know recognize yeah you may have that first visceral reaction that may just be something that's that's just inherent and and if you've grown up in the society you're going to have it in certain patterns with certain groups but the next thing to do is to take that next step and teach people actually how to do that and and it would seem that we're going to have to start very early with that and and do it in the schools you know with kids i think that by the time you have 19 and 20 and 21 year olds who are out bashing people uh then it may it's probably too late for them we need to start much earlier than that and are there projects that you either one of you know about that does that well there is teaching tolerance there there there are few that that teach that deprogram people from their fears and their hatreds um but you know the most the most effective set of approaches is exactly what you were saying sheila which is that you do have to have the laws in place if we had just stopped at the marches in the 60s and singing we shall overcome and kumbaya where would have you know we would have had absolutely nothing we had to forge every step of progress in the courts and which is why i went to law school now once once the court orders come down then everybody decides to behave and say we didn't need this in the first place nonsense you have to have the laws and you have to have the ability to enforce the laws and to protect the rights of the hated minority that has to come and and there are series of laws that have to be passed it's going to take years because you've got this the the sort of sort of hate brigades that and and people who are just based on fear they just block it for political reasons and look i i bashed them i bashed them more gays in the legislation they run on it so as long as we have politicians who think like that and as long as it's legitimate to do that i can see though through media and television and movies as more and more gay themes and the public culture i'll tell you clint eastwood probably did more to help race relations than than any 10 cases because as soon as he took on a black partner in the dirty harry movies i used to watch all of those white gis you just idolized clint eastwood and all of a sudden they're looking at their black counterparts a little differently well if you know dirty harry does it then and then of course he took on a latino partner and he took on a you know it didn't matter that he was espousing the archie bunker views the fact that clint eastwood had people in his movies did a hell of a lot through through popular culture so the popular culture realm is enormously important and we need to be pushing the stories to get away from the stereotypes you know the the gay parades and the things that people like to caricature as if heterosexual people didn't have equally you know expressive and uh you know exuberant expressions of their sexuality just go to las vegas um but of course you know you demonize the worst the worst of any culture that you're that you're trying to crush so popular culture law you're also going to have to have um in the religious community a very careful you're going to have to get a very brave group of pastors and rabbis and and monks and the whole slew across the across the spectrum of religions who are willing to take this on and say we stand against homophobia you're also going to have to have the same thing in the civil rights community i was just at a dinner last night with julian bond who explicitly included along with the james byrd discussion the matthew shepard discussion you have to have african-american civil rights leaders and chicano and and latino civil rights leaders and every other kind of women's rights and everybody else accepting the burden of helping to lower homophobia and uh it's part of why i show up at the press conferences and and do my little spiel you know whenever there's there's a there's nothing because there there are very few who are willing to do this so they're gonna have to be there's gonna have to be that leadership as well and then the politicians they're gonna have to be heterosexual politics so in every single sector where opinion is made and where the tone and approach of the society to a group of people is set and put into motion we're going to have to be there and and we're it's going to be a horrific battle because this i i have to tell you i haven't seen this kind of reaction i've seen it in communities where women have unlike an appalachia where we tried to do a women's center it was burned down three times um and and where you're tearing there's a it's seen as a threat to the social setup very fundamentally like you're going to tear up the whole culture of that particular town um and when it's that volatile it has to you have to have more than just the terrorized group you have to have a whole coalition i think that you know one of the important points that you were making earlier and that goes in with this this list and your your troika with that included the pulpit um i think we have to realize that a lot of the defensiveness and sense of threat that's associated with lesbians and gay men is not just because of issues about gender and sexuality but also because since well since really the late 70s in a big way we've had this religious movement in this country that has demonized lesbians and gay men and has created a culture in which for a lot of people uh well people need to have a sense that they're good people you know i need to have a sense that i'm i'm basically a good person i'm doing the right thing if i'm a christian fundamentalist uh as of about 1978 or later part of being a good person meant opposing the homosexuals and and seeing the gay community as being a threat not just in terms of sexuality and gender but in terms of my whole set of values in terms of my god and that demonization is still very strong and that's why i think it's especially important to bring in the pulpit and and people from all of the religious groups unfortunately they are also very resistant which you know if we watch these different events that are going on around the country and around the world in terms of the different churches taking you know either taking anti-gay stands or really failing to not to take a a positive stance toward uh lesbian engagements oh i think we're seeing some change and it's very slow 75 methodist ministers marrying two lesbians in sacramento publicly and saying you know this is something we want to do this is wonderful i could talk for a whole another hour and i hope you'll stay and do that but unfortunately we're down to the last minute it's really difficult to believe it goes by so fast for me so greg herrick research psychologist from uc davis connie rice co-director of the advancement project my friends thank you so much for being here really glad that you joined us as well and i hope that i guess i'll change the ending that i normally use a little bit because i i hope that where hate crimes are concerned we will never get used to it and i hope you'll do your your part thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you