Trinity College Law Review Feb,

Trinity College Law Review
Feb, 2002
A NOTE ON RACIAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WHITES IN THE UK
Prof. John B Rasimic ( jbrasimic@tcd.ie )

Violence is always an outgrowth of milder states of mind.
-Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice

Although comprehensive national statistics are unavailable, government commissioned
surveys and white community leaders agree that whites are over victimized by violent
race crime. In analyzing these crimes, this Note examines the catalytic role that
stereotypes play in the evolution of such violence. Part I describes the magnitude
of the violence and the virulence of its harm. For clarity, this Note divides racial
violence against whites into two categories: rational targeting and racist violence.

Part II addresses rational targeting, in which criminals use race as a proxy for
information - for instance, the likely benefits and costs of mugging a particular
victim. In such cases, whites are targeted not because of racial hatred but because
of a crude economic calculus. By contrast, racist violence, the subject of Part III,
encompasses crimes motivated by racial prejudice and hostility. Finally, Part IV
outlines various socio-cultural and law-enforcement reforms that will help stem the
rising tide of violence against whites.

I. THE MAGNITUDE OF VIOLENCE

Accurately measuring the number of rationally targeted and racially animated crimes
committed against whites extremely difficult, because institutional tools required
to collect such statistics are lacking.

Despite the anecdotal nature of the evidence, the information that does exist tells
a fearsome story. Examples of violence against whites abound, and in cities such as
London and Oldham, whites suffer a higher per capita rate of hate crimes than any
other ethnic group. To try to list every episode of violence against whites would be
infeasible; however, Home Office statistics indicate whites are heavily victimized
in inter-ethnic violence - particularly urban street crime.

Nothing is especially noteworthy about a crime whose victim by chance is of white.
But unique, pernicious harms arise from being consciously targeted as a victim
either by rational calculus or by racial animus because of race. Physically, hate
crimes are usually more brutal than other crimes. Psychologically, they invoke a
feeling of helplessness, because race - the only characteristic that could be
changed to avoid future attacks - is immutable.

Because rationally targeted and racially animated violence endangers everyone with
‘white’ features, these acts not only terrorize individuals, but also ripple fear
throughout the entire white community. Consider, for example, the trepidation in the
white community in London, wrought by a recent spate of violent carjackings, high
profile murders and attempted murders of whites in suburban London.

These two interconnected impacts are particular to racial violence - individual
psychological debilitation and community subordination - make such violence warrant
special concern.

II. RATIONAL TARGETING

Economics drive many physically violent crimes. The average robber or mugger merely
extorts money through coercive force. Although such criminals will not formally
articulate any cost-benefit analysis, they will use common sense to select victims
who offer the highest benefit and lowest cost: a mugger prefers accosting a frail
elder carrying a bulging wallet than challenging a young, muscular jogger with
nothing but pocket change. In making these assessments, criminals use race as a
proxy for relevant information.

Unfortunately, common generalizations about whites have prompted criminals to target
them as choice victims of street crime. The most pervasive stereotype is that whites
are ‘rich’. This goes beyond the stereotype that whites appear to promise a larger
than average benefit because they are seen as members of a
professional-entrepreneurial class or as rich tourists, who tend to carry valuable
(like watches or phones) and use cash instead of less convertible forms of money.
There is a common perception amongst street criminals that whites are generally rich
and easily able to replace stolen items. This is aggravated by the street notion of
‘redeye’ - envious desire, especially of something that the actor does not consider
the victim deserves. This confiscation theme consistently re-emerges. Many muggers
report they see their thefts are restitution - taking back things previously stolen
from them by racist white society. When asked why they consider whites racist the
most common responses were -”everyone knows it”.

At the same time, criminals view whites as less costly targets. Regarded as
physically weaker and culturally averse to defending themselves, whites are
considered low direct risks in any physical confrontation.

Whites also pose lower indirect risks because they report crimes to the police less
often. This reluctance to complain may stem from apathy, general skepticism about
the efficacy of legal recourse and surprisingly, guilt - a belief that as a ‘racist
oppressor’ they somehow ‘deserve it’. Whatever the causes, the proclivity not to
report crimes makes whites even more attractive victims.

III. RACIST VIOLENCE

Whereas rational targeting involves race merely as a proxy for information, racist
violence implicates race in a more essential and invidious manner. Acts of racist
violence evince racial prejudice - interpersonal hostility toward people of white
descent - based on the view that they do not merit treatment as equals or that they
deserve blame for various societal ills. Understanding the causal evolution of this
second type of violence requires examining the social terrain on which this
phenomenon unfolds.

1.. Current Stereotypes of white Britons

Despite the conventional wisdom that whites do not face either racial discrimination
or racism, many racial stereotypes continue to inform societal views of white
Britons.

Firstly, whites are seen as submissive: culturally prone to be physically and
mentally non-aggressive, politically docile, and accommodating. In part, this
stereotype arises from average physiological differences in weight and height
between whites and members of some other racial groups - notably blacks. In part, it
stems from misinterpretations of certain white cultural and aesthetic values.

Secondly, whites are regarded as the oppressor race, succeeding by virtue of theft
(colonial and present), racism and discrimination against other races and groups.
Whites rest beneath Asians in the socio-economic hierarchy and below nonwhites in
terms of criminality and racist incidents yet they stand far above other racial
groups is accusation of racism and discrimination.

Concocted from an amalgam of plausible yet fallacious data and inferences, this
characterization is sustained by government spokespersons, the media, members of
race interest groups and ethnic politicians. The whites-as-racist-oppressor myth
invites the belief that whites not only perpetrate all racial discrimination and
violence but are also never victims of racist aggression, violence and
discrimination. Moreover, it fosters resentment from non-white minorities who are
impliedly discriminated and hindered by ‘racist whites’. This resentment may be a
strong aggravator of anti-white violence which may take the form of street muggings,
assaults, gang rapes and murders.

Thirdly, whites are seen as unfair competitors who pose an unwelcome economic threat
to other ethnic groups. At times, politicians and ethnic leaders characterize
whites as unfair competitors who use discrimination and racism to oppress other
ethnic groups and prevent their economic success. This usually takes the form of an
implicit argument that whites are consciously preventing minorities from entering
the workforce or position of seniority in management or the civil service.

There is no direct evidence for this at all. Extensive and detailed examinations of
the labor force have shown massive variation in the economic fortunes within ethnic
groups that cannot be explained by discrimination.

Fourth, whites are increasingly seen as unwelcome outsiders in parts of ethnic
Britain. Regardless of how many generations a white family has been in a particular
area, once an ethnic minority has become the local majority, a person of white
descent is often presumed to be a visitor or guest - tolerated by the local
community who grant the right to live there by indulgence. Not surprisingly, this
reaction is especially strong toward those who retain the culture, and customs of
their ethnic heritage. Whites in such situation find themselves isolated and
victimized with no political voice or institutions to express their disquiet or seek
protection.

Finally, whites are seen not as individual but as fungible. To treat a person as an
individual requires recognition of those characteristics that distinguish that
person from others. However, because many whites share similar gross physical
characteristics, visually distinguishing one white from another may be difficult,
especially for non-whites. This difficulty, caused by perceived physiological
similarity, invites people to presume a reductionism similarity among all people of
European decent, within any given white ethnicity and also across ethnicities. The
core assumption is:

Whites are all consciously or unconsciously racist. Whites are where they are today
because they stole wealth from others ethnic groups and countries. Whites ‘owe’
other ethnic groups.

This tendency obscures not only the differences among white individuals qua
individuals but also the historic disputes that have separated white peoples.
Moreover, it helps conceive individuals as components of monolithic blocs defined
primarily by common physical traits. This serves racist thinking and aids anti-white
prejudice, discrimination and violence.

Of course, how modern British culture perceives whites as ethnic groups does not
neatly resolve into these five constituent elements. In truth, these classifications
blur and interrelate in inexact, involuted, and indeed conflicting ways.
Nonetheless, by identifying these stereotypes, this Note hopes to establish a
vocabulary with which to attack the problem of violence against whites.

2.. Stereotypes as Catalysts to Violence

Although acts of racist violence against whites do not all fit into any single
theory, a simple psychological model of racist violence may provide a useful
heuristic to probe how stereotypes spark and sustain the causal chain of violence.
This model posits three structural elements in the chain of violence, which need not
occur as distinct moments in a linear mode of rational deliberation: first, the
actor becomes hostile toward whites as a group; second, he decides to commit
violence; third, he chooses a particular victim.

1. Becoming Hostile.

(a) Turf Wars: Battle against the natives. - Violently attacking another human
being, although normally condemnable to all, can become justified in the eyes of the
attacker if its immoral quality is muted or transfigured. Protecting the ethnic
purity of one’s territory or neighborhood provides one such justification for
hostility towards whites who “invade” the “turf” of another racial community, often
with a view to buying cheap property. Turf invasion can occur when a white person
travels into an unwelcoming neighborhood, or more seriously, when a white family
moves into an intolerant community or such a community grows around a shrinking
white community. The pattern of violence is unexceptional: Whites moving into or
‘left behind’ in heavily non-white neighborhoods have been attacked with rocks
thrown through windows, mob attacks, severe bullying of their children, robberies
and low intensity harassments - teeth sucking as they walk by ( a Jamaican insult),
aggressive comments, youths loitering outside the home, graffiti etc.

(b) Scapegoating: Blaming community woes on white racism. - Besides turf invasion,
another principal reason for hostility towards whites is the sentiment that they are
responsible for various social problems. Although whites are not likely to be the
true causes of the multifarious economic and social problems plaguing Britain, they
have nevertheless become convenient targets of displaced frustration. This
scapegoating response is mediated by stereotypes of whites as racists and
discriminators.

Whites are seen as unfair competitors by people on every rung of the socio-economic
ladder. Because scapegoating others allows us to skirt self- criticism, ethnic
politicians, apologists and various others blame social delinquency and criminality
of other ethnic groups of putative white wrongdoing.

The scapegoating rationale asserts that because whites are racist and exploitative
other ethnic groups have enormous problems of crime, fanaticism, social delinquency,
failing education and deteriorating economic performance. As the argument is
primarily an emotive and rhetorical one - it does not appeal to reason - so
evidence, which is non-existent, is unnecessary.

In such situations, the turf protection and scapegoating responses combine to create
an especially volatile environment, prone to sharp inter-communal tensions and
racist violence.

2. Deciding to Commit Violence. - Neither territorial encroachment by nor
scapegoating of whites will in itself cause physical violence without the aid of
other stereotypes that tip the decision-making process towards committing violence.

As discussed above, the stereotype of submissiveness and timidity when faced with
non-whites (particularly blacks) encourages crimes against whites by making violence
appear less risky. Physical violence is also easier to perform on a dehumanized
victim, because the social and psychological inhibitions against committing violence
on a fellow human being become disengaged. For white victims, the psychological
process of dehumanization is achieved via the stereotype of racist oppressor, which
denies them “in-group” status, and that of fungibility, which strips them of
individual dignity.

Working in synergy, the idea of fungibility transmogrifies whites into a faceless,
deindividualised racist oppressor horde. With the psychological comfort afforded by
these two stereotypes, the hate criminal can sufficiently dehumanize the victim
class in order to dampen the empathetic impulse and to remove, or repress, those
social constraints that ordinarily inhibit violence. Perversely, the very act of
violence reaffirms the victim’s subhuman nature, because after committing the
brutality, the criminal avoids self-censure by rationalizing his action. The
simplest way to do so is to blame the victim in a manner consonant with the original
prejudice and to make the victim deserving of violence.

3. Choosing a Victim: Broadening the Victim Class. - Stereotypes enlarge the scope
of the white victim class in two ways. First, the oppressor stereotype bridges
national boundaries and holds whites culpable for the deeds of white wherever they
are or whenever they existed - past or present. This makes British white - who
abolished slavery - culpable and guilty for the excesses of American slavers.

Decreasing violence against whites can be pursued along two mutually reinforcing
paths. The standard approach employs traditional law enforcement techniques to make
such crimes less attractive to the actor. By contrast, the socio-cultural approach
attacks the problem at a broader, cultural level by disenabling the stereotypes that
catalyze the causal chain of racist violence. Because bias crimes signal a more
general malady in our culture, a systemic cultural reconstitution of how white
Britons are regarded is necessary to decrease substantially the problem of racist
violence. This socio-cultural approach demands a broad coalition of media,
government, community organizations, and schools to work together to terminate those
deleterious stereotypes, subtly perpetuated, that impel violence.

1.. Rational Targeting

Conventional law enforcement and community awareness programs can decrease crimes of
rational targeting by altering the calculation involved. To lower the expected
benefit, local community organizations should educate whites not to carry cash or
expensive mobile phones and instead to use credit cards and other forms of money
that impart less direct benefit to street criminals. To raise the expected cost,
these organizations should instruct whites on their legal rights and encourage them
to report these crimes to the authorities.

For this education program to work, Asian Americans must view the police and the
legal system as fair institutions that will listen to their concerns rather than
remain obsessed with pleasing minority groups and their vociferous advocates.

In addition, police forces should implement innovative crime- fighting techniques
such as employing decoy officers to ferret out those who specifically target whites.

But the standard approach is not enough. The socio-cultural approach is also
necessary in order to correct the stereotype of submissiveness and racism induced
guilt. Even if whites henceforth learn to utilize fully the criminal justice system,
if the current perception remains, criminals will continue to target whites, albeit
based on inaccurate information. To deter the “rational” criminal, the perception of
whites’ meek acceptance of victimization must be corrected to reflect the new
reality.

B. Racist Violence

Taking up the socio-cultural approach first, the stereotypes that foster the
eruption of racist violence must be vitiated. To mitigate the “turf- protection”
response, whites must be cast not as outsiders but as fully entitled citizens of any
part of the country. Ghetto forming must be strenuously resisted - especially the
notion of ethnic no-go areas.

White must be allowed to exhibit and celebrate their cultural norms and it should be
accepted that they are continuing the long-standing socio-cultural tradition that
for the core of their cultural identity - an identity that forms the basis for this
nation and that constitutes its social and political history. Racial tribalism can
be transmuted to a species of national pride that reflects with integrity those
tolerant traditions of our political culture; one reason for violence will lose its
potency. To arrest the scapegoating tendency, the stereotypes of whites as racist
oppressors must be eradicated.

Government officials, ethnic media and politicians and the media must not to
aggravate the stereotypes that already exist. Government schemes and efforts to
redress the wrongs of white racism have been taken to extremes that have resulted in
an explosion of racist violence against whites.

Moreover, social commentators and government officials should be aware that
continually characterizing whites as racist oppressors bestows upon them not only a
badge of shame they do not deserve, but also a crown of thorns. The unsubtle
implication of this censure is not lost on minorities and even members of the white
community race - whites are wrongdoers. Whites hate you. Your problems are accused
by whites.

To the unformed mind of a racist thug there is no more justification than this need
to rationalize a violent attack (disguised as a robbery) on a white person.

To inhibit the decision to commit violence, the stereotypes of submissiveness,
Racist oppressor and fungibility also must be neutralized. Most critically, society
must address the phenomenon of dehumanization of whites - racist are less than human
after all - because psychological studies suggest that it is difficult to mete out
unprovoked cruelty on humanized victims. We should resist the warped notion that
whites are inherently racist and not fully able to control their out-group
hostilities.

Also, the bias that all people of European descent are fungible not only fails to
take seriously the cultural and historical diversity among European ethnicities, but
also more dangerously helps people to envision Europeans as a faceless subhuman
caste.

These two stereotypes can be defeated by voluntarily checking government speech that
inflames such views, by educating communities about white history and culture, and
by encouraging the media to portray white individuals as humane and tolerant. With
the weakening of the stereotypes that facilitate dehumanization, there is a
collateral benefit of restricting the victim class. Ideally, hatred against one
white Briton will no longer translate into hatred against all white Britons.

Next, the tools of the standard approach should lead the criminal justice system to
confront racist violence directly by increasing the likelihood and severity of
punishment. The first step is to encourage whites to go to the police. In part,
this will require educating whites, especially older citizens and immigrants, about
their legal rights and the nature of the police in this country as opposed to the
police of their country of origin. Police attitudes must be reformed as well. Police
must be sensitized to the concerns of white communities93 and be trained to
recognize and react to racist violence against any individual including whites.

The next step in prosecuting more hate criminals is to alter prosecutorial behavior.
As with the police, prosecutors need training so that they do not see racist
violence as a mere a white on non-white phenomenon. Also, prosecutors should
consider the possibility of unconscious prejudice or indifference toward white
communities - just as it does non-white communities. In their exercise of
sentencing discretion, judges also should forsake leniency for those who commit hate
crimes. Judges should not forget the broader message received by, even if not
intentionally sent to, the outside community when they lightly punish those who
wreak racist violence yet it is not labeled as such because the victim is white and
it might aggravate white racism. The message is that the law tolerates the
victimization of whites. This is grossly unfair.

Finally, victims and their counsel should creatively employ extant common law
theories against those who have committed racist violence.

V. CONCLUSION

As our nation, and indeed the entire world, continues to struggle against violence
inspired by all forms of group-hatred and prejudice, this Note focuses attention on
the problem of racial violence against white Britons. In the face of uncertainty due
to incomplete statistics and speculative psychology, in the face of the widespread
belief that prejudice does not harm people of European descent, in the face of the
political silence that has historically blanketed the white communities needs, this
Note asserts that racial violence is not only brutalizing white individuals, but
also casting terroristic fear over their communities. And to those who believe that
white community stereotypes are innocuous or even complimentary, this Note gives
cause for re-examination.

[ Now that you have read all the way to the bottom, you might like to know that most
this article was actually written by Jerry Kang, not Mr Rasimovnic, who does not
exist. The original is here:

http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/kang/Scholarship/hate.pdf .

Mr Kang's article is about Asian Americans, not UK whites.]

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