Bait and Switch: The Undercurrent of Hate in Indiana

On Monday at 8am in a packed to brim Senate Chamber, SB 12 was granted a Public Policy committee hearing. The measure was one of a handful of hate crimes bills filed this session, co-authored by two Republicans, Senators Alting and Bohacek, with significant guidance from Senator Glick, a member of their caucus and author of SB 12’s predecessor, and Senator Taylor, the Democratic lawmaker perhaps most devoted to putting a hate crimes bill on the governor’s desk.

I had planned to attend to testify against the bill as I did last year, but Monday was Presidents’ Day, an inconsequential federal holiday and a day off from school for my stepdaughter. I much prefer her company than that of state lawmakers and policy influencers, so I stayed home and listened to the live-stream over tea and breakfast with my wife, sparing myself from reliving the scenario of the previous session. I had the distinct honor of offering two incredibly daunting minutes of testimony between lobbyists representing ultraconservative advocacy groups, arguing against a measure my friends and colleagues and fellow organizers fervently support. My claims were diametrically opposed to those testifying before and after me and in direct conflict with the positions of people I care deeply for and often work alongside. It did not feel good.

It still doesn’t today.

I wrote on Facebook from bed the night before, “it might just unfold like the political circus it already is” of Monday’s committee hearing. The morning began with opposing testimony chock full of the usual suspects spouting off about traditional family values, white Christian hegemony, and reverse discrimination. In a wild card moment, Ryan McCann of Indiana Family Institute explained to the committee that the LGBTQ+ community is not a monolith. He then proceeded to quote the Sylvia Rivera Law Project:

“SRLP opposes the use of hate crimes legislation as a way to protect queer and trans people, as well as people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, and all marginalized people. We believe hate crimes legislation build up systems that cannot protect us and deflect resources from systems that sustain and support our communities, such as education and health care.”

Indiana Forward, a sizable coalition of influential organizations for “a clear, specific and inclusive hate crimes law,” led and activated a public campaign to back the bill, including “the state’s most prominent business, education, civic, and interfaith leaders.” After three long hours of impassioned testimony at the microphoned podium, the committee voted 9-1 to pass the bill to a second reading on the chamber floor, a small victory for the coalition and community members for the legislation.

But the bill that cleared this major hurdle was gutted by a GOP-backed amendment, removing protected classes from the statute and replacing the language to instead allow courts to consider undefined bias motivation as an aggravating factor when determining sentencing for an already existing crime in the code. In little more than a single day, Republican leadership upended the triumphant trajectory of the bias crimes bill. A political circus, indeed.

The Democratic caucus left the Senate floor in protest of the amended bill, passed by a large margin mostly along party lines, a precedented conservative move courtesy of former Senator Delph last year. Public devastation was immediate and overwhelming. ​Indiana Forward sent out a statement by email:

“Without a list of characteristics, Senate Bill 12 is not a true bias crimes law.” ​

The glaring problem is that SB 12 never was.

Over the last 18 months, I have been researching, writing about, and facilitating community spaces exploring hate crimes legislation and the dangerous impact of a potential law in Indiana. My work draws on policy positions from organizations named for and carrying forward the visions of queer and trans foremothers of color - the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Audre Lorde Project, TGI Justice Project, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Further, American Friends Service Committee and Against Equality have been studying, publishing content, and organizing against hate crimes legislation since their inception in the U.S. thirty years ago, amplifying writers, scholars, and organizers like Kay Whitlock, Dean Spade, Yasmin Nair, and then some.

What began as a lonely and deeply unpopular project is now a little less lonely. AFSC Indiana, Muslim Youth Collective, Jewish Voice for Peace Indiana, and a thriving hateration group have joined forces to challenge the liberal narrative about hate crimes laws, especially in a state where conservative power holds a supermajority in the statehouse and can squash or manipulate weak convergences at any point.

Protected Classes

The most comprehensive bias crimes statutes list “immutable characteristics” like race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, disability, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, and age as protected classes. However, the designations ignore systemic power of some identity groups over others. “Race” as a protected class is not a stand-in for “people of color,” a distinction that legitimizes a contested category of “anti-white” hate crimes tracked by the FBI, a point liberal supporters and racist opponents fail to acknowledge or address.

On November 12, 2018, Senator Taylor appeared on an episode of WFYI No Limits along with David Sklar of Indianapolis JCRC and statehouse reporter Brandon Smith to discuss hate crimes legislation in preparation for the current legislative session. To a call-in question about specialized treatment of minorities, Taylor responded: “Majority race people have nothing to worry about.” Smith took the argument further, echoing Indiana Forward’s Bias Crimes FAQ, saying “Everyone has a race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, etc. It’s not a zero-sum game. Everyone is protected.”

The GOP amended SB 12 to strip protected classes from the statute, but the terms hold so little legal value “any bias” and “immutable characteristics” are conflated and can be weaponized against marginalized communities, a political pattern already at play in and beyond Indiana.  

Policing, Prisons, and Hate Frameworks

Hate crimes laws expand investment in aggressive policing, mass incarceration, and longer prison sentences, as means of ineffective criminal punishment and sites of inhumane state-sanctioned violence disproportionately harming the same marginalized groups presumably covered by protected classes in bias crimes statutes.

This two-fold systemic oppression presses the question: What happens when the state itself is a perpetrator of hate? Hate crimes legislation, by design, does not hold institutions accountable for state violence of past or present.

Yesterday’s powerful bait and switch illustrates just how politically limited the foundation of bias crimes laws are. A hate framework builds on the idea that individualized hateful acts cross arbitrary lines of civility and are crimes worth a harsher punishment - a bias crime conviction and sentence enhancement. Hate crimes are hypervisible occurrences that we are conditioned to believe exist in isolation outside of a socially acceptable norm. In reality, hate crimes are manifestations of our culture that constantly redefines and reproduces and thrives on the existence of hate.

Hate crimes laws are popular among community members and organizations advocating for marginalized groups, economic interests, and progressive political power. Representatives of varied identities from United Way of Central Indiana, Indy Chamber, Indiana Youth Group, Muslim Alliance of Indiana, Women4Change, the local chapter of National Association of Social Workers, Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council, Urban League, and more spoke in favor of SB 12 on Monday morning. Dean Spade speculates on this phenomenon, writing: 

“… ongoing experience of marginalization makes some of us deeply crave recognition from systems and people we see as powerful or important. This desperate craving for recognition, healing, and safety can cause us to invest hope in the only methods most of us have ever heard of for responding to violence: caging and exile.”

A hate crimes law will not effectively uproot our culture of hate in Indiana, the common threads between the murders of Eleanor Northington and Ashley Sherman, anti-Semitic graffiti at a synagogue, the harassment and academic silencing of Palestinian students, attempts to restrict eligibility for poor families in need of SNAP and Medicaid, inhumane treatment of incarcerated people, and then some. SB 12 was a nonsolution for these pressing issues. The events of the last two days give us the opportunity to do the work that doesn't always feel good. We can and should turn a critical eye to hate crimes legislation and take a hard look at ourselves, too.