White People ~ at it Again

And, speaking of internet time ~ I got behind here. Worked like a demon over the weekend and responded to three CFP's, all related to the book. We'll see what comes of all that activity.

In other news, looks like white people are at it again, this time in Montauk, out at the tip of Long Island. There's this story in Newsday about a hate crime, and the controversy to follow:

"The tensions first surfaced publicly during a rare standing-room-only hearing in Montauk in February 2003 about Latino immigrants who were living in hotel rooms -- the only affordable housing they could find -- and who faced eviction. At that meeting, one local asked why officials "would want to turn Montauk into the Bronx of the East End. We don't want Hampton Bays out here. We don't want Freeport out here." Montauk, he added, "is turning into a hole." "

Fortunately, one of the white guys in Montauk says this:

""We get along much better than 98 percent of the rest of the world," said Paul Monte, the president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce and manager of the famed Gurney's Inn. "I think we should pat ourselves on the back."

Nice response.

Fast Capitalism & Internet Speed

I've been thinking a lot lately about the several things and how they might relate to one another. The first is what Ben Agger calls Fast Capitalism and the whole notion that one of the unintended consequences of globalization is it speeds up the processes of capitalism.

The second, related concept, that I've been turning over in my mind is that of the variable, socially constructedness of time. Eviatar Zerubavel has written a lot about this. Most notably, in my opinion, is his Seven Day Circle, about the social construction of the week.

The third concept, not surprisingly, is about hate groups online and the way that time has begun to speed up both the proliferation of these groups (or at the very least, their websites) and how that fact affects both the analysis of these groups and the praxis of doing anything something about them.


No answers or great insights, just thoughts to ponder at this point.

Hate Crime - The Movie

This looks interesting....

Hate Crime.

South Jersey Neo-Nazis

The lull in posts here has been due to a huge, and inadvertent, data loss last Friday which I've been mourning. Note to self: it's important to back up all your data. Onward....

Some neo-nazis in South Jersey have been behaving badly, according to this report, which says:

Two avowed New Jersey racists have been charged with trying to build a fertilizer bomb similar to the device that blew up in Oklahoma City, authorities said yesterday.

Gabriel Carafa of Pennsville, N.J., and Craig Orler of Whiting, N.J., allegedly gave a federal informant 60 pounds of a fertilizer component and asked him to build a bomb.

"Carafa boasted that this urea was more pure than the stuff that [Timothy] McVeigh used," authorities said in court papers.

McVeigh was executed for his role in bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City.

Convicted of beating a Hindu store owner in 2002, Carafa, 24, has "rahowa" tattooed across his forehead - skinhead shorthand for "RAcial HOly WAr."

New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice spokesman John Hagerty said authorities are still trying to determine why they wanted a bomb. "We're not quite sure of the target that Mr. Carafa had in mind, if anything in particular," Hagerty said.

Authorities cut short the five-month-old investigation last week, after the pair allegedly sold 11 stolen rifles, handguns and shotguns to undercover investigators. The weapons were stolen from a home in Pennsville, authorities said.

Carafa is a leader in Matthew Hale's racist Creativity Movement, formerly known as World Church of the Creator, authorities said. Both Carafa and Orler are members of "The Hated," a neo-Nazi skinhead group, authorities said.

Hagerty said the hate groups had some "limited activity" in South Jersey. The Southern Poverty Law Center says the group is active in Newark and Toms River, N.J.

Orler, 28, also has three felony convictions, for two burglaries and an assault. The pair were both barred from possessing firearms.

Don't you just love it when the racists tattoo that fact across their foreheads? It would make it so much easier to identify them if they all did that. No obvious internet connection in this story, but I'm guessing they didn't use the USPS to find the formula for the bomb they were building. My guess is they googled it.

Google Alerts & Hate Crimes

I have Google set up so that it sends me an email everytime there's a news report on the web of a hate crime. It makes for an interesting flow of work through the day, as the new message icon glows into appearance on the lower right corner of the desktop, "Google Alert: Hate Crime" reads the subject line of each email. Then, in the text of each email is the headline of the story, and a link to the report. Just now, there's a headline from the middle of the country that "Grade Schoolers Could be Charged with Hate Crime":

"Danville (KY) police are trying to determine whether an act of vandalism was just childish or racist. Police say five kids ranging in ages 8 to 11 vandalized this home by using soap to write the symbol for anarchy and a derogatory remark about the nine year old boy who lives there.

A few weeks earlier a note containing racial remarks and threats was posted on the front door. Police are still investigating the case and no charges have been filed. If it's determined this was a hate crime, the case could be handed over to federal authorities.

The mother of one of the accused children says her son admits to the vandalism but at nine years old he doesn't realize there were any racial overtones in what he wrote. Lisa Hardin says her son and several other neighborhood children have never gotten along with Ruby Jackson's nine-year-old son.

Jackson says the letter mentioned the KKK and "they were going to take my son to the court yard and hang him."

Jackson says she only reported the crime to let the kids know their actions have consequences.


Leaving aside for the moment the false dichotomy set up here between "just childish" or "racist", what strikes me is that I'm being "alerted" to this by Google. It makes me wonder if there are ways to mobilize people against hate crimes via Google. Something to ponder.

White Supremacist Professor on Web Radio

Jacques Pluss, 51, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey (and about a half hour from the city), was dismissed recently from the University. After his dismissal, faculty and students learned that he held explicitly white supremacist views and was involved in the National Socialist Movement, a neo-nazi organization based in the midwest, the AP reports.

There's some disagreement about the reason for Pluss' dismissal. He, says he was dismissed in March because university officials learned about his involvement in the National Socialist Movement, which bills itself as "America's Nazi Party." University officials said he was let go for missing too many classes.

According to the AP story linked above, after his dismissal Pluss:

...went on "White Viewpoint," a radio show on the National Socialist Movement Web site, to talk about FDU's "Jewish plutocratic university" and described the school's men's basketball team as "nigger to the core."

"They (the players) have absolutely no right to be in that classroom because they do not possess either the merit or the enhanced intelligence to be there," he said on the show.

Not surprisingly given these views, Pluss also questions the veracity of the Holocaust saying:

"I don't deny that a Jewish Holocaust of some kind occurred," he said in his customary dry, dispassionate voice. "However, I do believe that the Holocaust needs to be re-examined from a general vantage point. How many were really killed? Under what circumstances?"

And, in my favorite twist on this story, Pluss (who, to reiterate, is 51) is dating one of his students, Jessica Stephens, a 21-year-old sophomore who had taken one of his classes. Nice to see that my argument about white supremacy being fundamentally about white-male-privilege-and-entitlement still holds.

Perhaps one day colleges and universities will take this kind of sexual harrassment on the part of faculty as seriously as they do neo-nazi involvement.

Neo-Nazi Spam

This is a new twist to hate online, neo-nazi spam. Apparently, there's new computer virus called Sober.q that spreads neo-nazi hate messages via email from infected computers. According to this source:

The new virus is the 16th variant of the Sober virus family, which was born in Germany and was first spotted in October 2003. While previous versions infected through email attachments, the new version uses a Web site to update computers infected with the earlier Sober.p variant and infect new computers.

The subject lines of the email messages range from ‘60 Years of Freedom: Who’s Celebrating?’, ‘Honorable Action’ and ‘Dresden Bombing Is To Be Regretted Enormously’. Some messages expressed concerns about Mafia groups and the increase in the number of foreigners going to German schools, while others drew attention to the issues related to Germany’s large Turkish migrant population. Yet others provided links to the Web site of National Democratic Party, Germany’s right wing nationalist party.

The spam emails come around the 60th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War. Alfred Huger of Symantec Corp said that Sober.q has generated ‘tens of millions’ of spam emails since each infected computer is sending around 10,000 spams an hour.

Fortunately, it looks like this is virus can be handled by the usual virus-protection software -- would that there was virus-protection software to protect against white supremacy. Doesn't work that way, though.

"Crash" - Movie with a Message

Caught a screening of "Crash" (2004) over the weekend at the Clearview, 62nd & 1st Ave.

Interesting film, and flawed in a number of ways. In case you've missed it, the basic premise of the film is the intersecting lives of strangers viewed through an auto crash in Los Angeles which opens the film. Eventually, we circle back around to that same crash after having explored the lives ~ and the racism ~ of a number of characters.

Written and directed by Paul Haggis, a white guy from Canada, who brought us the heavy-handed, "Million Dollar Baby." Haggis is also interested in social issues, and is co-founder of Artists for Peace and Justice, a member of the Board of Directors of The Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, among his other projects.

Back to "Crash." One of the central incidents in the film involves an African American couple who are stopped and harrassed by a couple of white cops. One of the white cops fondles the woman in the couple, and the couple quarrels about her husband's response to this assault. Later, the woman is involved in yet another auto "crash" (ok, it is L.A.) and the white cop who assaulted her is the one who comes to her rescue, thus illustrating our interconnectedness and how even the people you hate are people that you must a) rely on, or b) assist in the day-to-day business of doing your job. Once the cop rescues the woman, she looks at him with a mix of gratitude and resignation, realizing that her oppressor has now become her hero. After this "crash" we never see her character again to explore what the ramifications of this experience were for her, and she fades into the two-dimensional background of the story. We finally see her at the very end of the film, when her husband ~ who we've followed through yet another encounter with the police ~ decides to call her. (Apparently, nearly dying isn't enough to get him to interrupt his busy day.) The rest of the women in the film are similarly sexualized and/or frigid, shrill two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs of real women. Clearly, Haggis was so preoccupied with racial politics here that he couldn't be bothered to address the intricacies of gender politics as well.

There are a lot of ways in which "Crash" is also deeply problematic around the racism that it so earnestly wants the viewers to be critical of. The only character that is without blame and exists within a space of a kind of racial innocence, is the assaultive/rescuing white cop's father. The cop's dad is dying of prostate cancer after years as a janitor. According to the son's passionate re-telling, the father owned his own janitorial service which employed exclusively African Americans, then was put out of business when the city decided to only give contracts to minority-owned businesses. This blow resulted in the a total and devastating series of losses for the father, culminating in his health being held hostage by an unfeeling HMO run by incompetent affirmative action hires.

While the ostensible 'message' of the movie is that racism is bad, creating a character who is putatively innocent and untouched by racism, but only the victim of "reverse" discrimination policies such as affirmative action, undermines what could have been a progressive message film.

There is another problem inherent in the form of "message film," that I think Stephanie Zacharek speaks to in her review of the film in Salon. She writes:


"...for the most part, "Crash" works so hard at moral instructiveness that it's tedious to watch. That's a shame, because there still ought to be a place for the old-fashioned social-problem picture. I'm thinking of movies like "Bad Day at Black Rock," "Twelve Angry Men," "Norma Rae," or, to name two more recent examples, "Erin Brockovich" and "The Insider" -- movies that stem from liberal outrage and the need to speak out against racial or societal injustice. (A superb example from last year, though it's not an American movie, is Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda.") But "Crash" doesn't have the resonance of those movies, or even just the kind of storytelling that makes them so righteously entertaining. When Sandra Bullock hugs her Hispanic maid and says, "You're the best friend I've got," we, like her, may be overcome with warm fuzzies. But we haven't really been made to think, or even to feel. "Crash" only confirms what we already know about racism: It's inside every one of us. That should be a starting point, not a startling revelation."

To me, the dilemma with any sort of message film is the what Zacharek mentions with the "moral instructiveness" that makes the film "tedious to watch." It requires a kind of bluntness, in order to get a message across, a didactic quality that is, I would agree tedious to watch except for the most committed (and then, that's really just preaching to the choir, isn't is?). This kind of bluntness is juxtaposed against the demands of what makes an artistically compelling film. For something to be subtle enough to actual be a good film it is going to be too subtle to teach anything about racism or tolerance. I suppose that's still an open question.

Hated To Death ~ Connecting HIV/AIDS & Intolerance

I wear many professional hats, and one of the other professional hats I wear is in the field of HIV/AIDS. So, I've been thinking a lot recently about the connections between the work I do here at ICTE on intolerance and the work I do at Hunter around HIV/AIDS.

While on the face of it these may seem completely disparate, there is actually lots of interconnectedness. One of those points of connection is evident in this story, via Human Rights Watch. I'll just excerpt a little of this story, actually from last year, but still oh-so-relevant:

On June 9, 2004, Brian Williamson, Jamaica's leading gay rights activist, was murdered in his home, his body mutilated by multiple knife wounds. Within an hour after his body was discovered, a Human Rights Watch researcher witnessed a crowd gathered outside the crime scene. A smiling man called out, "Battyman [homosexual] he get killed!" Many others celebrated
Williamson's murder, laughing and calling out, "let's get them one at a time," "that's what you get for sin," "let's kill all of them." Some sang "boom bye bye," a line from a popular Jamaican song about killing and burning gay men.

If you want more on this, you can read the entire 81-page report Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence, and Jamaica's HIV/AIDS Epidemic".

The M-Generation ~ Cyberbullying

The Kaiser Family Foundation(KFF) issued a report recently based on a study of what they refer to as the "Generation-M." The "M" here stands for "media." The KFF study, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds," used a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries.

What they found was that found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using “new media” like computers, the Internet and video games, but those in "Generation M" are not cutting back on the time they spend with “old” media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.

How's this connected to "hate" and intolerance online?

What the KFF doesn't mention this, but along with the increase in time spent on 'new media' by kids, there is also an emerging phenomenon of online bullying, reported on recently in USA Today.

What is it? Basically, kids who used to settle scores on the playground or after school are taking dispute with classmates online, escalating them into pitched battles, and continuing them for days, weeks, even months. This kind of "cyberbullying" can take the form of websites that post taunts, hostile emails or instant messages. Cyberbullying is so pervasive in Westchester County, N.Y., that officials held a half-day conference last month for students, parents, teachers and law-enforcement officials. Six hundred attended.

Typically, the students who get targeted are ones who are considered 'different' in some way ~ overweight or underweight compared to their peers, kids who are gender-different, or isolated in terms of racial/ethnic identity. And, perhaps not suprisingly, most of the online bullying is done by boys, though it's not an exclusively male phenomenon.

Some of the cyberbullying involves what amounts to racial and sexual harrassment, if not a full-fledged 'hate crime.' Take for example, the case of Gerald, 14, reported in the USA Today story (linked above):

"Gerald, 14, was accused by another student of using a racial slur to describe a female friend, he went on the attack late last year. He spread a rumor that his female accuser was a prostitute.

His instant message ended up on a website popular among students at his high school in Tampa. He apologized to the embarrassed girl, and she told him she was sorry for starting the online exchange.

"This is so common at our school," says Gerald, who spends about three hours a day exchanging instant messages. "

Some parents, teachers and activists are taking note of this emerging phenomenon and taking action. One of those is Teri Schroeder, who founded i-Safe America which teaches kids how to be "safe" online. i-Safe may be a worthwhile idea, but it's also possible it does more harm than good.

Boston White Supremacists ~

The Boston Globe reports that white supremacists disrupted a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony at Faneuil Hall this week.

Hate Crimes ~ Through the Looking Glass

There's something very Alice in Wonderland, through-the-looking-glass about the way the term "hate crimes" is morphing in the current political climate. For example, there's an organization on Long Island, Bias Help,that says it's "committed to fighting hate on the internet and beyond." In one of its anti-bias training sessions, Bias Help is using September 11th as an example of a "hate crime." I can see how one might view the attacks of September 11th as a "hate crime," certainly, those folks flying those planes hated Americans, but the actual application of that definition stretches the term to the point of meaninglessness. The Bias Help training goes on to invite participants to contemplate the meaning of the "hate crime" of 9/11 for:

"The implications of our national origin, civil liberties and the protection by our Constitution...."

Here, it would seem that "hate crime" means anything that threatens the nation-state of the U.S. or its constitution. Thus, "hate crime" comes to mean the same as what used to be termed "an act of war," or when committed by a citizen, "sedition." And, what of those civil liberties that have been completely disregarded by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all the rest since 9/11 ~ are those "hate crimes" too?

Such a reframing of 9/11 as a "hate crime" against Americans undermines, at the very least, any sort of analysis of the vicious and widespread attacks against Arabs in the U.S. in the months following the attacks, and does nothing to critique the abuses by the U.S. goverment at Guantanamo or Abu Gharib.

This through-the-looking-glass use of the term "hate crime" is not limited to the U.S. context. According to one report, the government of the Netherlands is using its' stringent laws about online hate groups to prosecute a number of Islamic groups:

The government of the Netherlands is looking to prosecute the owners of 357Hosting for spreading hatred. 357Hosting has been the provider of space for Islamists websites that have often carried a radical message. Some of the more infamous sites hosted by 357 Hosting include Albasrah.net, Hamasonline.com and Shareeah.org. 357Hosting has also hosted the official website of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Zarqawi's splinter group. Many of the beheading videos of foreigners in Iraq have been hosted in 357Hosting's servers.

My point here is not that groups like Al Qaeda are not hate-filled, they most certainly are. My point is that it is ironic, to say the least, that "hate crimes" legislation intended to provide some modicum of justice for people of color, and other oppressed groups, ends up being used in the defense of the U.S. constitution and against the very people it was meant to protect.

Through the looking glass, indeed.

Modding Racist Video Games

I've been reading Vron Ware and Les Back's book, Out of Whiteness (Univerisity of Chicago Press, 2001), which includes a chapter by Les Back on hate groups online. In it, he has a brief mention of racist video games, some of which are available for playing online. Back writes:

"The combination of intimacy and distance found in cyberspace provides a new context for racist harassment through abuse or digital tools like ‘mail bombs.’ It also provides a context in which racism can be simulated. Elsewhere I have talked about the use of computer games that offer the ‘pleasure’ of simulated racial violence. These modalities make new types of racist behavior possible. They combine all of the fruits of the new digital era to produce interactive visual forms that are alluring and attractive to a particularly youthful audience. Virtual forms of racial violence related to chilling lived experiences, while remaining in the ‘other world’ of computer simulation. They are politically slippery because they blur the distinction between social reality and fantasy.” (p.123)

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague here at ICTE, Carol and I were talking with Katie Salen, a game designer, interactive designer, animator, and design educator currently at Parsons about video games. I asked Katie if it might be possible to re-engineer racist games to reflect different values. That's when Katie told us about "modding" or modifying video games. I've looked, but I haven't found anyone doing something like this ~ modifying racist video games. If you've seen such a thing, please leave a comment, or send me an email.

Online Hate Goes Mainstream @ ESPN.com

In my first book, White Lies, I made the argument that "white supremacist discourse—whether produced by extremists, Madison Avenue, or academics—serves to sustain privileges of race, class, gender, and sexuality which are endemic to a white supremacist context” (1997, p. 7). I also did a lot of work in that book connecting the extremist expressions of racism (racist cartoons of "welfare queens") to more mainstream expressions of racism (Clarence Thomas calling his own sister a "welfare queen.")

And, it looks like a similar argument could be made about expressions of racism on the internet. In a story published by Tolerance.org this week, the commercial website ESPN.com is dealing with bigotry on its discussion boards, but not dealing with it very well. While ESPN.com does have a policy that the boards are not to allow any "bigoted, hateful or racially offensive" posts, it appears that whoever is supposed to be sweeping these boards for such material is not doing their job. I wonder who ESPN.com hires to do this (almost all the big outfits subcontract this work out to companies such as LiveWorld). I also wonder if the folks at ESPN.com are going to pay the latest invoice from whichever company they've contracted with given the current controversy.

ESPN.com and their subcontractor did manage to add a "report abuse" button to the boards, but it doesn't seem to be doing much good. According to the article:

"A survey of recent posts reveals that despite the step, a problem remains.

'Can blacks go to Heaven? If so that would be a bummer! Ghettos, lazy people, unkept frontyards, & welfare lines in heaven,' reads one message, typical of dozens of racist messages added since the new link [to the report abuse button] was activated."

Clearly, white supermacist rhetoric on the internet, like the same rhetoric in print, is not resctricted to extremist websites. It also appears in solid bastions of the mainstream like ESPN.com.

>> DO SOMETHING
Tell ESPN.com's Patrick Stiegman and Paul Melvin to stop the racism on ESPN's message boards.

Measuring Global Hatred Online

The January/February 2005 issue of Foreign Policy featured a story that I find fascinating because of the issues it raises around how one measures hate on the internet globally. Scholar Stephen P. Cohen and software entrepreneur Jacob Levy have created a bit of code called, "Global Hatred Index (GHI)," designed to gauge levels of hatred online.

From the article, written by Leslie Palti:
"Using algorithms and text-analysis technology, Cohen and Levy’s software automatically searches, scans, and analyzes millions of Internet messages—from online discussion forums, chat rooms, blogs, etc.—to assess levels of hatred toward, say, the United States, Jews, or Muslims. For instance, in one recent index, conducted between June 2003 and May 2004, the software analyzed nearly 2 million messages. The results? An average of 35 percent of the messages expressed some level of anti-Americanism, 32 percent were anti-Semitic, and 20 percent contained anti-Islamic content."

From my view, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a piece of software that could perform such a task. The emergence of the "Global Hate Index" (GHI) raises all sorts of interesting questions ~ including who will pay for such a program (presumably there's a business model behind it if one of the developers is an entrepreneur). It also raises new possibilities and methodological questions about what can be done in terms of content analysis of the web, in addition to questions about what gets coded as hate speech.

Beyond the issues of who will pay, what the code is, what the methodological implications for studying hate online are, the GHI suggests a techno-cratic approach to combatting hate online. If we count the number of hate messages online, are we closer to stopping them from appearing altogether? Missing from this kind of strategy are the consumers, and the creators, of hate online. What's really needed are new ways of critiquing and thinking critically about hate online. I'm not sure there's an algorithm for that.

"A Changed Man"

I've been reading "A Changed Man," a novel by Francine Prose. It's about a neo-Nazi who has a transformation after he takes a hit of Ecstasy at a rave, and then goes to a group called Brotherhood Watch to work for tolerance. A great read so far.

Salon.com has decent review of it, starting here.

Hacktivism & Hate

I've been thinking a lot about "hacktivism" or hacking with a political intent and how it might be relevant for thinking about countering hate online and internationally. There have been a couple of incident of "hacking against hate" that I could find over at Wired, one in 1997 and one in 1999, but not much since then.

I can see both sides of this. On the one hand, the first amendment defenders and free-speechers are against this kind of action against hate groups online. And, it's not been effective over the long term. On the other hand, it is immediately and swiftly effecient in removing hate speech online in the short-term. And, it's completely effectual across national and international boundaries whereas the laws of individual countries have not been as effectual.