If your first instinct is to believe what someone tells you, good on you.
We ought to give each other the benefit of the doubt. If that occasionally means we are fooled, so be it. Honest people are always subject to being taken advantage of by those willing to engage in deceit. That's the price of having a clean conscience.
So when a TV star comes forward alleging that bad things have happened to him, there's no initial reason to doubt him. Because we know there are people who act out their hate. There are plenty of examples of people being hurt or killed merely for being who they are for us to dismiss as outrageous any individual's claims of persecution. When someone claims to be a victim, the decent first thing to do is to believe their account of what they say happened to them.
And if we can't quite manage that, the least we should do is suspend our disbelief. We should tend to them, wrap them in a blanket, get them to a hospital, call the police. We can investigate later. But just because Tawana Brawley might have lied-- probably lied--doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to innocents.
Just because an actor acted cynically to try to exploit a sad state of affairs for personal gain doesn't mean we aren't living in a time when racists and homophobes feel empowered. Just because someone made up a story doesn't mean that the real victims are the people who feel threatened by the existence of other kinds of people. There's no victory here; just something pathetic that will eventually be sorted out, probably to no one's complete satisfaction. That's how life works.
So maybe your problem is that getting fooled makes you feel foolish. Maybe you shouldn't feel that way, maybe you should give yourself a break. You had no reason to suspect a lie.
And you're not some brilliant rationalist if your first instinct was to suspect a lie, either.
Because most people who report being attacked aren't lying. Matthew Shepard didn't make it up. Brandon Teena didn't make it up. The 103 people killed or wounded in the attack on the nightclub in Orlando didn't make it up.
Nobody formally tracks hate crime hoaxes, in part because hate crimes aren't uniformly reported. (Arkansas is one of five states without a hate crime statute; few law enforcement agencies in the state even bother to track them. Little Rock reported zero hate crimes in 2017.) Last May, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, released a report indicating "massive under-reporting" of hate crimes, citing Department of Justice's figures that suggest since 2015, about 250,000 hate crimes have occurred annually and that they account for 3.7 percent of all violent crime. (In 2015 the DOJ estimated 208,000 hate crimes in the U.S., with a high percentage of victims not reporting.)
"Conversely, our Center has found a very small number of approximately two dozen confirmed or suspected instances of false 'hoaxes' in the last couple of years amidst thousands of police of hate crimes reported to police," the study's authors, center director Brian Levin and criminology professor John David Reitzel, write. "[O]f an estimated 21,000 hate crime cases between 2016 and 2018, fewer than 50 reports were found to be false. The center believes that less than one percent of all reported hate crimes are false."
There we go again, believing. Bless our hearts.
I've written before that I'm not altogether comfortable with hate crime legislation because in a lot of instances it's difficult to determine exactly what happened, let alone why it might have happened. We ought to punish behavior, not thoughts, and it's dangerous to enhance criminal penalties because we perceive that the perp is a bigot.
Terrible crimes are not made any more heinous by the poison thoughts that course through ignorant, terrified little minds. Murder is as bad if it is motivated by pecuniary interest or dumb hate. It ought to be illegal to discriminate against a person on the basis of his skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation, but no one's life or dignity ought to be considered more important or valuable by the law.
But our principle sometimes get modified by reality. Maybe it serves the public interest to say that if you roll someone for their money it's bad, but if you roll them because of who they are it's worse. I think that's politics, not morality, but I'm not naive enough to believe that politics doesn't drive policy.
And it's important that we think about why people commit crimes, and that categorizing crimes by motive isn't such a bad idea. I think I understand the psychology of the thwarted people who commit these kinds of crimes. It is not too far wrong to say some of them don't know any better. The best argument for hate crime legislation may be that, whatever conflicting signals one picks up from the ether and the Internet, it sends the message it's not OK to act out against those people who frighten you.
We're supposed to give people the benefit of the doubt. That's what the presumption of innocence is all about--it can be very difficult (or impossible) to prove oneself innocent of a crime, so we put the onus on the prosecution to prove the suspect's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
I don't think it's possible to prove that anyone did anything for any particular reason. Most of us occasionally do things for obscure reasons--if we can't always say what we were thinking, how can we ever explain with any degree of certainty why someone else acted as they did?
If you wear Nazi paraphernalia and white supremacist tattoos, maybe you deserve to be presumed a Nazi. If you shout hateful slogans and call people names, maybe you deserve a little extra time in jail to think about your life choices. I've got enough to worry about; the worst people in the world can fight their own battles.
Maybe it's hard not to be jaded. A lot of people seem to be exhausted and disheartened whenever they perceive that someone has got something over on them. But it's not all that hard to understand that every rule has its exceptions, and that every stranger is to be received with an open mind.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 02/26/2019