Focusing on motives

Editorial

Three Vancouver men face charges after a series of assaults on visible minorities. In a particularly grisly incident, a Filipino man asleep on a discarded couch on a city street was set on fire in 2009, suffering burns to his arms, neck and head. One of the suspects in this case is also accused of assaulting a black man that same year. Another individual is charged in relation to separate assaults on three people: a black man, an Hispanic man and an aboriginal woman. The men were charged in December; one appeared in court late last month, while the other two are scheduled to appear this month.

Each incident is an alarming act of violence, but police and media are focusing on a very particular connection. The men are alleged to be members of a white supremacist group called Blood and Honor, which a member of British Columbia’s Hate Crime Team says may have about 15 members in the province. It is this aspect of the story that has received the most attention from the surprisingly few media outlets following it. The potential hate-group links were highlighted again when the names of two of the accused apparently showed up in files leaked just over a week ago by computer hackers – files that listed dozens of Canadians allegedly associated with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.

It is axiomatic that poor economic conditions nourish scapegoating, which most often manifests against visibly identifiable groups. So, while hand-wringing over a perceived spike in white supremacist activity is understandable, it should not surprise us that, in these times, such attitudes would see a renaissance of sorts. We need to stop seeing social progress as linear and recognize that much of it is cyclical; bad people and bad ideas come and go, with fluctuating economic conditions playing a role.

But there is another matter here, something just a little off about our reaction to the potential role of racial motivation in these incidents.

On the one hand, racially motivated crimes must be condemned by society. Not only should we condemn them, but, as members of society, each of us has an obligation to review our own small but concentric circles of influence to consider how we have contributed to making a more tolerant society.

On the other hand, is the focus on the alleged association of the accused with a white supremacist group a strange sort of societal denial? Is it possible that some who do not belong to the targeted minority find solace in the fact that, no, this was not a random act that could strike anyone? Such a perspective would be self-interest in the extreme and maybe that does not fully account for the reaction. It is certainly part of human nature to seek a reason for seemingly inexplicable events. If we were to only understand these acts as racially motivated, we could at least categorize them, maybe condemn them, and move on. Perhaps, subconsciously, racial motivation could be comforting, if only because it offers some sort of explanation.

But this sort of justification can lead us to focus more on “naming” the motivation than on condemning each individual act of violence as abhorrent. Society rightly advocates particular censure for acts motivated by bias against a group (whether or not one believes this censure should be expressed morally at an individual or communal level, in national charters of rights and freedoms, through explicitly legal methods like hate crimes laws, or all of the above). But we should be careful not to allow our acknowledgement of a crime’s particularity to blind us to the universal value of opposing violence against human beings regardless of motivation.

It was a strange marriage of self-interest and universalism that led Jewish leaders in the second half of the 20th century to advocate for the values that characterize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, where antisemitism should have died but didn’t, it became clear that the protection of Jews particularly might best be achieved by promulgating values of respect toward human beings generally. This approach, of course, was not new; it is inherent in the oldest texts of our traditions. But, in a very practical sense, it seemed then as it does now, that the best incentive against killing people based on the victim’s creed or color or innate characteristic is to rededicate ourselves to the commitment against killing for any reason.

There is no question that we must condemn acts perpetrated in service of hatred. But we also must devote ourselves to promulgating – and living a life based on – the fact that an act that diminishes humanity in any of its forms diminishes humanity in all its forms.

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