Hate crimes function as mechanisms for reasserting threatened social hierarchies.

Evidence

Perry (2001: 10) argues that hate crime is about offenders pursuing a level of control and power, and states that a hate crime must involve: […]acts of violence and intimidation, usually directed towards already stigmatized and marginalized groups. As such it is a mechanism of power and oppression, intended to reaffirm the precarious hierarchies that characterize a given social order. It attempts to re-create simultaneously the threatened (real or imagined) hegemony of the perpetrator’s group and the appropriate subordinate identity of the victim’s group. It is a means of marking both the Self and the Other in such a way as to re-establish their ‘proper’ relative positions, as given and reproduced by broader ideologies and patterns of social and political inequality. — Irene Zempi and Imran Awan, Islamophobia, 48

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reframes hate crime from an expression of feeling into a structural repair mechanism — the act restores a hierarchy rather than merely venting animus.
• XREF: Connects to the corpus material on state repression producing Islamophobia (Islamophobia in America), which also treats bias as structurally manufactured rather than individual.