The Struggle Against Hate Crime: Movement at a Crossroads

This Note argues that such an extraordinary amount of police, legislative, judicial, scholarly, and community activity around hate crime in such a short period of time—less than two decades—is the result of an emerging social movement against hate crime. If, indeed, “times have changed,” such change is attributable to the rise and societal impact of a social movement dedicated to hate crime victims. This Note further argues that this anti-hate-crime movement has been rapidly assimilated into the institutions of criminal justice, with the result that anti-hate-crime measures now reflect the culture and priorities of those institutions and therefore inadequately alter those institutions’ treatment of hate crime and its victims.