Why I think Martin Amis is racist

Since the debate over how brilliant Martin Amis is at current affairs commentary continues, via articles and letters, I’m going to return to this issue again. It’s worthwhile re-visting this controversy to clarify issues around it.

Should Amis be regarded as racist? How should the liberal-left approach such issues? This is what I want to explore.
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Does hate-crime deserve extra punishment?

Yesterday I cited this NY Times article on my blog about hate-crime against Sikhs in the United States. My question was:

The question is, should “hate-crime” based on a person’s race, sexuality or religion carry extra punishment? I’m not sure because on the one hand crime sentences should be uniformly addressed, on the other hand it looks like unless they are specifically addressed then the powers that be end up ignoring them.

In the comments below Dave Cole made a persuasive case for extra punishment:

Firstly, they have a pernicious effect on society, breeding mistrust, suspicion and hate beyond those immediately affected by the crime.

Secondly, they are more common than hate because on the basis of someone’s cardigan and are indicative of societal attitudes that must be challenged, morally and in a more utilitarian fashion, through the criminal justice system precisely because of the effects mentioned above.

Thirdly, as has been seen in many instances, hate crimes tend to lead to retaliation – they are a feature of group psychology – and so it is important to prevent cycles of retaliatory hate crimes both by presenting the stick and saying that the state is opposed to hate crimes.

(I’m going to ignore the right/conservatives here because while they pretend to be colour blind, articles like this illustrate they are anything but. Plus, on hate-crime legislation they seem mostly confused anyway.)

The left is rightly protective of (racial, religious, sexual) minorities when they are being demonised. But one of my editorial aims on LC is to bring more nuance to this debate since I think this protectiveness sometimes spills into covering up for malicious agendas by self-styled “community leaders”. David T’s exposé of Ken Livingstone’s apologia for the MCB is a good illustration of that.

There’s a point here about group identity that I think the liberal-left needs to come to grips with. One the one hand we should champion the need for people to live as equal citizens under the law. On the other we can also end up ignoring group dynamics that lead to tension and social disruption. In my article The sexual politics of Partition I showed how people have spread race/religion based rumours to fuel hatred and violence in the past.

More recently, the Hindu Forum of Britain has made allegations of Muslims forcibly converting Sikh/Hindu girls, repeated in the national press, without any actual evidence. To date the Met Police still has had no such cases come to light. They have the free speech to make such baseless allegations but what about the mistrust (and possible violence) it results in? I think this is the point that Dave Cole is making above; that extra punishment for hate-crime isn’t necessarily going to deter anyone but it may be a signal that there should be extra stigma attached to such kind of violence. Plus, as Unity points out, motives feature heavily into the length of sentencing and it’s clear that hate-crime is based on added maliciousness. What do you think?