Kim McGuire

This chapter connects some of our earlier more descriptive analyses with an emerging critical stance that is more fully developed later during Part Two. In this chapter we characterise some of the distinctive effects of the natural attitude as including a form of cognitive closure and resulting exclusions of experiential aspects of hate crime. This is a highly prejudicial form whose operations tend to be self-fulfilling in the sense of a dogmatic and implicit form of self-validation that bypass expressly discursive justification. Going against the grain of such closure-by-exclusion, which is also exclusion-by-closure, we argue that it is vital to salvage what is excluded. Such a salvaging operation is needed to gain access to a mass of qualitative data, and thereby broaden out the source material of hate crime studies.

[T]he most difficult problems of all are hidden problems, the sense of which is naturally concealed from all those who still have no inkling of the determinative fundamental distinctions. In fact, it is … a long and thorny way [to] phenomenological data. (Husserl 1982: 212)It is of the very essence of such prejudices, drilled into the souls even of children, that they are concealed in their immediate effects. (Husserl 1970: 120)If true, the second short quote from Husserl, above, has major implications for the study of hate crime as a lived experience. This chapter outlines what we set out to achieve in the present study, its overall aims and objectives. It also explains our two-part structure. The descriptive-analytical Part I is concerned with the prejudicial mediation of experiences of hate crime-related issues by the natural attitude. This chapter prepares the ground for the more advanced Husserlian critique of the impact of such prejudicial presuppositions that comprises the task and bulk of Part II. The final chapter of Part II strives to spell out the constructive implications of such critique. Thus, our second part aims to both build upon and fulfil the overall potential and trajectory of an analytical movement initiated by Part I.

This chapter argues that contrary to its own self-image, the so-called “common sense” of the natural attitude is actually highly prejudicial. Far from being an unmediated direct intuition of “the facts” of, say, a hate incident, the natural attitude generates interpretations that are driven by a number of underlying presuppositions. These in effect “mediate” even the most apparently “immediate” intuition of seemingly “objective facts” and “factual patterns” of hate crime. As a result, the natural attitude’s objectivism encourages distinctly positivist quantitative forms of hate crime research. At this stage, we leave open the question of whether its mediation by far from objective presuppositions tends to contradict and undermine such positivism; and if so, do the difficulties created in this way tend to point the way forward to a diametrically opposite radically qualitative approach of Husserl?

This chapter engages with legal definitions of hate crime, and their subjective interpretations in both formal and wider contexts. Since the types of activity that we are primarily concerned with amount to criminal offences and are dealt with by various key agencies in terms of its specific legal meaning, we cannot ignore how legislation defines hate crime and hate speech. Nor can we ignore how such official formal definitions are subject to rival interpretations and both selective and discretionary enforcement. By setting out formal legal definitions and juxtaposing these with a case study of a perceived offence on a railway station, twin elements of our phenomenology of hate crime will begin to emerge. In particular, the descriptions provided by our intuitively rich experiential case study raise a series of issues that our later chapters tackle in a more concerted fashion. We argue that these two sections counter-balance each other’s tendency towards offering only a one-sided impression of this topic.

This chapter develops a number of the constructive sides of our disclosure of the tensions, difficulties, and outright contradictions of an objectivist approach to hate crime. These constructive outcomes emerge from our close analysis of the implications of these tensions, difficulties, and contradictions in terms of refining and further legitimating a distinctly Husserlian alternative approach to hate crime-related research. In particular, reflection upon the implications of the extended critique of chapter “10.1007/978-3-030-33888-6_4” generates a series of questions and issues rich in detailed ramifications for a Husserlian alternative model and methodology.

The criticisms we set out in the preceding chapters concerning the various difficulties and self-cancelling contradictions affecting objectivist premises are intended to be fundamental. They go to the heart of our research by casting serious doubt upon the adequacy of a naturalistic form of objectivist approach to the study of hate crime. There remains, however, more constructive implications to the Husserlian critiques we set out during our earlier chapters.This chapter will, therefore, consider the various difficulties arising from the natural attitude’s subject/object dichotomy, and argue that this generates a vital need to consider the diametrically opposite position of Husserlian phenomenology as a possible constructive alternative response to, even remedy for, the problems that our own radically different phenomenological approach to hate crime has already diagnosed. Moreover, that the various criticisms already contain in seed form the basis of a distinctly “intentional analysis” of hate crime as experienced. The next section will show how, at least in principle, such analysis may be able to resolve some of the methodological problems we have already diagnosed with academic approaches that are shaped by the natural attitude’s merger of objectivism and naturalism.

This book approaches the topic of the subjective, lived experience of hate crime from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. It provides an experientially well-grounded account of how and what is experienced as a hate crime, and what this reveals about ourselves as the continually reconstituted “subject” of such experiences. The book shows how qualitative social science methods can be better grounded in philosophically informed theory and methodological practices to add greater depth and explanatory power to experiential approaches to social sciences topics. The Authors also highlight several gaps and contradictions within Husserlian analyses of prejudice, which are exposed by attempts to concretely apply this approach to the field of hate crimes. Coverage includes the difficulties in providing an empathetic understanding of expressions of harmful forms of prejudice underlying hate crimes, including hate speech, arising from our own and others’ ‘life worlds’. The Authors describe a ‘Husserlian-based’ view of hate crime as well as a novel interpretation of the value of the comprehensive methodological stages pioneered by Husserl. The intended readership includes those concerned with discrimination and hate crime, as well as those involved in qualitative research into social topics in general. The broader content level makes this work suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students, even professionals within law enforcement.

The field of hate crime research addresses the presence, sources and impact of particular types of expressions of prejudice, often perceived as particularly damaging and hurtful forms of interpersonal abuse and violence. Little, if any, credible academic research seeks to vindicate the specific racist, gendered and other vicious prejudices articulated by many perpetrators of hate crime. In turn, this raises the reflexive question of the possibilities of researchers themselves ever being able to adopt a truly "unprejudiced" approach to the presence of such damaging prejudices. Can this goal be realised without a researcher necessarily losing an experientially-grounded understanding of what these meanings, values and purposes have come to mean, and how they are themselves interpretatively re-constituted anew, including within the lived experience of victims, witnesses, police, prosecutors, judges and victim support workers? A possible philosophically-informed approach to the dilemmas posed by this topic is offered by Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl's perpetually unfinished philosophical methodology strives, with concerted if sometimes tragic reflective rigor, to "suspend," "bracket out" and "neutralise" those core presuppositions constitutive of the research field that typically pre-judge precisely whatever demands to be questioned and explored in a radically non-prejudicial manner. This study critically explores the possibilities, reflective stages and theoretical limitations of a sympathetically reconstructed Husserlian approach to hate crime, itself understood as a would-be qualitative "science of consciousness." It argues that despite its manifest tensions, gaps, ambiguities and internal contradictions, aspects of the Husserlian philosophical approach directed towards the different levels of experienced hate crime still retain the potential to both challenge and advance our understanding of this topic. It is the "instructive" part of "instructive failure" that this article highlights