Bias? Really?

Oct 18, 2009

I was clicking through some news links a friend on Twitter sent me a couple of days back, and I came upon a headline that read: “I thought I died’: Vic of savage gay-bias attack speaks out.”

That link led me to the article (one the same NY Daily News) which was more sensibly titled: ‘I thought I died’: Gay man Jack Price, beaten in Queens, talks about attack.

There’s not a huge difference between the two, but the word that caught my eye was bias. Bias? Really?

Down a few lines under pictures of Mr. Price with tubes coming out of him, his face battered and beaten, I read this: “Daniel Rodriguez, 21, and pal Daniel Aleman, 26, the two goons cops say were captured on surveillance video repeatedly punching, kicking and stomping on Price, have been charged with felony assault as a hate crime.”

Hate crime. I have found that a few of those I know are reluctant with the term, perhaps because they don’t approve of the person with whom Mr. Price has chosen to spend his life?

This crime might have been motivated by a lot of things, but it wasn’t bias. Bias is a tendency, a distortion, a curve or a bulge or an obliquely diagonal manner. It’s a way of cutting fabric to get a nice, flattering drape.

It wasn’t a tendency that caused these thugs to commit what we in Britain call “Grievous Bodily Harm”. It might seem like a small thing, but it matters. Words mean things, and hate has consequences.

I think we all run into little leaks of hate: in politics for example or even in little moments of spite in which people sometimes indulge. Some people stew in it and spew it to hurt people they feel superior to (or sometimes inferior to — depending on their particular neurosis). Some people let it move them to horrific violence.

But let’s call it what it is: hate, pure and simple, and not allow ourselves to feel better by pretending it was just a difference of opinion, even if it was savage.

Someday we will overcome, to quote a great civil rights hero. We can overcome hate, but not until we face it.