From Race to Hate
Contemporary anti-hate policies have largely evolved from a series of laws originating in the 1960s and 1970s that countered forms of racism. Particularly in large European countries such as Britain, France, and Germany, these laws were enacted as a function of an effort to combat anti-Semitism in the post-Holocaust years and antiminority racism in the decolonization and Apartheid eras. In the 1980s and 1990s, United States–based activists began to explicitly use “hate” to mobilize policy change at the state and federal level. In the 1990s and 2000s, these strategies spread from the United States to European countries where the language of hate has begun to gain political and policy traction. This chapter draws on these longer-term historical developments to illustrate the origins, growth, and spread of “hate” as a concept that evolved from—and that continues to exist in parallel to—longstanding concerns about racism in liberal democracies.