Racist Offences and Questions of Moral Motivation

A recent pattern of prosecution in the UK has brought charges against black and south Asian people for racist offences. For example, a young black man was charged in 2023 under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 for use of a racoon emoji in a tweet directed at a sitting black Conservative MP, and a black woman was taken to court in August this year, charged under the Communications Act 2003 for use of the word “n***a” in a tweet about a black footballer. Comparably, a woman of south Asian heritage very recently faced a racially aggravated public order offence for carrying a placard displaying coconut images in relation to two leading political figures, also of south Asian heritage. Far from anomalies, research indicates that black people are disproportionately charged with hate crime offences—in the UK, US, and elsewhere. In this presentation, I reflect on this phenomenon by drawing on abolitionist thought and findings from a long-term ethnography in a deindustrialised English town. I propose that a normative exploration of the issues can complement the well-developed structural critiques from hate crime law abolitionists by illuminating how and where the law misunderstands social practices.

Roxana Willis is an Assistant Professor in Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Crime, Security and Law, Germany. Before joining the LSE, Willis completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Junior Research Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg; a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford; and a Junior Research Fellowship in Law at University College, Oxford.