According to the author, Governing Hate and Race in the United States and South Africa concerns itself primarily with “how the racial minds of these two states function as they regulate racist hate” (p. 1). Rather than examine the constitutional questions connected to this type of question, Rivers's book poses questions about the everyday practices of state agencies to regulate racial hate, in a post-9/11 moment, and comes to three conclusions about how these two states regulate racist hate: (1) state agencies, within the United States and South Africa, “understand race and racial hate in ways that are rather strictly prescribed” (p. 2); (2) in both countries, “state offices … help bound race and agency in and through their regulatory practices” (p. 2); and (3) in the process of reforming regulatory rationales and practices, the retraining of state agents has appropriated and utilized multicultural rhetoric that “has conveniently allowed the neoliberal state to absolve itself of racist hate, even as the state ironically propagates a legal ‘science’ and racial ‘science’ promoting a social fixity and stasis antithetical to the dynamism and openness promoted by progressive multiculturalists” (p. 9). Rivers utilizes a slightly altered version of Foucault's governmentality to arrive at these three points.
Rivers takes a micro-level approach to the study of state regulation of racist hate. In doing so, he is able to question the state's inability to deal with the nuances of various racial constructs in ways that macro-level approaches to these questions have been unable to do. In other words, by examining localized and individual events, the book is able to discuss the nuances and connections between and among multiple forms of oppression and the state's inability to necessarily understand or regulate racist hate in a complex and meaningful way. While Rivers demonstrates the state's inability to deal with these complexities, he also problematizes some of the proposed solutions of various scholars. For example, Delgado's proposed race/hate tort is critiqued for reducing race “to a bit that must always be real and reiterable for a tort for racist slights to succeed, making no allowance for race that falls outside of modernist and positivist racial boundaries, and, thus, might be considered performative” (p. 47). In effect, both the perceived problem and solution, according to Rivers, reinforce the fixity of race within and through their attempts at regulating hate.
While the questions proposed in this book are intriguing and the comparative approach might have produced new and interesting approaches and/or ideas with regard to these questions, Governing Hate and Race in the United States and South Africa does not appear to do very much comparison of these two states' regulatory processes, and, in fact, spends considerably more time critiquing the United States's regulatory processes than South Africa's. For example, Chapter 3's discussion of tort is an exclusive discussion of U.S. tort law and proposed remedies to the problems of tort with regard to racist hate and its regulation. While this chapter, as already noted, is very good at exhibiting and discussing the nuances of the regulatory processes and analyzing proposed solutions, there is no discussion of similar regulatory processes within South Africa; consequently, this section of the book fails to be the comparative analysis the author suggests is the nature of the work.
This lack of real comparison between these two states and concentration on U.S. regulatory processes may have contributed to the lack of new findings or conclusions or approaches created by this work. In other words, while the work does demonstrate the three points it is attempting to articulate, these findings are not new and have been articulated in various pieces of scholarship within ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical race, and critical legal studies. What would have made this book more interesting and unique—potentially contributing to a deeper understanding of state regulatory processes of racist hate—would have been the comparative study the author promises in both the title and the introductory chapter.
