Professor Richard Ashby Wilson of Princeton on Anthropology, Hate Crimes, and Human Rights

Professor Richard Ashby Wilson joins us for a timely and important conversation on human rights, hate crime enforcement, authoritarianism, and the widening gap between laws written on paper and justice experienced in everyday life. A longtime colleague and friend of Professor Bert B. Lockwood, Richard is currently Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Princeton University Human Rights Initiative.

Prior to Princeton, he founded and directed the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, where Bert also serves on the board. One of the world’s leading legal anthropologists, Richard is the author of eleven books examining transitional justice, international criminal tribunals, incitement, and the failures and possibilities of legal systems.

Richard’s journey into human rights began in 1983 when, as an 18-year-old pre-med student at Johns Hopkins University, he learned that U.S. tax dollars were funding death squads in Central America. That moment changed the course of his life and led him into anthropology, determined to document stories and communities too often ignored or erased from public view.

Over the next four decades, his work would take him from Mayan communities rebuilding after genocide in Guatemala to South African townships navigating the aftermath of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In this episode, we discuss Richard’s groundbreaking research on hate crime enforcement in the United States and the alarming reality that, despite more than 150 years of hate crime legislation, only a small percentage of actual hate crimes are ever charged or prosecuted. We explore why targeted communities often do not trust the systems meant to protect them, how police discretion and prosecutorial practices shape outcomes, and what these failures reveal in America today.

Also, we discuss Richard's work helping draft hate crime reform legislation in Connecticut, as well as the growing pressures facing democratic institutions around the world.

SHOW NOTES

Episode Transcript PDF

Professor Richard Asby Wilson, Princeton University Department of Anthropology

Princeton University Human Rights Initiative

UConn Human Rights Institute

Key Publications and Scholarship

The (Non)Enforcement of Hate Crime Laws in the United States,
Richard Ashby Wilson, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2025

New Legal Realism at 20: Rethinking Law in an Era of Populism and Social Movements

Richard Ashby Wilson, Jeffrey Omari, and Pablo Rueda-Saiz, Connecticut Law Review, 2024

Incitement on Trial: Prosecuting International Speech Crimes
Richard Ashby Wilson, Cambridge University Press, 2017

Writing History in International Criminal Trials
Richard Ashby Wilson, Cambridge University Press, 2011

The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa
Richard Ashby Wilson, Cambridge University Press, 2001

Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q’eqchi’ Experiences
Richard Ashby Wilson, University of Oklahoma Press, 1995

Hate Crime Laws & Reform

House Bill 6872: An Act Revising and Consolidating the Hate Crimes Statutes

UConn Today Law: UConn Law Professors Lead Drafting of New Proposed Hate Crimes Bill

Organizations to Support

Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

ACLU: Immigrants’ Rights

National Immigration Law Center