6 minute read
Law and Order
By Donna Birch Trahan
Stanislaus State Professor Phyllis Gerstenfeld has become a soughtafter national expert on the psychology of prejudice and hate crimes.
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Phyllis Gerstenfeld was a graduate student when she read a news story that piqued her curiosity. The article marked the start of her journey toward what would later become her area of expertise: hate crimes.
The Oregon native was pursuing both a doctoral degree in psychology and a law degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The news story, out of Florida, involved a man who was accused of a hate crime.
“I had never heard the term ‘hate crime’ used before,” she said. “It was a new term, and the laws were new. The first hate crime laws were passed in 1981, and it was 1990 when I first started studying them.”
While the phrase was relatively new to her, the behaviors and sentiment affiliated with prejudice and hate were not. Gerstenfeld, who is Jewish, grew up in Portland. “Oregon has a really long history of racism. When it was established, Black people weren’t allowed to move there. We had some personal experiences. They were nothing too serious, but there was...stuff.” As an undergraduate at Reed College, she recalled going downtown and seeing a lot of skinheads hanging around. At the time, she didn’t know much about them. At NebraskaLincoln, after reading about the Florida case, she wrote a paper for one of her law classes.
“I was already interested in the psychology of prejudice and hate crimes fit from a legal perspective.”
— Phyllis Gerstenfeld
Three decades later, Gerstenfeld is an expert on the topic. She’s been interviewed and quoted nationally by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, National Public Radio, CNN and others. She’s written books, including two textbooks that are used in college-level criminal justice programs across the country, published papers and delivered presentations internationally.
While she does about a dozen media interviews a year, she shares her knowledge and insights with Stanislaus State students on practically a daily basis as a professor and chair of the Department of Criminal Justice.
“I think it’s kind of cool that there’s a national expert right here in the Central Valley at Stanislaus State,” Gerstenfeld said. “I believe our criminal justice program is exceptional, and this backs up that idea.”
Building from the Ground Up
Gerstenfeld joined the campus in 1993 as an assistant professor, shortly after Stan State launched its criminal justice program. “As someone who was straight out of graduate school, I wanted to be part of a growing program,” she said.
The position brought her back to the West Coast, and she began to help build the department’s programs and curriculum. Stan State was one of the first campuses in the California State University system to establish a forensics program. The department also established a juvenile justice concentration.
“We enroll a lot of students who want to work with kids on the prevention side of criminal justice, which is fantastic,” Gerstenfeld said. “We also have a mentoring program. All our students spend some time mentoring at-risk kids in K-12 schools. It helps them understand the struggles many kids face and how the presence of one positive person can make a difference in their lives.” As the department evolved, so did Gerstenfeld. She rose in the ranks, earning the title of associate professor in 1998. Two years later, she was appointed undergraduate program coordinator. By 2003, she was promoted to professor and two years after that, helmed the department as its chair.
During her time at Stan State, she earned two Fulbright grants to teach and conduct research in Zagreb, Croatia. She and a team of other scholars are currently conducting a large cross-national study on student attitudes toward LGBTQ people.
Her book, “Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls, and Controversies,” now in its fourth edition, is the leading text on hate crimes. She also co-authored “CJ: Realities and Challenges,” an introductory criminal justice textbook. Gerstenfeld said she and her co-authors were intentional in focusing the text on debunking myths about criminal justice.
“One of the challenges of teaching is (some students) think they know everything already because they watch ‘CSI’,’’ she said. “A lot of what we have to do early on is unteach them the wrong stuff before we can teach them the right stuff.”
— Phyllis Gerstenfeld
During the past few years, she’s been asked to increasingly speak about hate crimes and extremism. “It tends to be when certain things hit the news, such as high-profile hate crimes.”
She was interviewed for a documentary on hate crimes against Asian Americans as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last November, she co-authored a paper titled, “Hate-Motivated Behavior: Impacts, Risk Factors, and Interventions,” which discusses the shift of extremism from the fringes of society to the mainstream and hate-motivated behavior as a “a public health threat with structural, interpersonal and individual antecedents and effects.”
“I don’t think there’s any more racism now than there has been over the last several decades,” Gerstenfeld said. “I think it’s more obvious now to people who aren’t targeted by it. If you are a straight, white Christian, you didn’t see it too much for the past few decades. Now you can’t help but see it.
“It’s particularly frustrating when people who study this stuff have been sounding warning bells for years and years but others don’t listen. You see patterns of behavior and can predict what’s going to happen but you feel really powerless. Personally, I wish nobody had to care about hate crimes anymore. I wish my research was obsolete.” Although her subject matter can be emotionally heavy, the married mother of two daughters has found ways to inject some lightness. She teaches a criminal justice seminar for authors and budding writers. And last fall, entertainment cable network E! asked to interview her for its rebooted series “E! True Hollywood Story” for an episode about celebrity deaths.
‘E! True Hollywood Story’ Calls
Although her subject matter can be emotionally heavy, the married mother of two daughters has found ways to inject some lightness. She teaches a criminal justice seminar for authors and budding writers. And last fall, entertainment cable network E! asked to interview her for its rebooted series “E! True Hollywood Story” for an episode about celebrity deaths.
“It was different from what I normally do,” she said. “I talked about Whitney Houston, her daughter Bobbi Kristina, Bobbi Kristina’s husband, the Tiger King and Brittney Murphy, the legal aspects of their cases, patterns of death and procedural processes.” The episode, titled “Hollywood Mysteries,” is expected to air in fall 2021.
She also practices another creative outlet: she works a side gig as a published novelist, penning romance, sci-fi and horror books. She says it’s fun and calls it her therapy.
But don’t bother looking for those novels alongside her scholarly tomes because she writes those under a pseudonym. “When students go looking for my textbooks, I don’t want them to get sidetracked.”
