In the past week, two stories have brought matters of the free expression of ideas, and the First Amendment of the US Constitution, to the forefront of our ongoing national dialogue about race and bigotry: 1) the protest of kneeling by athletes during the playing of the national anthem at professional sporting events (initiated by Colin Kaepernick as way to protest the racial injustices inherent in the dominant white culture and society of the US), and 2) the attempts by white supremacists to commandeer a bastion of the left— UC Berkeley-- with what was billed as Berkeley Free Speech Week:
“Free Speech Week,” as organizers are calling it, will reportedly include big names such as Breitbart executive chair (and former Trump adviser) Steve Bannon, disgraced ex-Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, and author Ann Coulter. These are by and large far-right activists with similar political ideologies. But what’s bringing them together this time around is a belief that free speech is now being stifled in political discourse across the country — and particularly at Berkeley, which activists have targeted because it was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.
These fears are built on a belief that American universities have deteriorated to shield students from opposing political views — through “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and a general tilt toward “political correctness.”
Note, ‘Berkeley Free Speech Week’ is entirely the creation of the fascist right— it did not exist as some annual event, from which the organizers and speakers were being barred from attending— and there is some reason to believe that the ‘forced to cancel events by politically correct college administrators’ narrative was in fact the true purpose of staging the event, since the organizers refused to work with the university to simply complete the standard application:
What do you do when your arguments can't be defended on their own merits? It's a sticky question for those in and around the "alt-right," as it tries to grow past meme-ifying pictures of Pepe the Frog and trolling feminists on Twitter. The solution that has been developed over recent months has been for "alt-righters" and their allies to paint themselves as victims who are -- sing it with me now! -- being denied their free speech rights by a cabal of censorious leftists and "antifa" street fighters…
...there is legitimate room for doubt about whether Yiannopoulos' proposed "Free Speech Week" was ever intended to happen at all.
In August,
Yiannopoulos announced that his "Free Speech Week" would take place on Berkeley's campus, birthplace of the legendary Free Speech Movement of the early 1960s.
Yiannopoulos promised it would be a four-day extravaganza and said, "The free speech movement is being reborn at Berkeley, next month, by us."
From the get-go, however, there have been various problems and unanswered questions, starting with the student group that was actually supposed to host Free Speech Week. This group, called the Berkeley Patriot, didn't exist at all before July. Its site has five blog posts, its Facebook page shows no signs of real community and its Twitter account has 16 followers and no tweets. Both the blog and the Facebook page were started on Aug. 25 — shortly after Yiannopoulos announced he was working with this group to stage a major event on the Berkeley campus.
Despite being a tiny organization with no visible history, Berkeley Patriot had a huge ask: It not only wanted to hold events in the usual rooms offered at no charge for student events, but also wanted to rent Zellerbach Hall and Wheeler Auditorium, two of the largest venues on campus. The former of those, for instance, seats around 2,000 people and is mostly used for concerts and major performing arts events. According to the university, Berkeley Patriot was given three deadlines — Aug. 18, Aug. 25 and, finally, Sept. 15 — to sign a contract and pay the $65,000 rental fee for the two auditoriums. The students failed to do that.
“If it was so important to them to have access to these indoor venues, what have they been doing for the last five weeks?" Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof asked Salon…
In an email sent on Sept. 13, student organizer Mike Wright admitted that the group did not have the speaker confirmations.
“We need to know who’s coming," Mogulof told Salon, describing the university's response to Berkeley Patriot. "Give us something, anything, that would give us some confidence that this is all real. An email from the speaker. A voicemail from the speaker. A plane ticket. A contract. Anything.”
"Is this real?" seems to be the question of the day. In his interview with Salon, Mogulof framed the collapse of Free Speech Week largely as a matter of disorganization and incompetence, suggesting that the students of Berkeley Patriot may have bitten off more than they can chew.
It is worth noting, however, that while Berkeley Patriot is small, it was working closely with Milo, Inc., the multimillion-dollar organization Yiannopoulos launched in April. There are also indications that Yiannopoulos and the student organizers had access to legal counsel during their discussions with the university. So this tiny group, which seems to have come into existence just in time to be the official host of this event, has considerable resources. That could be said to cast doubt on the proposition that this was a bunch of college kids who couldn't fill out paperwork on time…
There's an alternative possibility, too obvious to ignore: This entire event was created to fail, so Yiannopoulos could declare himself the victim of "political correctness" or left-wing censorship.
This diary, however, is not about the fraudulent claims by fascists that their free speech is being suppressed: it is about the harm caused when they are allowed to speak.
Those that insist on an absolute ‘all speech must be allowed’ standard, and claiming the First Amendment requires this, rely on an unsupported assumption: the absence of substantial harm caused by the simple act of utterance of hate speech. This assumption is false.
The assumption that to allow hate speech to be expressed is, by itself, harmless, if not ‘beneficial to the marketplace of ideas’, and similarly, the naive belief that ‘the best ideas will win out’, only have merit in the abstract, and come from a place of privilege.
No reasonable reading of American or world history bears these assumptions out.
Hate speech is always harmful, as Prof. Frederick Schauer explicates in his article The Sociology of the Hate Speech Debate, published in the Villanova Law Review:
I do not believe that we protect speech because it is harmless,or even because its harms, individually or in the aggregate, are smaller than the harms caused by non-speech conduct.23 Rather,existing free speech principles are based on protecting speech despite the harm it may cause. My aim here is not to explain why this is so. Rather, it is merely to point out that insofar as widely believed free speech rationales (whether sound or not) do in fact focus on harmlessness (and note here the frequency with which the harmlessness claim is cloaked in "speech is the symptom and not the cause" language), then those who rely on such rationales are open to the claim that because this speech is harmful then it may be regulated consistent with an existing understanding of the First Amendment.Thus, when those who are injured by hate speech call attention to that injury, and challenge those who deny the injury (usually by using the term "offense," the word most commonly employed by those who want to trivialize what someone else claims is a harm),2 4 the step from the injury to regulation is one that paradoxically has been created by much of the free speech culture itself… (pg. 805)
The process of normalization of bigotry, for example, allows it to flourish, thus leading to more hate speech that is not recognized as such, and to overtly violent and destructive acts. Each time hate speech is promoted, it both a) injures people, and b) contributes to the culture in which bigotry is reified as the norm:
Even the broadest of the proposed hate speech regulations,however, is spectacularly under inclusive of the range of speech produced harms. Just as with, for example, the Indianapolis anti-pornography ordinance,2 9 the harms caused by communicative activities are far broader than even the broadest reach of the broadest proposed regulation. In contemplating the question of hate speech generally, or racist hate speech more specifically, we discover that the utterances of David Duke, the Willie Horton ads,the racially stereotyping discourse of sportscasters, 30 the almost total absence of non-white faces from advertising and engagement/bridal announcements in so-called mainstream newspapers and so on are constitutionally protected. Similarly, in the context of colleges and universities, the overt racial hostility of the Dartmouth Review, 31 the racially-based resentments of students who assume that all of their Latino and African American classmates are in some way unqualified, the behavior of faculty members whose classroom insensitivity is astonishing and so on is all likely outside the reach of politically plausible or constitutionally permissible regulation.Given the pervasiveness of racially marginalizing communication in society at large and also on college and university campuses,and given a historical willingness to accept it, how are its victims to call attention to the phenomenon? (pp 816-7)
Only those that live in a world of privilege and security have the luxury of claiming ‘all speech must be permitted, in all circumstances’, because they are not on the receiving end of the brutality of bigoted culture, and the speech that perpetuates it:
… the true objects of these regulations are the legions of students and faculty who, as a result of this whole controversy, are now more sensitive to the possibility that what they say may seriously impair the educational opportunities of others. Maybe, as proponents of the "anti-political-correctness"movement would have it, some of this reluctance to speak has been unfortunate. 38 But not every socially-induced refusal to speak, even on a university campus, is a bad thing, and although it is unfortunate when things that should be said are not, it is also unfortunate when things that should not be said are said. (pg. 819)
To disregard the severity of the variety of harms caused by hate speech is to minimize the suffering of those injured— itself an expression of the inherent bigotry of the society, in which the suffering of those subjected to the effects of bigotry is of no importance, or is claimed not to exist as real suffering, or real harm, at all, because it is only their perception. (This is a familiar dodge on the part of white supremacists, misogynists, religious bigots and homophobes: their hate speech has been ‘misperceived’ by its intended victims).
Profs. Katherine Gelber and Luke McNamara, writing in the journal Social Identities, dismantle the fiction that there harms of hate speech are inconsequential, or non-existent:
Evidencing the harms of hate speech
In assessing the harms of hate speech, there are two distinctions in the literature we will disaggregate for the purposes of our argument. The first is a distinction between two types of harm, and the second is between two types of hate speech events. Both are addressed in our study. The literature distinguishes between constitutive and consequential harms (Maitra &McGowan, 2012b, p. 6); namely, between harms that are occasioned in the saying of a hate speech act, and harms that occur as a result of it. The former includes the work of Langton, who has argued that ‘speech can subordinate in virtue of unfairly ranking women as inferior’,and Hornsby and McGowan who have separately shown how hate speech can silence its targets(cited in Maitra & McGowan, 2012b, pp. 7-8). Matsuda has written persuasively of individual harms including psychological distress and risk of destruction to one’s self-esteem, and social harms such as restrictions on freedom of movement and association (1993). This is consistent with findings from psychology that individuals subjected to non-physical discrimination suffer harms to their physical and mental health (Meyer, 2003; Vijleveld et. Al., 2012; Anderson,2013; Paradies et. Al., 2013; Gee, 2002; Harris et. Al., 2006; Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, 2012). Indirect effects include harms to dignity, ‘disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard’ (Williams, 1991, p. 73), and the maintenance of power imbalances within social hierarchies of race (Allbrook, 2001; Bloch & Dreher, 2009; Dunn &Nelson, 2011). (pg. 2, emphasis added)
By listening to the accounts of those subjected to hate speech, and documenting its effects, Gelber and McNamara make plain that the damage of hate speech is all too real, and devastating:
Being racially abused on a train and in a supermarket, ‘In both incidents, I deeply felt my human right as a citizen or simply a passenger was violated.’ (13)Interviewee was told that he couldn’t be seen in the dark: ‘he was like saying that we were too black and that he couldn’t even recognize that there were people there. He could only [see] the white people in the room.’ (24b) (pg. 8)
On media commentary on who ‘qualifies’ as a ‘real’ Aboriginal person: ‘So they’re taking away the right of self-determination of Aboriginal people to define ourselves as people.’ (3)‘You didn’t want to be identified as a Vietnamese person.’ (18)‘Those women wearing hijab are targeted by young people … some women even desperately avoid wearing hijab.’ (29)‘I stopped speaking Arabic in public after the Tampa.11 Because Mr Howard stands there in parliament, “We don’t want those kinds of people”. I have been in Australia 30 years by then. And I was very, very offended.’ (33)‘Well in my workplace, and I work in a government department, I definitely never use my language or my ethnicity ... I just wanted to fit in like everyone else, because I heard a lot of the crap that was going on about Arabs and Lebanese and ... I was not one of them, I was Australian.’ (39) (pg. 8)
What is overlooked, ignored, or simply unrecognized by free speech absolutists is that when hate speech is permitted, the social environment becomes a landscape of direct, unremitting personal injury to those subjected to it:
… the harms attested to by interviewees – as experienced, perceived and feared – bear a close resemblance to the harms alleged in the literature, and are both constitutive and consequential. Consequential harms included persuading others to believe negative stereotypes, conditioning the environment such that racism is normalized and causing hearers to imitate the behaviour of hate speakers. Constitutive harms included subordination, silencing,fear, victimisation, emotional symptoms, restrictions on freedom, lowering of self-esteem,maintenance of power imbalances, and undermining of human dignity. (pg. 9, emphasis added)
To claim that the society benefits ‘as a whole’ when we tolerate hate speech, is to exclude those harmed by it from the ‘society as a whole’, and in this sense, perpetuating the very aims of those that propound bigotry.
It is also to classify the concerns and suffering of those subjected to hate speech, as insignificant, because within the bigoted cultural framework hate speech emerges from, those subjected to bigotry are insignificant. That is, to dismiss the suffering and concerns of those subjected to hate speech is itself a form of white privilege:
(from: Chronic Disparity: Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Racial Inequalities, Keith Lawrence and Terry Keleher, presentation at Race and Public Policy Conference, 2004)
A privilege is a right, favor, advantage, immunity, specially granted to one individual or group, and withheld from another. (Websters. Italics mine.) White privilege is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of: (1)Preferential prejudice for and treatment of white people based solely on their skin color and/or ancestral origin from Europe; and (2) Exemption from racial and/or national oppression based on skin color and/or ancestral origin from Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Arab world. U.S. institutions and culture (economic, legal, military, political, educational,entertainment, familial and religious) privilege peoples from Europe over peoples from the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Arab world. In a white supremacy system,white privilege and racial oppression are two sides of the same coin. “White peoples were exempt from slavery, land grab and genocide, the first forms of white privilege(in the future US).”
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Power is the ability to define reality and to convince other people that it is their definition…
… in spite of the bogus nature of “reverse racism,” it was brilliant as a campaign strategy. Dubbed the “Southern Strategy” by electoral analysts, its aim was to win white working and middle class voters away from the Democratic Party by consciously catering to their racism. The strategy bore bitter fruit. Wallace’s American Independent Party garnered 10 million white voters, who became the foundation for the New Right organizations of the Republican Party which now control Congress and the “bi—partisan” national dialogue on virtually all social and economic issues.
Pop culture did its bit to confuse the white populace. TV created the image of Archie Bunker, the loud mouth, verbally racist, white working class man who was funny (to some viewers) as well as obnoxious. The image of Archie the racist promoted several false concepts of racism: it’s the result of individual, not institutional, behavior; it’s carried out only by white working class men, not white working class women or white middle class men and women; and it is overt language that may be sickening and offensive, but is really just “harmless talk.” (emphasis added)
(I discussed this ubiquitous, pervasive nature of bigotry, its normative quality, in a previous diary: ‘Racism without Racists’: pretending the election wasn’t about white supremacy won’t help.)
Whatever the intentions of progressives who adopt the absolutist stance towards free speech, by advocating the tolerance of hate speech in its most explicit forms, they are facilitating direct and severe harm to individuals, every time the act of uttering bigotry occurs, and reinforcing the framework of institutional and structural bigotry. That is, permitting hate speech only serves to strengthen it, which the history of this country and the world has borne out time and again.