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Q: do prohibitions of hate speech harm public discourse?
Insight on the News, June 24, 1996 by Paul Gottfried, Richard Delgado
More than 200 American universities have responded by enacting student-conduct codes penalizing face-to-face insults and epithets, while courts have developed sexual-harassment doctrine for women badgered and insulted in the workplace. Are these measures a good idea? Emphatically, yes: Racist and similar taunts convey little of value. They demean the victim while communicating to all who hear the message that equal personhood is of little value in American society. Campuses and workplaces wherein a climate of racial or sexual terror thrives are unattractive and unwelcoming for members of the victimized groups. Minority enrollment at many campuses drops in the months and years following well-publicized incidents of racial insult.
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Rules against hate speech, homophobic remarks and misogyny serve both symbolic and institutional values -- increasing productivity in the workplace and protecting a learning environment on campus. It has been argued that such prohibitions operate in derogation of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, but that amendment already is subject to dozens of exceptions -- libel, defamation, words of conspiracy or threat, disrespectful words uttered to a judge or police officer, irrelevant or untrue words spoken in a judicial proceeding, copyright, plagiarism, official secrets, misleading advertising and many more. The social interest in deterring vicious racial or sexual vituperation certainly seems at least as great as that underlying these other forms of speech deemed unworthy of First Amendment protection.
Some argue that speech codes are not as good a remedy to racist speech as talking back to the aggressor. According to this view, talking back will teach minorities not to rely on whites for protection while educating the utterer of a racially hurtful remark so that he or she will refrain from repeating the offense. But talking back can be futile or dangerous, especially when racist remarks are hurled, as they often are, in many-on-one situations or in cowardly fashion -- a leaflet slipped under a black student's dormitory door. Talking back cannot be the sole remedy for a victim of racist hate speech.
A third argument for tolerance of offensive utterances is that they serve as a kind of pressure valve, allowing tension to release itself before reaching a dangerous level. Forcing racists (homophobes, etc.) to bottle up their emotions means that they are more likely to do or say something even more harmful later. Anti-hate-speech rules, then, would increase, not reduce, minorities' jeopardy.
This argument is simplistic. Hate speech may well make the speaker feel better, but it does not make the victim safer. Social science teaches that permitting a person to do or say something hateful to another increases, not reduces, the chance that he or she will do so again. Moreover, others may feel that they can follow suit. Human behavior is more complex than the laws of physics that describe pressure valves, tanks and other mechanical things. Instead, society uses symbols to construct a social world, one that contains categories and expectations for terms such as "black," "woman," "gang member" and "child." Once these categories are in place, they govern perception and a sense of how folks may act toward others. Allowing persons to stigmatize and revile others makes them more aggressive toward those others in the future. Once a speaker comes to think of the other as a deserved victim, his or her behavior may escalate to bullying and physical violence.
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