Hate Speech and the Tea Party

(updated below)

Another post on language? Is this a theme? Ok, so I think about language a lot, perhaps as intertwined with the general concepts of speech and First Amendment rights. And judging from conservations with all other members of this blog, we'll go back and forth responding to similar ideas. Personally, I really struggle with that line on the First Amendment where hate speech falls - is it an action designed solely to injure? Is it political speech in any sense? Lately I've become more sympathetic to the Critical Race Theory approach, which is that hate speech is particular should be punishable in some way, but I'm still not sure. For all our liberal readers that have not yet explored the radical, Words That Wound is a collection of the seminal critical race essays on the subject, by Mari Matsuda, Kim Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence III, and well worth the mind-opening read.

Anyway, so this post was prompted by that oh so wonderful new-ish political movement, the Tea Party, and protestors' decisions to call Rep. John Lewis one of the words Jacob says we should have removed from our vocabularies loooong ago, and call Rep. Barney Frank another. I agree completely with Jacob that we need to monitor our own speech and be conscious of the results of it, but the difficulty is in the next step - can law be involved?


The crits believe that law can and must be involved. Whether it's on the civil or criminal side is another matter, but something should be done. The question they have that really gets tot he heart of the matter is why equality concerns can be so important in so many other areas, but when is comes to speech, they go out the window? It's a tough question to answer, and I'm becoming more convinced they're right. There's a fair bit of evidence that hateful speech serves to silence the targets of it, and therefore there are equality difficulties within speech itself, without even discussing the other effects.

So I guess I writing because my first reaction to this Tea-Partier was, "Aha! At least they're finally showing their true colors." So much of the political protesting during the health care debate specifically, and the Obama administration in general has been latent racism, but the lack of usage of the n-word has allowed people to not only deny the obvious racism, but cry out in mock outrage whenever they are called on it. Even the Obama administration has been afraid to actually acknowledge it. So immediately I thought to the argument that outlawing racist speech will only drive it underground, and that allowing it in open air will allow people to knock it down. Combat speech with speech, and all that.

I'm sympathetic to the argument generally, but I think I'd call my first instinct wrong here. The fact is that we've seen the extremely obviously racist speech - the limited type of speech that would garner a civil or criminal action - already has been driven underground. There are only rare reports of n-words, amidst plenty of "acceptable" political discussion on "illegals" and "lazy welfare recipients." The argument seems to have lost a great deal of our force, and while I'm glad they're showing their true colors, maybe the answer is we never should have needed them to - it was pretty obvious to start.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald, my favorite blogger, and someone I have a tendency to quote often, has a post up today that well describes the standard reaction of liberals, discussing the "evils of 'hate speech' laws. Unfortunately, as he did with his discussion of Citizens United, he took his First Amendment absolutist position as dogma, dismissing the very real political, and in fact, constitutional issues that must compete with an absolutist libertarian First Amendment position.

In both this case Citizens United, the competing ideals come from the First Amendment itself. There it was a question of preserving a forum for democratic debate (more on that in a separate post or six), and here, it's the tendency for hate speech to silence its targets. In both cases, most liberals believe they have "figured out" the answer, and are right to be dismissive. If that is your reaction, please read the book I mentioned above, at least to ehar the other side, and see how limited hate speech laws actually would be.