what appears to be an effort to change behavior by banning free speech? this sentence seems to be random in the context of what was previously said.. when has banning a word changed behavior? I don't think any one, anywhere, at any time in history, banned a word thinking it would change behavior.
Originally Posted by Chung Tran
Extracted from a review of the following book:
Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech, Harvard University Press, 2012, 292 pp., 26.95.
Professor Waldron insists that a “sense of security in the space we all inhabit is a public good,” like pretty beaches or clean air, and is so precious that the law should require everyone to maintain it:
Hate speech undermines this public good . . . . It does this not only by intimating discrimination and violence, but by reawakening living nightmares of what this society was like . . . . [I]t creates something like an environmental threat to social peace, a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word, so that eventually it becomes harder and less natural for even the good-hearted members of the society to play their part in maintaining this public good.
Professor Waldron tells us that the purpose of “hate speech” is to try to set up a “rival public good” in which it is considered fine to beat up and drive out minorities.
When we talk about politics or religion, we can be as rough as we like, but the “public good” of racial tolerance is different: “It is a recent and fragile achievement in the United States, and the idea that law can be indifferent to published assaults upon this principle seems to me a quite unwarranted extrapolation from what we have found ourselves able to tolerate in the way of political and religious dissent.”
“Diversity” and “inclusiveness” are so wonderful but fragile that maintaining the “dignity” of “vulnerable minorities” (Professor Waldron loves this expression) is a positive obligation not only for government but for individuals. The law should therefore require us to “refrain from acting in a way that is calculated to undermine the dignity of other people.” As Professor Waldron explains:"What is important is that citizens have a public assurance that this is so [that they all be equally accepted], and that this public assurance be provided not just by the government and the laws, but by citizens assuring one another of their willingness to cooperate in the administration of the laws in the humane and trustful enterprise that elementary justice requires."
In 1950, Joseph Beauharnais, president of something called the White Circle League of America, distributed segregationist leaflets in Chicago that said, in part:
"We are not against the negro; we are for the white people, and the white people are entitled to protection. . . . [and should unite]. If persuasion and the need to prevent the white race from being mongrelized by the negro will not unite us, then the aggressions . . . rapes, robberies, knives, guns and marijuana of the negro, SURELY WILL."
The pamphlet did not call for violence, nor did it cause any. Nevertheless, Beauharnais was found guilty under a 1917 Illinois law that forbade any writing that portrayed the “depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, color, creed, or religion,” and was fined $200. The US Supreme Court upheld the Illinois law in a 5-4 decision. Justice Felix Frankfurter called the pamphlet “criminal libel” against a group.
That was curious reasoning. Beauharnais never said all blacks are rapists and robbers. He may not even have been saying that they were more likely than whites to be rapists or robbers. It sounds to me that he was saying that when blacks rape or rob whites that will unite whites.
Professor Waldron is saying that to have planted the thought in the mind of a “vulnerable minority” that someone doesn’t want him around is as damaging as a physical assault and therefore should be a crime.
