Hate Speech

It seems to me that just about anything that is not praise might be characterized as hate speech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech. Then again, if you laud a category, that is engage in “love speech”, that is often seen as reprehensible as well. If I say that Jews are smart or Africans are athletic, I’m going to get into trouble almost as much as if I say that Jews are cheap or that Africans are lazy.

Saying that Jews or Africans as categories are anything is usually incorrect or irrelevant. Knowing that someone is a Jew or an African isn’t going to allow you to predict much at all about that person, unless you are interested in genetic markers and differential susceptibility to diseases or some such thing. You need to know a lot more about the individual than a few arbitrary categories that he can be classified by. Prejudice is irrational but pervasive, and we probably should cut each other a little slack.

It is a cultural fact is that when a member of a category makes jokes or statements about that category, even if they are demeaning or promote negative stereotypes, that’s NOT hate speech. I’m a person of altitude, so I can crack wise about hillbillies to my heart’s content as long as I don’t go so far as to seem like a self-hating cracker, in which case I am still not as bad as a non-cracker who denigrates my category. I am reminded of Krusty the Clown who, on discovering that he was not technically Jewish, realized that instead of being a self-hating Jew, he was just anti-Semitic, a far worse thing to be.

Another cultural fact is that the weak can criticize in pretty hateful terms the powerful more readily than the powerful can criticize the weak however gently and patronizingly. Accordingly, a black comedian can skewer upper middle class whites with impunity, but an upper middle class white businessman had better not say anything bad about black people (or anything good for that matter).

These cultural facts aren’t necessarily fair or reasonable. They are what they are, though, and it is wise to take them into account. You can argue that they ought to be different, but that won’t make them so until there is a cultural sea change. My favorite radio hosts, Opie and Anthony, can whine all they want about how times are tough for folks who like to make fun of people and be mean for a living (which I enjoy as much as the next guy), but cultural change will not come quickly nor will it become fair or reasonable or rational.

I was surprised that demeaning persons who hold particular political views was included as hate speech in the Wikipedia definition. If that’s the case, I’m guilty of hate speech when it comes to Nazis and other fascists, Stalinists and neocons, just to name a few. If you put yourself in such a category, you have already demeaned yourself, and anything I say will just be pointing out the facts. Your politics are way different from your race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or such like categories. The same goes for religion. Criticizing a religious category is more akin to criticizing the belief system or doctrine than criticizing the adherents themselves. If the Church of Moloch teaches some reprehensible things, then pointing this out is entirely different than slamming someone because of some arbitrary, largely immutable trait. Crazy Bill Donohoe, for example, plays the hate speech card entirely improperly in his smears of critics of Catholicism. Eventually, the concept will become so overworked by Donohoe and his ilk that it will lose its meaning.