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1. Bloggy Monday | Race & Racism | Xenia Institute on 06 Jul 2009 at 4:11 am

   [...] example of their work came last week in a post about hate speech and media reform. Guest writer Hannah Miller wrote about the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s efforts to [...]

Comments

1. Diana wrote:

   Seems to me if the man is advocating murder or incitement to murder, the local police and/or FBI need to get involved. The FCC is only authorized to impose fines.

   Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 2:01 pm ¶

2. Manju wrote:

   the fcc’s justification for policing the public airways–they’re publicly owned and have limited bandwidth– is all but over in the age of the Internet. in the future, all broadcasters will be like bloggers.

   so i think this approach is outdated and vaguely Orwellian.

   Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 2:26 pm ¶

3. Justice1 wrote:

   I think we do need to enforce, hate speech laws. I stumbled across a website the other day in which some guy is trying to peddle the book titled, “the secret relationship between blacks and Jews.” The book is nothing but fabricated antisemitic garbage and I was so angered until I wrote the webmaster and told him how I felt.
   I was very polite about it and my desire was to give him resources in order to dispute the claims of that particular book. Well…..he apparently assumed, I was Jewish and let the monster out of the bag with every single racial epithet, etc used for Jewish people; mind you, I am a woman of color.
   Having said that, I don’t mind sites like this and others that encourage debate, or practice responsible journalism within blogger limitations. However, when it comes to sites like stormfront and that crackpot owner of Blacks and Jews.com, we need to draw the line somewhere. Most of these people are hateful racist suffering from borderline personality disorder.

   Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 5:00 pm ¶

4. EGhead wrote:

   Why the dig at borderline personality disorder? That was completely irrelevant information for you to throw in there, and also completely unsupportable. Those of us with mental illness don’t appreciate the ableism.

   ANYWAY… I think it’s long past time to extend prosecution of hate crimes to the internet; I’m pretty sure it’s already illegal, but I never hear about people being punished for their disgusting bullshit online. The law is so far behind technology that it’s frightening. And dangerous.

   Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 7:15 pm ¶

5. Manju wrote:

   “This is illegal, and the FCC currently does nothing about this.”

   “I think we do need to enforce, hate speech laws. ”

   “I think it’s long past time to extend prosecution of hate crimes to the internet”

   This is problematic. Here in the USA, in order for speech, hate or otherwise, to be illegal in and off itself (as opposed to being simply part of a larger crime, as most American hate crime laws are constructed) the speech not only has to advocate violence, but the violence must be imminent. (i’m not addressing other exceptions like commercial speech, obscenity, libel, copyrights, etc)

   its a high bar, but its there for a reason. a theoretical incitement to violence would render the communist manifesto or more than a few religious texts illegal.

   Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 8:46 pm ¶

6. Slush wrote:

   Yep, and I believe the posting said “We’re going to have to start killing these people. I advocate using extreme violence against illegal aliens.”

   Not a slam dunk case of incitement, but hardly any set of facts ever is. The law that carries imagery of lynchings needs to adapt itself to the 21st century version of incitement as it takes place now. It’s great that we have outlawed mob murder by torchlight, but it’s nearly as obsolete as the Third Amendment. Unlike the third amendment, however, the crux of the problem, a serious and violent threat to vulnerable people, has not faded into dusty history books.

   Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 11:26 pm ¶

7. Logan wrote:

   Applying the old FCC laws to the internet….. it strikes me too much as thought policement on the internet, which I’m strongly against. For one, the illegality is in question since there is no public ownership of the internet (the biggest difference between the FCC and the internet, as pointed out before). You can’t even apply rules from like a parade or a gathering or something like that to the comments, simply because you can’t really incite a riot online.

   Additionally, there is a question of the power of the internet. Not that the internet isn’t more pervasive now than TV or any other media ever was, but the reach that people get with their opinions. I’m certain there are thousands of sites like the Neo-Nazi site you mentioned, but the number of unique visitors will be microsopic in terms of the overall population of people it effects. And for any subject large enough that it would effect a significant percentage of people, the internet still works both ways, and it is not only one opinion that is being put out there (which is where the real danger came in, in both the 60s and Rwanda).

   Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 11:30 pm ¶

8. Slush wrote:

   If you can incite genocide by radio, why can’t you incite a riot online? We’ve got the bandwidth at this point. It’s hooked up to millions of cell phones.

   You’re absolutely right that most of these wacko fringe sites get relatively very few visitors. But criminality is usually more closely related to intent and personal action than reception by a given audience, which is appropriately irrelevant.

   The idea that free speech must be absolute is not only simplistic, but ahistorical. Only since the 1930s and 40s has free speech been even close to as wide-ranging as it became at the end of the 20th century when we decided that money is also speech. Did we have an oppressive dictatorship with harshly repressed media in 1900? If so, I sure missed it. What I heard was we had Jim Crow, which meant white people had more speech rights than black people. That’s a 14th Amendment issue, not 1st Amendment.

   Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 9:47 am ¶

9. Nora wrote:

   Does anyone have cites or the names of any old FCC cases, particularly Dr. King’s lawsuit? I’d be interested in reading the ruling.

   Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 11:03 am ¶

10. E A wrote:

    A year or so back, there were concerns of hate speech online because derogatory epithets were posted on a young person’s website. The implications of hate speech are numerous as are the concerns of what it would mean for freedoms as guaranteed by the Constitution and its amendments. Speaking of definitions of violence, however, the levels of violence that can be exercised through speech are numerous and vast. Think critically about figures in history–like the Rwandan example–who were able to inspire genocide through their words. It would be interesting to consider when, examining uses of hate speech, which groups are persecuted most, regardless of these discourses of freedoms? And what would that say in regards to the discussion to bring greater attention to it.

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 11:48 am ¶

11. Slush wrote:

    “It would be interesting to consider when, examining uses of hate speech, which groups are persecuted most, regardless of these discourses of freedoms? And what would that say in regards to the discussion to bring greater attention to it.”

    Exactly. Well I’ll tell you what, the most persecuted are certainly not the white majority that believes punishing hate speech is a threat to their first amendment rights.

    If white men were a significant demographic of speech/incitement crime victims, do you think we would be talking about how prohibiting that speech is too Orwellian? No way.

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 1:02 pm ¶

12. Manju wrote:

    “Well I’ll tell you what, the most persecuted are certainly not the white majority that believes punishing hate speech is a threat to their first amendment rights.”

    its unclear to me the white majority doesn’t believe in punishing for hate speech. throughout history, the people have been much more likely to favor greater restrictions on free speech than desired for an ideal liberal democracy. polls have long indicated people want additional restrictions on blasphemy, obscenity, flag burning, radical political beliefs like communism or fascism, violent religions and cults like radical Islam or Scientology, etc.

    white power groups like the kkk and nazis are now well removed from respectable society and its unclear to me that the white majority wouldn’t favor some restrictions on their more egregious speech. the impulse to use the state to silent radical and violent fringes is a fairly common one among all nations, but a very dangerous one for liberal democracy, for a lot of reasons including the oft-repeated slippery slope. first they came for the nazis…

    thus our regime puts a limit on democracy, ie a small elite called scotus, in order to prevent tyranny of the majority. we ethnic and religious minorities have more to lose from restricting these fundamental rights than we stand to gain from trying to restrict them exclusively for our enemies.

    after all, america being a free country is why she attracts so many immigrants in the first place. (well, the $$ is the main reason, lets be real, but thats not unrelated to freedom either)

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 3:01 pm ¶

13. Miles Ellison wrote:

    It would take an exposed nipple for the FCC to do anything.

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 4:18 pm ¶

14. Slush wrote:

    But in America, the free speech slippery slope is in fact a total mirage. The slope has historically gone the other direction – in favor of broader and broader speech rights that we have now – despite any clamors to make certain people shut up. But meanwhile no one argues that before our ultra-free-speech era this country wasn’t a free democracy. The worry that limiting speech is the first step to totalitarianism is completely unfounded in the American context.

    Nonetheless you hear the slippery slope repeated everywhere, to defend the modern jurisprudence of absolutism on speech that in fact results in grossly disproportionate harm to minorities and vulnerable groups.

    Hate speech uses power and violence just like an assault. It is rarely difficult to distinguish between hate speech and political or religious speech, and where it is, then take it to court. That’s what courts are for.

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 5:04 pm ¶

15. Manju wrote:

    “But meanwhile no one argues that before our ultra-free-speech era this country wasn’t a free democracy.”

    slavery, sufferage, Japanese internment, jim crow…I think some people would argue precisely that.

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 8:50 pm ¶

16. Miles Ellison wrote:

    “But meanwhile no one argues that before our ultra-free-speech era this country wasn’t a free democracy.”

    It wasn’t. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. There wasn’t much substantive defense of black voting rights in the south between the end of Reconstruction and 1965. Essentially, there’s been universal suffrage in this country for 44 of the 219 years since the last original colony ratified the Constitution. The United States not being a free democracy is actually a pretty compelling argument from that perspective.

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 10:06 pm ¶

17. Restructure! wrote:

    The United States has the fewest laws against hate speech, but it ranks 36 in press freedom (see right column). Canada ranks 13, UK is 23, and Iceland is 1st.

    How does a lack of hate speech laws help democracy?

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 10:36 pm ¶

18. Slush wrote:

    Those are all 14th Amendment issues, like I said before. They weren’t speech-based repression and they didn’t exist because oppositional speech was prosecuted. They existed because they had broad support by those in power. In fact they were more like a state-sanctioned pro-hate speech regime, rather than speech restrictions.

    The important thing about hate speech is recognizing that it causes a real injury. Not only by incitement, but by the verbal denigration of people of itself. In general, the law tries to prohibit things that hurt other people, that’s what we think a crime is. In the case of speech, it has been decided that the hate speech sufficiently valuable to outweigh the injury to the victim.

    That is simply wrong, and it’s so wrong that no ones actually makes that argument, they just turn to the slippery slope and claim all our progressive freedoms will be washed away. But the weighing of rights is wrong from the beginning, and there’s no evidence that the slippery slope is very slippery at all.

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 11:04 pm ¶

19. Alston wrote:

    @logan: “you can’t really incite a riot online.”

    I really don’t see why you couldn’t. If you can incite and organize flash mobs online, why couldn’t you incite and organize a riot? Seems like the only logical way to do it in this day and age.

    Further, I can’t imagine that saying that some particular group should be murdered over the airwaves or by a site that attracts certain numbers of people is NOT an incitement to violence. How can this be protected? Justified? This free speech bullshit sounds like a bullshit argument to me, and does not address key issues, such as hate and violence.

    Posted 03 Jun 2009 at 1:56 pm ¶

20. Manju wrote:

    “Those are all 14th Amendment issues, like I said before. They weren’t speech-based repression and they didn’t exist because oppositional speech was prosecuted”

    the 14th ammendment gave blacks free speech rights, among other liberties. These liberties can’t really be separated, as inalienable rights are interconnected. in fact, slavery was, among other things, “speech based repression.”

    Posted 03 Jun 2009 at 10:59 pm ¶

21. Manju wrote:

    “there’s no evidence that the slippery slope is very slippery at all.”

    there is and you’ve provided it. what you’re noticing is not that the slope isn’t slippery, but that it slides both ways. Since reconstruction, we’ve seen an avalanche of expanded freedoms, since as we protect one liberty, the bar to justify restricting another raises.

    so, for example, the post office used to refuse to carry abolitionist pamphlets to the South. subsequent decisions, which had nothing to do with slavery, restricting the govt from practicing viewpoint discrimination viewpoint made such behaviour unconstitutional. reverse slippery slope.

    but if we were to try to reverse this direction, as you advocate— lets say by attempting to protect ethnic minorities by refusing to cary racist mail–we set a precedent that viewpoint discrimination is allowed, opening the door for state based repression against minorities once again (not to mention the individual rights of of bigots have a value in and off itself, or even the danger of falsely labeling some literature bigotry when it is not…a lot of pitfalls here.)

    Posted 03 Jun 2009 at 11:31 pm ¶

22. Restructure! wrote:

    Since reconstruction, we’ve seen an avalanche of expanded freedoms, since as we protect one liberty, the bar to justify restricting another raises.

    If we’re going to make correlational arguments, I could also say that Germany’s strong laws against hate propaganda coming into effect was highly correlated with the end of the Nazi regime.

    but if we were to try to reverse this direction, as you advocate— lets say by attempting to protect ethnic minorities by refusing to cary racist mail–we set a precedent that viewpoint discrimination is allowed, opening the door for state based repression against minorities once again

    The slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason. I could also use it to argue that if we allow hate speech against ethnic minorities, next we will allow physical violence against ethnic minorities as free expression.

    Posted 04 Jun 2009 at 12:44 am ¶

23. Jess wrote:

    Not to go all Godwin here, but the end of the Nazi regime came because of, y’know, a war.

    I have an issue with hate speech laws because many are poorly written and constructed. Here’s the bar for any law’s constitutionality (you can look this up):

    – The law has to be specific. I can’t write a law against “Disturbing the peace” and leave it at that. If you loko up the statute, you’ll see it’s long, with a laundry list of things that constitute such behavior. Same with laws against “menacing” — they’re pretty specific in order to prevent abuse

    – The law has to avoid viewpoint discrimination. The problem with the way a lot of people approach this is that they assume we all know what “hate speech” is. This gets back to specificity. It’s actually against the law already to threaten a specific person, and incitement laws already say that it’s a crime if I say to a group of people “Pick up your guns and kill some people.” A lot of the more crazy racists are aware of this already, which is why they phrase things the way they do.

    The viewpoint discrimination issue is important because these things aren’t fixed — and who is in power isn’t fixed. If laws are too vaguely worded then the wrong guy gets to be elected Sheriff one day in your town and he’ll jail you for protesting one day. This kind of stuff happens. And there are many viewpoints that we consider to be part of the normal discussion now that weren’t not so long ago.

    People used to be jailed for “advocating the violent overthrow of the government” all the damned time. Ask yourself this: what would happen if the law were applied to you? And don’t assume that “everyone knows” the difference between what you are saying and a racist. It isn’t always so intuitively obvious to people, even non-white people, even the ones who are oppressed in some way.

    Another issue that comes to mind is that while genocide — see Rwanda — has been incited by mass media, other things have as well. And in Rwanda, we forget that there was only one radio station with any power (and a tiny number of others) and the political landscape was very different from here in the US.

    In any case, there’s a reason that people are wary of limiting speech rights. I’d argue that the greater freedom of speech rights — all of which date from the post WW II era– actually resulted in being able to discuss many things more openly, starting with moving the political dialogue a little. The slippery slope argument isn’t entirely fallacious here– I could define a movie like “Lolita” for instance, as one long exercise in misogyny if I wanted, r even the . (Certainly it can be creepy).

    Nobody is arguing that we’ll have no free speech tomorrow. But they are saying that you don’t want to go back to what things were like in the 50s, when many well-intentioned restrictions on speech ended up falling heavily on women and minorities. Remember the bit about not being in power forever — a Republican can get elected just like a Democrat, and there’s no limit on the crazy that ends up in local candidacies.

    (I’ve see that so often, and it always amazes me how local town elect people who are certifiable sometimes).

    Posted 04 Jun 2009 at 7:34 pm ¶

24. Slush wrote:

    “The slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason. I could also use it to argue that if we allow hate speech against ethnic minorities, next we will allow physical violence against ethnic minorities as free expression.”

    True, but I think that hate speech is violence. It causes real injury, and that’s why it should be restricted.

    Posted 04 Jun 2009 at 11:13 pm ¶

25. Manju wrote:

    “The slippery slope is a fallacy for a reason. ”

    From the very article you cite:

    “Sometimes a single action does indeed induce similar latter action. For example, judiciary decisions may set legal precedents.”

    Posted 04 Jun 2009 at 11:27 pm ¶

26. Manju wrote:

    “I could also use it to argue that if we allow hate speech against ethnic minorities, next we will allow physical violence against ethnic minorities as free expression.”

    This is a slippery slope fallacy because it would take a long series of intermediate events to get from point A to B. Furthermore, there’s a clear delineation between speech and physical violence. Our entire regime is based on the idea that government exists in order to monopolize and outlaw physical force.

    in contrast, there is no huge leap involved in worrying that banning one form of speech would lead to the banning of another. for example, a pace u student was charged with a felony for flushing a koran down the toilet. But if we make desecrating the koran a hate crime, what happens to andreas serrano’s piss christ? we can easily imagine government cracking down on artists who dare challenge Christianity. its only a small logical step. a man in canada was tried for homophobic hate speech because he posted anti-gay excerpts from the bible. many here may be sympathetic to his prosecution but then what happens to the koran and to immigrant communities thow wish to maintin their cultures…cultures often laced with misogyny and homophobia. in fact, people have already tried to ban the Koran in Germany under the guise that its hate speech.

    we’re already beginning to see hate crimes being turned around and biting the very minorities they were meant to protect. and logically speaking, they should.

    Posted 04 Jun 2009 at 11:58 pm ¶