The Hate Debate

What is hate speech? How does a person suffer when they are vilified? What can public policy do to redress it? This text proposes a new type of hate speech policy - "speaking back" - providing institutional, material and educational support to enable the victims of hate speech to respond.

The hate debate is becoming increasingly urgent in both the US and the UK. This provocative collection helps frame that debate by asking all the right questions - and at the right time. Is justice served when someone committing an act of violence because of prejudice is punished more severely than someone who perpetrates the same assault for other reasons? That's the question posed by critics of 'hate crime' laws in the United States. It is also the central question addressed in The Hate Debate. Opponents say that hate crime laws infringe one's right to freedom of expression. They maintain that 'extra punishment' is not for the act itself, but for the bad VALUES and thoughts motivating the crime. On the other hand, supporters of hate crime laws argue that greater punishment is warranted because, in effect, hate crimes hurt more. The societal and other harms make hate crimes qualitatively different from crimes motivated on other grounds. What explains the emergence and extension of hate crime laws in the United States and in Britain? Do hate crime laws really create 'thought crimes'? Is extra punishment the best way to deal with hate? This collection of essays by leading commentators on both sides of the Atlantic seeks to clear a path through the current debate. Contributors: Elizabeth Burney, Senior Research Associate at Cambridge University's Institute of Criminology; Jeff Jacoby, award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe; Valerie Jenness, Chair of the Department of Criminology and associate professor, University of California, Irvine; Frederick M. Lawrence, Law Alumni Scholar and Professor of Law, Boston University Law School; Jack Levin, is the Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology and Director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, Northeastern University, Boston; Melanie Phillips, social commentator and columnist; Larry Ray, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent; David Smith, Professor of Social Work, Lancaster University; Peter Tatchell, journalist, author, broadcaster and campaigner on gay and other human rights.

Debating Hate Crime examines the language used by parliamentarians, senators, and committee witnesses to debate Canada’s hate laws. Drawing on discourse analysis, semiotics, and critical psychoanalysis, Allyson Lunny explores how the tropes, metaphors, and other linguistic signifiers used in these debates expose the particular concerns, trepidations, and anxieties of Canadian lawmakers and the expert witnesses called before their committees. Lunny reveals the meaning and social signification of the endorsement of, and resistance to, hate law. The result is a rich historical account of some of Canada’s most passionate public debates on victimization, rightful citizenship, social threat, and moral erosion.

This book proposes an original policy framework for addressing hate speech. Gelber argues that a policy designed to provide support to affected groups and communities to enable them to speak back when hate speech occurs, is a more useful way of addressing the harms of hate speech than punitive measures. She suggests that “speaking back” allows the affected groups to contradict the messages contained in the words of the hate speakers, and to counteract the silencing, disempowering and marginalising effects of hate speech. Gelber’s argument uniquely synthesises the ideas of defending the importance of participating in speech, recognising the harms of hate speech and acknowledging that targeted groups may require assistance to respond.

In this book, the authors, all legal scholars from the tradition of critical race theory start from the experience of injury from racist hate speech and develop a theory of the first amendment that recognizes such injuries. In their critique of "first amendment orthodoxy", the authors argue that only a history of racism can explain why defamation, invasion of privacy and fraud are exempt from free-speech guarantees but racist verbal assault is not.

The opportunities afforded by the Internet greatly overshadow the challenges. While not forgetting this, we can nevertheless still address some of the problems that arise. Hate speech online is one such problem. But what exactly is hate speech online, and how can we deal with it effectively? As with freedom of expression, on- or offline, UNESCO defends the position that the free flow of information should always be the norm. Counter-speech is generally preferable to suppression of speech. And any response that limits speech needs to be very carefully weighed to ensure that this remains wholly exceptional, and that legitimate robust debate is not curtailed.

Does hate speech undermine democracy by attacking its most vulnerable members? Does it threaten the equal dignity of all citizens? Heinze and Phillipson draw on law, politics, philosophy and ethics to debate these and other questions.

More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America’s culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.InFreedom for the Thought That We Hate, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas—political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America’s great founding ideas.