How is racist hate speech contrary to the purposes of the First Amendment?
“Racist speech that takes the form of face to face insults, catcalls, or other assaultive speech aimed at an individual or group of persons falls directly within the “fighting words” exception of the First Amendment protection.
The supreme court has held in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire that words which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tends to incite an immediate breach of peace” are not protected by the First Amendment.
If the purpose of the First Amendment is to foster the greatest amount of speech, racial insults disserve that purpose. Assaultive racist speech functions as a preemptive strike. The invective is experienced as a blow, not as a profered idea. And once the blow is struck, a dialogue is unlikely to follow. Racist insults are particularly undeserving of First Amendment protection, because the perpetrators intention is not to discover the truth or initiate a dialogue but to injure the victim.
In most situations, members of minority groups realize that they are likely to lose if they fight back, and forced to remain silent and submissive”
Forced to suffer their abuse in silence…
“Courts have held that offensive speech may not be regulated of otherwise public forums (such as streets, where the listener may avoid the speech by moving on). But the regulation of otherwise protected speech has been permitted when the speech invades the privacy of unwilling listeners home, and when the unwilling listener cannot avoid the speech.”
Charles Lawrence - Relflections: An Anthology of African American Philosophy
- As an addition to this excerpt from the debate between Charles Lawrence and Gerald Gunther, there is also a less discussed extension of the hate speech protections that should be implemented through contemporary “Reconstructive Amendments”. The psychological abuses that come with the projection of negative energy or violent combativeness towards another individual speaks to a more pervasive form of infringing on the rights and autonomy of another.
The pervasiveness of this experience is deeply rooted in the in-groups ability to create a sphere of negativity for the out-group that is then projected onto the out-group by way of racist and prejudicial reasonings that run tandem to the hate speech exception upheld by the supreme court in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. An example would be the gang-stalking and constant violent antagonization of the out-group if they were to live in close proximity to each other i.e the same neighborhood and is felt to extremes if the victim is the downstairs or next door neighbor of the victimizer; or even those who present themselves as pervasive bad faith actors in the workplace.
With a nuanced understanding of how racism and prejudices morph to become a determinant of how one treats another person, one is required to become honest in the experiences they've had to suffer through at the hands of people who knowingly create and project harm for others. There is no excuse for the impotent behaviors of racist and prejudicious people, especially when there are laws that safeguard the out-group from these abuses.
-Yogabrofessor
Montmarquet, J. A., & Hardy, W. H. (2000). Reflections An Anthology of African American Philosophy. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA65356223
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