Day 35: What does it mean to be free to speak?

So, this is a post about something I mull over quite a bit.  It's not going to be the last post on this (and it probably isn't the first, but I'm too lazy to go back and look at other places where I might have mulled/ranted/opined/otherwise engaged in discourse about this).  It has to do with freedom of speech, hate speech, freedom to speak, the First and Second Amendments, and so many other things.  In this moment, the context for thinking about these issues is the hideous hate crimes that took place recently in California, Texas, and Ohio.   Also, the way that language preceding the El Paso violence, in particular, chimes with hateful language which is always already there, but which seems to be on the rise.

Further context for this has to do with free speech on my particular college campus, and the way that speech is protected and exercised, and by whom.  There's a lot to unpack there, but for the moment, recent precipitating events for me in thinking about this are these:
- An African-American student was referred to our health services (the details aren't available, due to FERPA), and was removed from a classroom by police pursuant to that referral;
- A white student, after being reported multiple times for posting hateful misogynistic, white-supremacist and anti-Semitic speech on classroom online discussion boards (nothing was done on the basis of those referrals), engaged in a terrorist attack at a local synagogue, killing a woman and injuring others;
- Female students have been followed down the quad by older white men holding placards with religious quotes, screaming at those women that they are whores and Jezebels, and telling male students that these women will drag them (the male students) down to hell with them.  This is protected, says our campus administration and police, by the fact that our entire campus is a "free speech zone".

The terrorist at El Paso, like our student who committed the hateful and tragic crime at the synagogue in Poway, preceded his attack with a post of a screed that is the definition of hate speech.

I am an ardent supporter of free speech.  I am a trained ACLU legal observer.  I am also a linguist who understands that speech is, inherently, action.  It does something in the world.  Speech is also intertextually linked to other speech, and to specific acts, in many cases.  Intertextuality refers to the process by which we understand a given text (which can be speech, written representations of speech, symbols, etc) through reference to other, similar, texts, or to texts which have been linked to it in many circumstances over the past.  For example, the text of a burning cross is intertextually linked to violence and death, perpetrated by white bodies upon black bodies.  They're inextricable.  The same is true of the swastika - a religious symbol in many many cultures over millenia, now (I would argue) impossible to extricate from Nazism and anti-Semitic violence and hatred. 

The standard pro-free-speech response to the question of what to do about hate speech is to support the rights of the hateful to speak, and to advocate for more speech in return - for those who disagree to speak out in response to the hateful speech.  I have advocated that course of action many times.  Furthermore, the definition of hate speech that actually should be policed in other ways is very interesting: it is usually understood (in court cases) to be speech which can reasonably be expected to lead to physical response of some kind in retaliation, or speech which creates a dangerous situation.  Direct (credible) threats and harrassment are usually also not protected speech.

But I have come to realize that that is not an unproblematic prescription, and these definitions are also not unproblematic.  In fact, both the prescription of "more speech", and the definitions of hate speech, assume (as we so often do) a "standard reasonable person", read: a white man. 

Think about it: if an African-American man engages in physical violence in response to hate speech, he is not going to be judged to be a reasonable person, responding reasonably to provocation - he is going to be read through a very different lens, one which is informed by centuries of texts arguing that Black bodies are dangerous.  If a woman responds with violence, it won't go much better for her (doubly if she is a woman of color).  But, in fact, women are much less likely to defend themselves physically than men, because angry and hateful words directed at women, intertextually, link to physical violence and sexual assault.  It is not safe for a woman to yell back at someone who calls her Jezebel.  So the definition of hate speech becomes hard to apply to cases where the target isn't a white man.  This is also true of the prescription to just speak more: women and people of color speaking out do not get the same reception that white men do, and they are also at much higher risk of a violent response to their speech.

A colleague of mine has a student who told her about going to a crowded music festival with female friends.  A man grabbed one of the women's rear end; when another woman in the group called him out on it, he hit her so hard he broke her cheekbone.  When women speak out, they risk being hurt.  Or, they risk being threatened with hideous physical violence (usually sexual in nature; I've never yet seen a man, posting something disagreeable online, being threatened with rape, but it happens to women so often that we mostly don't even talk about it).

In other words, by exercising freedom of speech in specific ways (ways in which the speech itself is an act which intertextually links to violence and, by so doing, creates an environment of violence), those who engage in hate speech shut the doors on the right to the freedom of speech of others.  It is problematic and simplistic to say that the targets of that hate speech just need to speak out more - saying that denies a reality in which speaking out in response is dangerous, or is policed and silenced.

I am by no means saying we get rid of freedom of speech; I'm not even necessarily saying that we need to narrow our definition of free speech.  I am saying that we need to think carefully about simplistic understandings of how free speech is enacted, who gets to enact free speech with relative impunity, and whose freedom of speech is regularly abrogated by credible threats of violence, whether overt or implied.  When I think about whatever back-door conversations went on after the Poway shooter's hateful screeds were reported on campus, whatever "free speech" arguments were made that kept him from being policed in the same way that the African-American student was policed, I also think about who wasn't getting to exercise their right to free speech in those same forums.  Which students were afraid to speak, lest it result in violence?  Because let's be clear, this man's speech arose out of a tradition of violence, and resulted in violence.

I don't know what to suggest, but I think we'd better be having conversations about this for sure.  I'd love to hear your thoughts - this isn't something to consider in a vacuum, I don't think...