Hate Speech: Definitions (Dee Speaking)
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				Fred

Before we say anything about a proposed code, let's ask how we can, or how we should, define hate speech. As a libertarian I'm concerned about definitions of this sort of thing. I think they all have serious problems. But I've collected some to show you.

In his history of the hate speech controversy, Samuel Walker tells us that

There is no universally agreed-on definition of hate speech. Traditionally it included any form of expression deemed offensive to any racial, religious, ethnic, or national group.

Rodney Smolla tells us that

Hate Speech is the generic term that has come to embrace the use of speech attacks on race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation or preference.

Mari Matsuda writes that

The hate speech flaring up in our midst includes insulting nouns for racial groups, degrading caricatures, threats of violence, and literature portraying Jews and people of color as animal-like and requiring extermination.

Later, Matsuda specifies three identifying characteristics of the worst racist hate messages:

1. The message is of racial inferiority

2. The message is directed against a historically oppressed group

3. The message is persecutory, hateful, and degrading.

Laura Lederer and Richard Delgado offer the following definition:

Speech or conduct aimed at a group of historically disenfranchised people; speech that reviles, ridicules, or puts in an intensely negative light a person or group on account of who they are - this is what we are calling "racist speech" or "hate propaganda."

I think these definitions or descriptions give us the flavor of what is meant by "hate speech." But as a civil libertarian I'm not sure I would accept any of them as the basis of a speech code.

Reference: See Walker's Hate Speech, p. 8, Smolla Free Speech in an Open Society, p. 152, Matsuda in Words that Wound, p. 23, 36, and the introduction to The Price We Pay edited by Lederer and Delgado.

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