When faced with someone hurling racial and hateful epithets, the reaction one might have could be anything from anger, to fear, to shock, to surprise. Hate is an emotion, and being such, tends to elicit an emotional response. However, before one reacts emotionally, it may be beneficial to step back, take a breath, and logically think through one’s response. Ultimately, there may be more at stake than individual feelings and emotions; how we react with regard to hate speech can ultimately affect our own personal rights and freedom of speech.

"Why should I do anything but to try and stop hate speech?" you may ask yourself. "It doesn’t have any purpose or socially redeeming value, so why not just outlaw it all and be done with it?" The answer to these questions is not an obvious in your face answer. However, most emotional issues seldom have obvious answers beyond the immediate, and often detrimental, emotional response. But when basic rights and freedoms are at stake, it is worth the time that it takes to think through one’s reactions.

In order to consider what, if anything, there is to be gained by allowing hate speech to go unchecked, let’s take a look at what the nineteenth century philosopher and champion of free speech John Stuart Mill has to say. In On Liberty, a work many consider his Magnum opus, Mill explains that there are three primary reasons for the necessity of unbridled speech (133). First of all, the currently prevailing opinions may be false. "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that," states Mill. People in this situation, he explains, are in a position where "Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know ... " (126). Secondly, he maintains that even if an opinion is true, a challenge to the false is necessary for clear understanding and acceptance. In his words, "… there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood" (139). Last of all, Mill reminds us that sometimes the real truth lies in a combination of the two conflicting opinions. Based on Mill’s assertions, one could say that unrestrained freedom of speech is essential for the discovery, maintenance, and preservation of all truth.

In spite of the persuasiveness of Mill’s arguments, the United States Supreme Court decided in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire to recognize an exception to the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. This exception came with regard to what is known as fighting words. This decision is of interest relative to hate speech, as hate speech is often regarded as fighting words.

What are fighting words? These are words that the Court described as "those which by their very utterance [1] inflict injury of or [2] tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" (The Fighting Words Doctrine). Since this ruling, the Supreme Court has clarified the fighting words doctrine to include only part two of the definition, and then only when the words "… tend to provoke violent resentment," and are "directed at the person of the hearer" (The Fighting Words Doctrine).

Why support restrictions, even on fighting words? In his essay titled Racist Speech as the Functional Equivalent of Fighting Words, Charles R. Lawrence, III offers an explanation as to why the Court ruled the way it did. He also gives two reasons as to why he agrees with the Court’s decision that face to face insults are unworthy of first amendment protection. The first reason, he explains, is that racial insults produce immediate injury. "Visceral emotional response to personal attack precludes speech," he states. "Attack produces an instinctive defensive psychological reaction." One could summarize by saying that face to face racial insults tend to provoke a fight or flight response on the part of the victim.

The second reason cited by Lawrence for justification of restricting fighting words is the preemptive effect insults have on further speech (240). One of the underlying purposes of the first amendment is to foster the greatest amount of speech possible. In the case of face to face insults, speech is often an inadequate response. If a gay person is called faggot, Lawrence explains, "… it is not sufficient to deny the truth of a word’s application, to say, I am not a faggot" (241). Thus, it can be seen how the preemptive nature of such manner of speech is in direct conflict of the underlying goal of promoting further speech.

So who is right and who is wrong? That is a decision that is up to the citizens of the United States of America to decide. How we vote, how we react, and what we tolerate, will ultimately determine our fate as a people and as a nation. I would only ask of you this; when you are making a decision, any decision, that is related to the freedom of speech, bear in mind the words of Benjamin Franklin when he said, "Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech…." He truly understood the importance of free speech.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Lawrence, Charles R., III. Racist Speech as the Functional Equivalent of Fighting

Words. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy. Eds. Thomas A. Mappes

and Jane S. Zembaty. New York: McGraw-Hill Co., Inc., 1997, 239-242.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Primer of Intellectual Freedom. Ed. Howard Mumford

Jones. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949, 110-141.

The Fighting Words Doctrine. MIT.

legal/chaplinsky-v-new-hampshire> (7 December 1997).