Proponents of laws banning so-called hate speech often couch their arguments in terms of dignity: that is, they claim that banning hate speech is essential for protecting the dignity of minorities from racial slurs and other denigration. As David Shih writes for NPR, hate speech is “nothing more than state-sanctioned injury of people of color.”
This argument sounds plausible; but in actuality, free speech is the best friend of minorities. In his book Kindly Inquisitors, gay activist Jonathan Rauch documents the brutal conditions under which gays and lesbians lived in the United States in the 1960s.
Gay Americans were forbidden to work for the government; forbidden to obtain security clearances; forbidden to serve in the military. They were arrested for making love, even in their own homes; beaten and killed on the streets; entrapped and arrested by the police for sport; fired from their jobs.
What helped gay men and women to change the culture of the United States such that they could begin to live lives of dignity and grace? Free speech. As Rauch writes,
In ones and twos at first, then in streams and eventually cascades, gays talked. They argued. They explained. They showed. They confronted. … As gay people stepped forward, liberal science engaged. The old anti-gay dogmas came under critical scrutiny as never before.
Rauch documents how gays and lesbians fought for their rights and their dignity, and how that fight slowly bore fruit in building a culture that respected both. Free speech is one of the best tools that disempowered people have to push the culture at large to respect their innate human dignity.
But I want to flip the dignity argument around on would-be censors like Shih even further. The truth is that if we’re really serious about respecting the dignity of every human being, then we need a culture of free speech.
One reason is that every human being has unique experiences, which lead to a unique perspective. None of us have lived the exact same life as someone else, which means that all of us have a unique outlook on life that cannot be fully captured by anyone else. Each of us can add our own beautiful note to the grand symphony of the human experience.
When we censor people, we degrade their perspective. We tell them that their note isn’t worth adding to the symphony, that the rest of us can get along just fine without the unique knowledge and perspective that only they can contribute. That’s an incredibly insulting way to think about our fellow human.
This is especially true because, contra the myth of many of those who would ban so-called hate speech, the people who would suffer under these laws aren’t just people who want to use racial slurs and denigrate others. Hate speech laws are invariably broad, which means they’re going to punish a lot of speech that might have value. For instance, feminists in England have been charged with hate speech because they insist that there are biological differences between men and women. In the United States, a graffiti artist in Brooklyn was charged with hate speech for spraypainting messages such as “a wrongful arrest is a crime” that criticized the NYPD.
And even if so-called hate speech truly did have no value, laws banning it still have to be enforced. That enforcement presents its own concerns. When a government throws a young man in prison for posting a meme on social media that the government doesn’t like, can we really say that his dignity is being respected? No matter the noble impulse of some censors, there’s something barbaric about how this censorship looks in practice.
This is even true when the censorship isn’t being performed by the government, but by private citizens forming cancellation mobs. Like official bans on hate speech, cancel culture has often been defended as being about dignity: a way of calling out the powerful and giving a voice to the powerless. But it rarely looks this way. In practice this kind of cultural censorship looks like ordinary peoples’ lives being destroyed, often for jokes or for statements that are misinterpreted by the cancelers. One man was fired from his job for having just moved to New York and not knowing what a bodega was. The video he made airing his frustration was deemed racist by the online mob, but he disagrees. Rather than making fun of the minorities who run bodegas, he says, “It was more of an intent to almost like make fun of myself for being a new person in the city.” When we make snap decisions to destroy a person’s livelihood based on a single video clip without first trying to understand the context or intent of that clip, are we really respecting the other person’s dignity?
In fact, joining online mobs to culturally censor someone is often less about making the world a safer and kinder place for minorities, and more about indulging our own human capacity for cruelty. Former canceler Barrett Wilson describes his “gleeful savagery” in tearing apart other peoples’ lives for minor misdeeds. He regrets the “destruction and human suffering,” that he and other cancelers caused, suffering that they often had to selectively forget in order to maintain the myth in their own minds that they were the good guys.
Authoritarianism — including the urge to censor — can be linked to some pretty nasty psychological traits. As social psychologist Bob Altemeyer notes, authoritarians “strongly believe in punishment, and admit that they derive personal pleasure from administering it to ‘wrongdoers’.” (Altemeyer was studying right-wing authoritarians, but his insights apply to authoritarians across the political spectrum).
It can be tempting to look at the racial slurs and other insults that some minorities have to deal with and conclude that bans on hate speech are essential to respecting our human dignity. But the truth is the opposite. If we truly want to build a society that respects the dignity of every human being, then we have to start by affirming the right to speak.