Hate speech

The enforcement of the laws proposed in this article will be fraught, complex and difficult. However, the difficulty of administering a law is never a good argument for refusing to enforce it. The censorship of the written word ended in England with the Lady Chatterley and Oz obscenity trials, but this liberalisation of publication standards has not prevented the state from prosecuting hate speech when it appears in print. It is clear that, although we have more latitude than ever to say or write what we want (no matter how objectionable), standards and taboos continue to exist. We can take it that these taboos are especially important and valuable to the running of a stable society, as they have persisted despite the legal and cultural changes that have taken place over the last fifty years. Hate speech is prosecuted and censored because of its power to intrude into the lives of individuals who have not consented to receive it. As pointed out in Jeremy Waldron’s response[1] to Timothy Garton Ash’s piece[2] on hate speech, hateful comments are not dangerous because they insight gullible individuals to abandon their inhibitions and engage in race riots. Hate speech is harmful because it recreates- cheaply and in front of a very large audience- an atmosphere in which vulnerable minorities are put in fear of becoming the targets of violence and prejudice. Additionally, hate speech harms by defaming groups, by propagating lies and half-truths about practices and beliefs, with the objective of socially isolating those groups. Gangsta rap does all of these things, yet legal responses to the publication of songs containing such lyrics as “Rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome,” have been timid at best. Even if we maintain our liberal approach to taboo breaking forms of expression, we can still link hip hop to many of the harms that hate speech produces. Gangsta rap gives the impression that African-American and Latin-American neighbourhoods throughout the USA are violent, lawless places. Even if the pronouncements of rappers such as 50 cent and NWA are overblown or fictitious they enforce social division by vividly discouraging people from entering or interacting with poor minority communities. They damage those communities directly by creating a fear of criminality that serves to limit trust and cohesion among individual community members. Finally, violent hip hop is also defamatory. It propagates an image of minority communities that emphasises violence, poverty and nihilism, whilst loudly proclaiming its authenticity. It is completely irrelevant that these images of minority communities are produced by members of those communities. It is on this basis, however protracted the process of classification must become, that the content of hip hop songs should be assessed and censored. Liberal democracies are prepared to go to great lengths to adjudicate on speech that could potentially promote racial or religious hatred. The same standards should be applied to hip hop music, because it is capable of producing identical harms. [1] Waldron, J. “The harm of hate speech”. FreeSpeechDebate, 20 March 2012.  [2] Garton-Ash, T. “Living with difference”. FreeSpeechDebate, 22 January 2012.