The problem with anti-slavery policies is that they discriminate against your own freedom to own who you want to own, and treat them the way you want to treat them. Where I come from, I could clearly see the line forming against Slavery because of anti-Slavery laws being "the right thing to do" around the late 1790s. Looking back, most of what went on at Slave markets in the mid 1790s would now be labelled as discriminative, and most people of the time would now be jailed for making the very same economic trades in 2014.

Is that progress? In my mind the society was better as a whole when there were less restrictions everywhere. Now you have to think twice about who you can or cannot own, you have to tone down any violence against negroes you'd like to beat for fear of it being discriminative in any way... it's just plain boring, and fake, because people anyway still arrange lynchings but they are simply not allowed to talk about it in public anymore.

At least before people felt some responsibility for the slaves they owned, instead of having to set them free.

OK, OK, I know, it's a bad analogy. Limits on speech are much less clear-cut than freeing slaves. But I hope I've made the point that you can't just point to the past, say "Is that progress? In my mind, society was better [then].", and claim that that's a substantive argument. It's not.

Yes, there are great arguments for Free Speech. Make those arguments instead.

On the other hand, there are good arguments to limit discriminatory speech. Speech can definitely harm people. One person saying "[Ethnic] immigrants are no-good, low-down, filthy, lazy, uneducated spongers, only interested in taking advantage of food stamp programs and great emergency medical treatment services while stealing jobs from real Americans by doing them for half the cost, cash-in-hand." probably isn't going to make much of a difference. But if it turns into a narrative or meme that's repeated again and again and again, it really can.

Oft-repeated speech can harm discriminatred-against peoples ability to get good jobs, by turning the minds of employers against them. It can harm their ability to start their own companies, by turning the minds of lenders against them. It can harm their ability to get a good education for their kids, by making school boards indifferent to the problems of schools with large [ethnic] populations. It can harm their ability to petition school boards, or to join them, by having the people already there dismiss them, ignore their input, and quash their participation.

Sure, despite this, if an [ethnic] kid with enough smarts and enough determination fights as hard as they can from the age of about 5 against all these barriers, and has a good amount of luck, they could still make a great life for themselves. But should they have to? Huge swathes of non-[ethnic] kids do at least as well for themselves without having to overcome these barriers at all; some of them, due to the privileges they enjoy, manage it while almost coasting. Meanwhile, masses of [ethnic] kids with only 90% of the drive of our special snowflake are beaten back into a life of poverty.

Discriminatory narratives in our cultures materially harm whole populations of people. Even if you can point to individuals that are exceptions to this, that doesn't stop it being true. It's still possible to do well at the game of life when it's on "nightmare" difficulty setting, it's just that many fewer people playing on that setting will do as well as the people playing on "easy" difficulty.

So the question is, is the freedom for us to create and spread discriminatory verbal narratives against minority ethnic (or other) groups in our society, more important than their freedom to truly be seen as equals and individuals, and to have the same advantages with the same lack of barriers that the majority enjoys?

It's not a clear-cut answer. Freedom of speech is incredibly important, and any limits, no matter how well-intentioned, should be regarded with utmost suspicion.

But, there is a case to be made here, and it needs to be decided on its merits. Saying "we never used to do it that way" simply isn't good enough.