Is Free Speech Racist?

Gavan Titley

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509536177
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Demography

The question of free speech is never far from the headlines and frequently declared to be in crisis. Starting from the observation that such debates so often focus on what can and cannot be said in relation to race, Gavan Titley asks why racism has become so central to intense disputes about the status and remit of freedom of speech. Is Free Speech Racist? moves away from recurring debates about the limits of speech to instead examine how the principle of free speech is marshalled in today's multicultural and intensively mediated societies. This involves tracing the ways in which free speech has been mobilized in far-right politics, in the recycling of 'race realism' and other discredited forms of knowledge, and in the politics of immigration and integration. Where there is intense political contestation and public confusion as to what constitutes racism and who gets to define it, 'free speech' has been adopted as a primary mechanism for amplifying and re-animating racist ideas and racializing claims. As such, contemporary free speech discourse reveals much about the ongoing life of race and racism in contemporary society.

ONE
Debating racism, disputing speech

Beyond the clichés of free speech crisis

The question of free speech is never far from the headlines, and in these headlines it is frequently declared to be in crisis. That these dramatic headlines proliferate in societies increasingly marked by abundant communication is curious, but this is only part of the puzzle for this book. More curious is why controversies hingeing on ‘what can be said’ about particular political, cultural and social issues feature so centrally in free speech crises, over and above, for example, the powerful, material and governmental threats to expression increasingly witnessed in societies marked by political surveillance and authoritarian attitudes to the press. The aim of this book is to explore why racism, in particular, has become so disproportionately integrated into these intense debates about the status and remit of freedom of speech, debates that are conducted in societies characterized not only by endless speech, but by a dominant if intensely disputed sense that racism is largely a problem that has been overcome. This thorny relation between the meaning and scope of free speech, and the meaning and salience of racism, produces an apparent contradiction. In the public imagination, free speech is celebrated as a fundamental freedom, central to modern emancipation, self-expression and democratic vitality. In contemporary western societies, it has also become fundamental to an insistent, many-stranded politics that is reshaping how racism is expressed and legitimized in public culture.

‘Racism’ and ‘free speech’ are complex and disputed keywords. Often, when these keywords are invoked together, it is because racism produces questions about the limits of permissible speech. Racist discourse can and regularly does enjoy legal protection as an exercise in freedom of expression. Consequently, academic discussions of the regulation of speech often address the political and legal dimensions of this protection, and the question of if and when racist expression constitutes incitement to hatred or hate speech, and thus qualifies as a subject of restriction, censure or prosecution. In his survey of post-war legal regulation of fascist propaganda, and subsequently anti-immigrant political rhetoric and ‘hate speech’, Erich Bleich considers this a key dilemma for post-war European liberal democracies: ‘How can we balance the core values of preserving freedom while limiting the harmful effects of racism?’ (2011: 3).

This kind of tension recurs in what follows; however, this book is not centrally concerned with questions of regulation, as the extent of current conflicts concerning the public legitimacy of racist speech transcends, in significant ways, the parameters of legal considerations. Free speech is never simply a subject of law or a question of legality, and while the question of ‘the limits of freedom of speech’ is critically important, treating it as the singular horizon of discussion prevents a full engagement with the importance of ‘free speech’ as a political discourse and cultural imaginary in many contemporary societies. Freedom of speech is constantly invoked in public not solely as a legal principle, but because it acts as a focal point for advancing antagonistic visions of who constitutes the public and what values should guide public discourse.

Consider, as a point of entry, this fake political quotation from a list published on the popular US satirical site, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

‘We shall crush apartheid and white racist minority rule in the marketplace of ideas’, Nelson Mandela, 1980. (Appel 2019)

What’s the joke, exactly? It is said that you ruin a joke by explaining it; however, satire sharp enough to introduce some of the key issues analysed in this book can probably withstand some extended discussion. Mandela’s personal history is well known to be marked by the brutal repression meted out by the apartheid regime. Opposition to apartheid involved mass mobilization, civil disobedience and international solidarity action. Laid out in these terms, the joke seems to rest on nothing more than an absurd juxtaposition – the dismantling of white supremacist rule was not secured through a free exchange of ideas. The satire, however, goes further. The phrase ‘marketplace of ideas’ is a prevalent metaphor in public discourse for what is often termed the instrumental value of free speech. Instrumental arguments for free speech base its value on the good it potentially produces: more truth, greater understanding, advances in knowledge, informed citizenship and so forth. Any arbitrary restriction on speech, therefore, risks distorting the diversity of opinion and processes of exchange through which better and truer ideas may emerge. The market is both metaphor and model for optimum democratic exchange, for if speech is left unhindered, the truth emerges as a kind of product from competition between ideas.

In the next chapter, it will become clear why this kind of free speech imaginary is intensely disputed from a variety of theoretical and political positions. The question, for now, is why the satirical intent is trained on the question of racism. The parody hinges on the assumption that racism can be ‘defeated’ in the marketplace of ideas because of how racism is dominantly understood as a product of ideas, and ideology. Consequently, racist ideas, like all ideas, are regarded as being open to forms of rational, deliberative engagement in the public sphere, where they can be disproven or discredited. In Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Paul C. Taylor regards this emphasis on ideas and attitudes as fundamental to contemporary confusion and conflict as to how racism is understood and spoken about in public:

Defining ‘racism’ is difficult in part because we use the word to describe many different things. Some of us speak of racist people, actions, attitudes, and beliefs; others speak of racist practices, ideologies, and institutions. Some of us refuse to complain of racism unless there is some intentional discrimination; others are willing to set aside intentions and focus on consequences. Some of us want to think of racism as a matter of prejudice in individual interactions; others insist that it is about social systems and structures of power. (2013: 31)

This stark divergence is informed by many factors, but one of them is a pronounced narrative about the historical status of ‘race’ and racism, and this is where the satire hardens considerably. Apartheid South Africa stands as the last of the ‘overtly racist regimes’ of the twentieth century (Fredrickson 2002), and when arrayed against the awesome power of an historically symbolic racist state, faith in the power of reasoned persuasion appears absurd. However, after the end of such organized supremacist, racialized hierarchies, the dominant assumption in western public cultures is that racism is defined by what remains: ideas and ideology, manifested in forms of recognizably extremist politics and aberrant individual attitudes. In this ‘postracial’ context, such faith is not absurd, but self-evident, as these ideas and attitudes can and should be debated, the better to expose them, and to demonstrate the kind of tolerance that, so the story goes, racists lack.

Except, this is not self-evident to people who are subject to racism, and who struggle to describe and contest it in terms adequate to their experience and political goals. Racism, in Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s well-known formulation, ‘does not stay still’, but is articulated differently according to changes in the economy, social structure and political formation (1990). The divergent understandings in Taylor’s summary picture, therefore, are not just differences of opinion or an assorted collection of ‘ideas’. They are politically consequential assumptions given meaning through structures, institutions and practices. Nor are these positions equivalent in their influence. The conviction that racism is primarily about ideas, attitudes and ideologies can be regarded as a ‘post-war hegemonic ideology’ in western nation-states with official, publicly renewed commitments to particular forms of anti-racism (Wade 2015: 1292).

Read against this backdrop, the pitch of McSweeney’s satire is utterly contemporary. Conflicts over how racism is defined and how it is best opposed, and who gets to decide this and why, have erupted with renewed intensity in recent years, and they are often mediated through the question of ‘free speech’. The headlines proclaiming a ‘free speech crisis’ survey arenas and institutions such as universities, mainstream journalistic outlets, political platforms and social media spaces, and often propose that the problem is a ‘new intolerance’ – a ‘fragile’ refusal to engage in democratic debate, to give ideas a fair hearing, and to respect the earlier described instrumental value of free speech. Increasingly, it is contended that there is a willingness to define racism with such elasticity – attaching it to any number of events and actions – that it shuts down legitimate debate and limits the diversity of acceptable viewpoints; the definition of racism, according to the political commentator David Goodhart, ‘has been subject to mission creep’ (2017). Anti-racism, it is argued, has become a censorious political reflex, or in the proposition of a debate hosted by Reason magazine, ‘the message of antiracism has become as harmful a force in American life as racism’ (Gillespie 2018). Short of a frequently invoked and rarely defined threshold of ‘hate speech’, a refusal to engage with the free flow of ideas is regarded as a refusal of democratic values and procedure.

It is precisely this willingness to regard racist discourse as open to persuasion and deliberation that the egregiously faked Mandela quote takes issue with. Across these sites and arenas, people subject to forms of racism and those in solidarity with them are refusing to validate and amplify racist ideas by engaging with them as ideas. What kind of pluralism demands, as a common contemporary anti-racist slogan puts it, ‘that I debate my humanity’? What understanding of democratic deliberation insists that those racialized as not white, or as ‘migrant’, or as ‘Muslim’, must treat the established logics and tropes of racist discourse as propositions for reasoned engagement, as if the world starts afresh with every new debate? What vision of ‘the public’ requires those racialized as ‘problem populations’ to validate the terms and frameworks of debates about ‘the problem’? Lost in the sensationalist framing of free speech as ‘in crisis’ is the tension that the McSweeney quote captures acutely: that how one understands racism inevitably has consequences for how one conceptualizes free speech, and vice versa.

Given the insistent frenzy of crisis headlines, the contours of crisis have begun to receive critical attention, notably the tendency of appropriating ‘free speech’ as a shield against criticism or as a licence to provoke. Examining the ‘weaponization’ of free speech in Australian politics, Katharine Gelber observes that ‘never before has the catch cry of “free speech” been used by so many so often as a catalyst for wider political objectives, many of which have very little to do with free speech at all’ (2017). Surveying, in a Guardian Long Read essay, a narrative of crisis in the UK, William Davies points out how the ‘claim that free speech is under attack is often a mask for other political frustrations and fears’, and the unrestrained donning of this mask by ‘conservative provocateurs’ means that ‘the ideal of free speech is being stretched to the point where the phrase starts to mean too much’ (2018). In everyday Internet culture, the elastic instrumentalization they chart is parodied as ‘freeze peach’ – a presumed entitlement to speak without criticism, restraint or consequence.

One interpretation of this rhetorical appropriation of free speech is that it provides a way of occupying space and attention in highly mediated public cultures. Claiming that one has been ‘silenced’ is patently about generating publicity within the accelerated dynamics of the attention economy, and consequently all sorts of ‘contrarians’ seek to trigger secondary debates about their right to speech, in the service of anti-egalitarian goals. These voluble claims of silencing are made, generically, across the range of issues condescendingly bundled into the idea of ‘culture war’. Political correctness, militant feminism, ‘diversity police’, the ‘gay lobby’, ‘trans ideology’, the multicultural consensus: projecting these as hegemonic is a well-established move, opening political space by inflating any opposition into evidence of repressive orthodoxy (Ahmed 2009). It is a transparent yet regularly efficient means of parlaying established public status into virtuous marginality, casting discredited ideas as deliberative propositions, reframing familiar, reactionary ideas as iconoclastic experiments, and entangling criticism and opposition in abstracted debates about freedoms that are not, in reality, substantially in question.

These tactics enable the recuperation of racist ideas and claim space for racist discourse, and as is discussed subsequently, they are not just opportunistic, but increasingly patterned into a financed and organized infrastructure of ‘open debate’ that, for all the declarations of scholarly and citizenly disinterestedness, is thoroughly preoccupied with race. This opportunism, nonetheless, is not sufficient to explain the contemporary intersection between racism and free speech. What is most at stake here is the shape rather than limits of speech in intensively mediated, multicultural societies. Thus, sketching out a corrective, normative theory of free speech will not tell us much about why racism is so often at the heart of these conflicts.

It is the central argument of this book that where racism is dominantly understood in terms of ideology and ideas, invocations of free speech have become fundamental to reshaping how racism is expressed and legitimized in public culture. As subsequent chapters demonstrate, this politics has many overlapping strands. Cumulatively, they fuel recurrent public controversies and media spectacles, where the right to express racist ideas and circulate racist discourse is increasingly marked out as what is most at stake in relation to freedom of speech. Yet what is principally at play in these disputes is not a legal right to speak or freedom from coercion. Instead, it is the legitimacy of what is being said, and the contested reception it receives in diverse, antagonistic and reactive public spheres. In contexts where there is intense political contestation and public confusion as to what constitutes racism, and who gets to define it, free speech has been adopted as a primary mechanism for validating, amplifying and reanimating racist ideas and racializing claims.

Free speech: the map and the territory

Freedom of speech is a central modern imaginary. In public discourse it is celebrated as a fundamental liberty; however, a dominant version of this celebration mistakes sacralization for political commitment, marginalizing the complexity of how ‘speech’ is organized and distributed. In some ways, this tension is not new. In the – capacious – liberal tradition with which freedom of speech is profoundly associated, it is primarily predicated on negative liberty, that is, freedom from arbitrary restriction or interference, particularly that of state and governmental power. In other, materialist and critical traditions, this dominant liberal vision has always been shadowed by the constraints it neglects: the forms of material possibility, structured inequality, political power, media access and communicative capacity that organize the meaningful distribution of expression and attention in racially ordered capitalist societies.

What is new, arguably...

Índice

• Cover
• Contents
• Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Debating racism, disputing speech
• 2 Closure: who decides what is racist?
• 3 Culture: who values free speech?
• 4 Capture: what is free speech being claimed for?
• Afterword: so, is free speech racist?
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement