Language is powerful. As our primary medium of communication, it affects us in ways that even physical interactions cannot. Language allows us to bring the private into the public, permitting others to understand our thoughts and vice versa. Language is fundamental, utilitarian and beautiful.
Language can also be terrifying. It can be overtly abusive and aggressive, or it can reveal discriminatory thought through its unspoken assumptions. Hate speech is one of the most effective tools of intimidation, coercion and torture precisely because our language affects and is affected by our deepest emotional responses.
In the eyes of the law, hate speech is language that directly incites violence. But we all know that speech doesn’t have to be violent to be hateful. So in common use, we define hate speech more loosely: it disparages an individual or a group based on some characteristic or identity, such as religion or sexual orientation.
The legal definition of hate speech is an extreme, and it ignores the long, painful gradient leading up to it—language filled with subtle sexism, homophobia and racism. To define offensive speech only as violence-inducing victimization is to forget the miles of “soft bigotry” (as George W. Bush called it) that line much of what our culture says and does.
Some of us have personally dealt with hate speech, but many more of us deal with soft bigotry every day. Consider the lesbian student who feels uncomfortable with her peers’ hetero-normative assumptions, or the Jewish student reluctant to call out an anti-Semitic joke for what it is.
Or the hundreds of Duke women who, before the university rose in protest, allowed themselves to be called “sluts” and “bitches” because they either found the language harmless or they feared social consequences if they raised their voices.
In the wake of several highly publicized e-mails sent by fraternities to campus women, student groups began to discuss the campus cultural conditions that led to the e-mails and offer plans of action for future change. Maybe we have a deep cultural problem, and maybe we don’t. Maybe these working groups will begin to resolve our issues. I’m not sure.
But I do think we—here at Duke and outside as well—might have a problem with dialogue about bigoted speech. We have a problem with talking about talking.
Everyone has a responsibility to be careful with his or her words because language is so powerful. But we often find it difficult to separate what one says from who one is. Saying something racist or homophobic doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is a racist or a homophobe. To be sure, there is a decent correlation—chauvinists do tend to be chauvinistic. But boiling a stranger’s character down to a few misguided statements hardly does justice to the complexity of his or her experience and identity. And we all make mistakes.
When post-conflict discourse is dominated by an assault on who people are rather than what they said, the efficacy of an anti-bigotry argument is lost. People get turned off when they feel like their character, rather than their actions, is being questioned. An anti-hate message can easily be lost in transmission when it is delivered clumsily—and that can, in turn, breed more misunderstanding.
That being said, the fact that someone is not generally a hateful person doesn’t diminish the bigotry in his or her “off-hand, joking, harmless,” offensive speech. We can’t dismiss sexist language just because the person who said it “has a lot of female friends,” or “really respects Duke women.” It’s especially dangerous to dismiss bigoted speech when it comes from those who profess to care. These are the people who should be most invested in using careful language. The closer we get, the more we should care about others—that’s the foundation of any good relationship.
What conditions are we creating with our language? And what are the consequences?
Why do more than one-third of LGBT young adults attempt suicide? Why do Duke women leave this university with lower self-esteem than when they arrived? How many of these cases were driven by explicit hate speech, and how many were the result of soft bigotry?
Language doesn’t have to be the verbal equivalent of picking up a metal bat to cause pain. Averted eyes or indifference—or refusing to understand how some jokes can be upsetting—can sometimes be worse.
The consequences of hateful language won’t ever leave the news unless there is a dramatic shift in our collective psyche. I’m not entirely convinced this is possible. To hate is as human as it is to eat and breathe. We find it natural and easy to construct our identities in opposition to others. These in- and out-group associations, explicitly demarcated or not, determine much of how we interact with other people. And because language is another obvious marker of identity, our language use affects and is affected by these other identities.
The beauty of human cooperation, though, is that we are able to prevent the construction of our own identities from leading to the destruction of others’. We can hold back our aggression. We can demonstrate love and caring through our words.
Language is powerful. While we can’t necessarily count on our society to rise up and assume collective responsibility for what we say or do, we can take ownership of our own individual language and the consequences it engenders.
Our words are the mirror of our thoughts onto our world. What are we reflecting? And what sort of world are we constructing?
Let’s talk—about talking.
Sandeep Prasanna is a Trinity senior and a Program II major examining change in language. His column runs every other Thursday.
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