Students who protested Riley Gaines, a recent controversial speaker, on campus called the presentation hate speech. While protestors argued that hate speech has no place on campus, opposing students and university leadership defended the presentation as free speech.
Personally, when the importance of a message or argument comes down to preserving free speech, I’m a little skeptical. Is the best defense you can think of really the fact that you can technically be wrong if you want to?
If we take the Constitution’s definition of ‘free speech’ at face value, the First Amendment is pretty expansive; it takes a threat of imminent lawless action to lawfully be limited. College students across the nation, however, have rejected this threshold, refusing to allow what they consider ‘hate speech’ to receive a platform on campus.
They often cite the emotional and mental harm they face when speakers invited to campus attack the basis of their identities as falling under hate speech. There exists a real concern that this speech will reinforce and encourage hostile messages and actions while simultaneously worsening the condition of marginalized groups.
That being said, as a private university, Trinity does not have to follow the First Amendment. Our statement on students’ rights and responsibilities, however, says that our freedoms of expression are the same as all citizens — meaning First Amendment standards still apply.
Okay, so it seems then that speech must be hate speech or free speech, one or the other. Well, I’d argue it’s not that simple. What constitutes offensive or derogatory speech and when does that become hate speech worthy of limitations? Who gets to make that decision? I believe this distinction to be far too subjective to be codified in any standardized rule or guideline.
Free speech champions would likely agree with me on this one. They often reference the slippery slope argument, which posits that once we limit one message as offensive, the subjective nature of this division could lead to the limitation of all arguments.
I don’t necessarily agree that society will slip down the slope into an authoritarian-style anti-speech regime. I do believe, however, that hate speech and free speech are not opposites. In fact, I would argue that they are one and the same.
Look, college campuses have served as society’s battlegrounds for the debate between free speech and hate speech for decades. When students protest controversial speakers, news outlets point the camera to capture ‘radical’ university students contributing to the ‘divide in America.’
However, the more I think about this debate between the old guard and progressive movements, the more I see the unification against contrary ideas as the real value of free speech. When students band together to refute a speaker’s message, they demonstrate to the speaker, the speaker’s supporters and society at large that future generations no longer tolerate this message.
When universities provide offensive speakers with a platform, they also provide students with a platform to project their disapproval. A shared adversary mobilizes students, creating a space for the support of those affected by harmful messages while drawing on the community to condemn its spread.
The reality is hateful speech will exist no matter what we do. To limit hate speech is to attempt to develop a shared definition of what is offensive and what is not. Personally, where the state of the world is right now, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
So, even though I don’t think the free speech argument is a very strong one, I also don’t think limiting it under the auspices of hate speech is a good idea either. I’d challenge fellow college students to reclaim the concept of hate speech not as an argument against the presentation of an idea but as a term condemning the offensive nature of a message.
We can and should label derogatory discourse targeted at the inherent characteristics of a group as hate speech, but this label does not change the fact that this discourse is protected and probably better off that way.
Whether we like it or not, the majority of speech is protected by the First Amendment. However, there is power in labeling offensive messages as hate speech, a power even the First Amendment cannot refute.
