The Comments Section, Part 3 (Hate Speech)

In response to a Facebook post about free speech, I left this comment:

I think freedom of speech is like when a kid calls another kid an ugly freak, and the other kid smacks him upside the head for calling him that. The kid has the right to say that, but he also has to deal with the consequences of his actions.

Another person then asked me what I thought hate speech was. This was my reply:

Words that repress or restrain people, reinforcing ideas of inferiority, despite being purely based on sociological bias without fact.

The equivalent of a kid throwing rocks at another kid because her skin color looks different from most of the other kids; turns out the kid's parents said things that put down people with dark skin, and so the kid thought it was okay to throw rocks at her.

Or maybe another kid publicly ridiculed a girl because she was trying to reprogram a video game, and that's a "boy" thing to do, and girls aren't good at that.

Hateful words spread to others and often cut more deeply than physical actions, affecting them for the rest of their lives. Consistent hateful words can systematically and subconsciously plant bias in people's heads that cause them to believe the hateful words as fact - even those being repressed.

Exposed to this hate speech over time, that black kid might eventually believe she is an inferior being, even though she is a human, just like everyone else. That could cause her to aim lower in life, and instead of getting a career in neuroscience, she may be stuck working retail at minimum wage, because she, and so many others, said she isn't capable of being a scientist.

That programmer girl might begin to believe she's bad at programming, even if she's brilliant at it. Instead of a high salary job working at Google, she may never go to college, because it's expected of her, as a girl, to stay at home and mother children. She has been told this so long that she, herself, now believes it.

Hate speech is what made you assume that the second girl in this story was white.

I believe that's what hate speech is, and that's what it creates. That is what it does to people. My view may be a bit too broad for realistic political application though.