Weaponising Freedom of Speech
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Weaponising Freedom of Speech Gavan Titley: Is Free Speech Racist? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020, 155 pp Bob Brecher1 Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Speaking under threat of erasure is the grammar of nationalist resentment; the authenticity and truth of what is said are an effect of who is attempting to silence it. (p. 112) In this admirably short, tightly argued and easily accessible book Gavan Titley argues that racism has come to be furthered by denials of its existence and that, furthermore, the domination in which it consists is furthered by invocations of freedom of speech that insist on giving it a platform. In today’s anglophone political and social conjuncture, racism and freedom of speech are inextricably intertwined. For this to be brought about, furthermore, racism has to be deliberately mis-presented as a theoretical intellectual position rather than being understood as and for what it is, a real, material, state of affairs; and freedom of speech has to be (mis)understood as an ideal, a-political academic discourse rather than being recognized as a political activity. In short, ‘[I]n the public imagination, free speech is celebrated as a fundamental freedom … [but] has also become fundamental to an insistent, manystranded politics that is reshaping how racism is expressed and legitimized in public culture’ (p. 2). But ‘[W]hat kind of pluralism demands, as a common contemporary anti-racist slogan puts it, “that I debate my humanity”?’ (p. 8; see also p. 55 ff). The point is that it is never those who suffer racism who get to determine what it is; that anti-racists are seen as restricting ‘public discussion because they refuse closure on what racism really means’ (p. 38, original italics); and that that is why the widely touted ‘right to offend’ is not one that is justly distributed (p. 84 ff.). Through a focus on the media, Titley explains how and why this state of affairs has come about; how it is that ‘[F]reedom 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’ (p. 3). By the end of the book’s four short chapters no reader can plausibly deny that racists, from racism’s liberal to its far-right expression, are using the slogan of freedom of speech as a weapon with which to contest what is in fact a * Bob Brecher [email protected] 1
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
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given—she is a person; slavery is unconscionable; racism is intolerable. Such facts are no more debatable than the shape of the earth. So in brief, what is in fact going on in today’s so-called culture wars is this: racism, something that is no sort of theory, is nevertheless represented as such in order that its expression may be made into a ‘freedom of speech’ issue; and at the same time freedom of speech is treated as an end in itself that tru
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