speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Addressing the Harms of Speech
a century later in Los Angeles and Berlin. 88 Blacks, especially
women, were insulted when white fraternity members put on blackface,
fright wigs, and padded breasts and buttocks for a skit in the
George Mason University student refectory. Did women feel equally
insulted when gay men calling themselves the West Hollywood
Cheerleaders marched in the eighth annual AIDS Walk Los Angeles
wearing mini-skirts, padded tops, and oversized wigs? 89
3. Target. Abstract assaults on collectivities affect larger numbers,
while concrete insults to individuals inflict more intense harm.
Compare pornography with sexual harassment, blasphemy with
desecration of religious sites or disruption of rites, mass media
stereotyping with face-to-face taunts. The higher the target's status,
the less likely it is to be impaired. If unredressed, the harms of speech
cumulate, transforming tendentious allegation into unquestioned
stereotype, alerting speaker and audience to the victim's vulnerability.
Characteristics deemed volitional are more likely to seem fair
game: sexual orientation rather than gender, religion rather than
race.
4. Relationship between Speaker and Target. Group members
can use language that would be intolerable from outsiders. An image
that is erotic if created by and for lesbians becomes pornographic if
produced by or for men. Blacks distinguished sharply between Paul
Robeson's portrayal of Othello and Laurence Olivier's. Consider the
decision to cast Denzel Washington as Steve Biko and add Whoopi
Goldberg to the film version of "Serafina." Lenny Bruce made a
career out of telling anti-Semitic jokes to mostly Jewish audiences.
Eddie Murphy satirised Jesse Jackson on "Saturday Night Live."
Hanif Kureishi can make films about Pakistani immigrants and Spike
Lee about African Americans, Maxine Hong Kingston can write
about Chinese Americans and James Welsh about American Indians
in ways that outsiders cannot. 90 Subordinated groups neutralise the
sting of epithets by domesticating them: one woman calling another
a "bitch," a black describing another as a "bad nigger," Larry
Kramer titling a play "Faggots." A publisher explained why he had
named his magazine NYQ: "The word queer started up as a way to
say it's not derogatory to be a homosexual. It is also a way of defining
yourself as a political person." 91 Yet community membership can
intensify the sense betrayal when insiders address the outside world,
as shown by the response of Muslims to Salman Rushdie, Jews to
Philip Roth, and African American men to Alice Walker. The impact
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