[Music] [Applause] i am the product of a strong black and creole family i am a wife a mother a daughter a sister a friend i am also the victim of hate speech my family has been victimized by hate speech my community has been victimized by hate speech and yes while i use this term victimized purposely i'm going to add another term and that is empowerment myself my family my community have been empowered by hate speech because we have our eyes wide open we know what we face we know that we are once again witnessing the
rise of hateful ideology in our society and the fact that white supremacy things like white supremacy are once again given a platform of legitimacy in our society and we know we must come together collectively and creatively to fight against this social injustice my consciousness about hate speech actually begins with my late father alfred charles stansberry he was the first black architect in a small town in louisiana baton rouge louisiana the local clan did not appreciate having such a brilliant and successful black man represented in our town and so they took to terrorizing my father and
my family but my father didn't back down my mother liz stansberry didn't back down oh my mother oh my goodness my black creole bodacious beautiful mother did not back down mother yes the community did not back down as a matter of fact black men in the community took to walking my father to and from work to and from his car to make sure that he was protected and they walked with my family i'm sorry they actually watched over my family's home to make sure that we were protected this is an example of empowerment this is
an example of a community coming together and saying no we will not stand for this and by the way and by the way i mentioned my father and my mother by name because it's important for me to recognize that they gave me the backbone to deal with what i have to deal with on a daily basis sometimes in our society they empowered me and so i want to honor them and that's why i purposely mention their names so what i want to cover today with you is to talk about one of the traditional justifications of
freedom of speech the most well-known one and the rationale behind why we protect hate speech so when we think about it one of the most traditional justifications of freedom of speech is called the marketplace of ideas theory this is a theory that was talked about by mill and holmes and others in this theory it holds that society all of us act as an open market where a free exchange of ideas leads us to agreed upon truths this idea actually dates back to the sophists of ancient greek culture the sophists were early teachers of rhetoric they
knew that they needed to teach persuasion and argument in order to help the democracy function and one of the things that they said is that the truth comes through the clash of arguments think about that the truth comes through the clash of arguments that is really important it does not come through the clash of ill-informed opinions now when it comes to hate speech hate speech is defined as any speech that is directed to a historically marginalized group it is a speech that communicates inferiority it is a sp its speech that degrades and dehumanizes that is
hate speech our understanding of hate speech and our approach to hate speech in society has been heavily informed by a landmark case called brandenburg versus ohio in 1969. in this case a ku klux klan member was charged with inciting a riot through his racist speech he later won his case on the grounds of the first amendment and what this did this case established what we call the new incitement standard what this means is that in order to be criminalized for your public speech you have to prove that your speech causes immediate harm and violence and
really that is difficult to prove that is where we start to see blanket protections of hate speech in our society now please don't get me wrong i am not advocating for censorship i am saying that all of us have a responsibility to understand the first amendment to understand our responsibilities and the consequences of the first amendment hate speech has real material harm in our society it harms individuals it harms families it harms community it harms our democracy so we really need to think about ways to mitigate that harm and we need to be responsible of
that we experience hate speech in the college environment we experience it out in public we experience it coming from our leaders and our media personalities we experience it everywhere freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences nor does it mean freedom from responsibility and i think and i think that is what we are missing oftentimes when we talk about the first amendment or teach about the first amendment we teach that all ideas are created equal and all ideas are equally valid and true but if those ideas are not informed by solid logical argument those
ideas aren't worth anything and i'm sorry to say that but they're not if they're not informed they're not really worth being in the marketplace and being in the clash of arguments that the sophists talked about so that is important also we need to understand that the marketplace is an ideal it's not truly open and free power dictates the market power often dictates and influences whose voices are heard and prioritized oftentimes the most ill-informed anti-democratic racist sexist homophobic speech becomes normalized in our society we get to a point where politicians and media personalities can vilify an
entire group of people by calling them animals rapists invaders with little to no consequence and then we as a society as a culture we accept this and we say hey it's just their valid opinion and valid political ideology this is a problem this is a problem so what do we do about it let's be clear just because someone does not actively engage in hateful rhetoric it does not mean they are not complicit in it they are complicit through their silence and they are complicit through their excuses so we must hold them accountable and how do
we do that we hold them accountable through our voices through our activism and through our vote it's also important to hold our family and friends accountable i don't know about you all but many of us have been taught that we should not talk about politics and religion at the dinner table or with family and friends and yeah have you been taught that yes okay i say that this has been a detriment to our intellectual and cultural growth the next time a family member or friend sits down next to you and starts spouting out messages of
hate racist sexist homophobic classist information challenge them on them but challenge them with civility and care be willing to really listen to them and try to come from a space of understanding that we are all doing the best that we can and we're all a product of our socialization that is important to think about another thing that we must think about is educating our children and talking to our children about these things oftentimes we think you know we want to protect our children we want to save them from the atrocities of what happens in society
but we really need to educate them because they're going to be out there in the world and not only going to be they're there now they're seeing this now they're watching media just like we're watching media and so it's important for us to teach media literacy to talk to them to think about it i have two beautiful and bold daughter sorry a daughter and a son and my husband and i um have really worked to talk to them about everything that's going on in society and i admire my husband brian because he has been instrumental
in talking to my son about what it means to be a black man in society uh being a role model for my daughter about who men should be we both talk to our children about all these things that are relevant in society and i encourage all of you to do the same if you don't have children children are around you talk to them they see what's going on and if we're not talking to them that's an issue so that's important also it's important to model civility so at the heart of civility is a concept known
as dialogic ethics and with dialogic ethics there are two pieces listening and learning so we must be willing to actively listen to one another and be willing to learn from one another like i said before understanding our socialization understanding our stories and not being afraid to share our reasoning and our rationale with others that is important to dialogic ethics one of the other things that people often say about civility is that anger has no place in civility what do you think i'm going to say about that it has a place it has a place we
should be angry that we are now again witnessing the rise of hate in our society we should be angry that our leaders and our politicians and our media personalities and our people are not doing enough to combat this hate we should be angry that too many of us are excusing it as valid opinion and valid political ideology we should be angry but we should not yes but we should not let our anger overtake us we should not let our anger be a detriment to our success and so what we need to do is challenge that
anger and like i said previously we challenge that anger through our votes and through our activism and our cultural activism and so i encourage us all to use that anger and challenge it into good so we are living in difficult times but you know what we've been through this before we've overcome this before and we will damn well overcome it again [Applause] [Music] you
