Memes

Slurs transcend capitalism. Racism persists in socialism, and it fades alongside slur use. Slurs should be opposed, rejecting them doesn't affirm them. Explain how this is idealism, dialectical materialism acknowledges language, art, culture, laws, and other social constructions. Classes are also social constructions, that doesn't make them super-natural, but rather are affirmed by how we interact, produce, distribute, and live. Where are you getting the idea that this is idealist from?

Secondly, alluding to me being racist because I oppose people using slurs is deeply unserious.

Slurs are socially constructed; opposing its use affirms its existence.

It exists whether you affirm it or not.

I’m saying there’s no point in opposing it because that’s not how you get actual social change!

Wikipedia: Paradox_of_tolerance

Dissent: A Struggle, Not a Debate | Liberal appeals to truth will not stop fascists.

At the base of that anti-fascist reasoning is a well-founded objection to the idea that white supremacist speech, which is white supremacist organizing, is best felled with more speech rather than disruption. It requires an extraordinary ignorance of history to presume that, in defending the unbounded protections and privileges of white supremacists, we also somehow ensure the fair treatment of people historically marginalized by the media and oppressed by the state. Shutting down white supremacist and other oppressive speech reflects a robust understanding of how speech functions in the world.

Speech is used to do far more than express opinions and ideas about the state of perceived reality. We do all kinds of things with words. In 1962 the philosopher J.L. Austin introduced the notion of speech acts. All speech is enacted through speech acts, Austin argued; the act is the thing done or achieved with our utterances. Some speech acts assert opinions, some describe states of affairs, but many utterances also complete or attempt certain actions: demanding, promising, ordering, threatening, persuading, and so on. Whether their propositional content is true or false is less relevant than whether, for various contextual reasons, they succeed in performing their intended acts. (A judge, for example, has the authority to perform the speech act of sentencing someone to prison, while I do not.)

When we limit our concerns to questions of which ideas and opinions we should permit in various publics, we miss the entire terrain of how speech works. Contemporary debate consistently, and incorrectly, treats speech simply as a tool for sharing opinions and holding up various representations of the world. This view found its ultimate expression in the notorious July 2020 Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which advised that “the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.” It was a given for the signatories that what was at stake was no more than the circulation of “ideas,” some of which, they admitted, are bad.

But when political figures and groups gather and speak in the public sphere, they’re not only positing beliefs about the world, offering their thoughts up to the so-called marketplace of ideas. Such speech is not so much organized around expressing the interiority of the speaker, or describing something, as much as it is organized around the listener. When, for example, Tucker Carlson speaks in horror about “The Great Replacement” of white people and their privileged standing, he indeed offers a false description of the world, the falseness of which has, time and again, been pointed out. But the utterance doesn’t primarily function as a description to be tested for truth or falsity; the listener, if white, is being told to feel threatened or, if non-white, is being imperiled by being named as a threat.

Counter-speech, insisting on the anti-racist truth, might challenge the constative elements of the racist utterance. But pointing out the truth often does little to disrupt the performative force of white supremacist speech acts. My argument is not that racist, fascistic speech should not be tolerated only insofar as it is understood as an action, rather than some sort of mythic “pure” speech. That sort of reasoning—attempting to define the line between speech and action—has bogged down all too much First Amendment scholarship. I merely submit that liberal appeals to truth will not stop fascists.

There’s something peculiar about “free speech” discourse: it has all too many people sounding like the state, insistent on establishing immutable rules and laws, under the pretense of a universalist approach unbesmirched by histories of oppression and power. But it is both offensive and fanciful to pretend that we’re in some sort of Habermasian ideal speech situation, which the woke left is now undermining with a tirade of cancellations. This is the “white ignorance” that philosopher Charles Mills argues can reconcile “liberal egalitarianism and racial hierarchy.” As long as we live under racial capitalism, some people’s speech will always be freer than others. Limiting the excesses of white supremacist and transphobic speech acts in our midst is the least we can do.