Teaching hate speech: what is hate?
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"Hate speech" isn't quite the same as "hate." Considering that "hate speech" is often abused by people without any legal knowledge, who tend conflate the term with "hate," the other day I preluded my lecture on hate speech with a short examination of "hate." I discussed a poem by William Blake, titled "The Poison Tree," which I emailed the students before our meeting. When people confront their hate and find outlets, the emotion is relieved. When people buries the hate, it does not disappear: it continues to grow. The person harboring the hate may even enjoy cultivating the feeling. The poison tree serves as a symbol of cultivated hate that would lead to disasters than if the hate had been confronted and relieved/released at an early stage.
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Hate as a human emotion is natural and moral. To get rid of hate is to deprive humans of an emotion that makes them human.
Hate towards people who put us down motivate us to work hard and excel. Have you ever been put down by your peers, some of whom might be even vastly inferior to you in terms of talent and ability and who were not even qualified to pass such judgments on you? There was this girl called M, who indicated in a highly sarcastic way that I would never get into Cambridge. She said I should apply for its summer school instead, so that I can at least let others know that I went to "Cambridge-SUMMER-school." A year later, I received an offer from this university. While I was angered by her remark, and allow myself to hate her for saying it, I did not dwell on my hate or let it consumer me: I used my hatred to motivate myself to work hard and succeed. Yes, I enjoyed many summers there and have gone back for visits as much as I can.
As a human emotion, hate has inspired countless pieces of great literature. Great literature derives its inspiration from life and holds a mirror to reality, of which hate is an important part. Shakespeare's Othello, a great tragedy, is about envy and hate, and even a comedy like The Merchant of Venice contains elements of hate along with other emotions. Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush delivered this famous line in his portrayal of the infamous French writer Sade in the movie, Quills: "We eat, we fuck, we shit, we kill, and we die." There was a teacher at my high school who told us to read good literature, which, according to her, was literature that leads people to see the positive aspects of life. Then a teenager, I was laughing inside: if you would stop insulting your students, they surely would feel hopeful again! Writers who only know love or dwell on love cannot write great works; they should not be writers. In fact, they do not even qualify to work for the church or any religious institute: it would be an insult to the priests, for instance, to say these naive people should dedicate their lives to preaching instead of writing.
To hate objectively bad things, in other words evils, is arguably even a moral obligation and leads to real social progress. There are countless examples. This blog post aims to be as current as possible. It is moral obligatory for Israel to hate Hamas and to try to eliminate it. Isn't it also moral obligatory for Palestinians to hate the leaders of Hamas who used civilians in Palestine as human shields and who live in luxuries elsewhere? Isn't it also moral obligatory for Palestine supporters to hate Hamas and condemn it and not justify their genocide as an act of "decolonization"? I dare say "yes."
Beware of people who tell others that it is wrong to hate and who try to suppress this emotion in others.
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Hating a person due to their conduct, a morally justifiable feeling, is not the same as hating a whole group of people. Even secretly hating a whole group does not equate to expressing hatred, let alone inciting hatred or violence, towards the group. Hated individuals who get defensive tend to pull the race/ethnicity/gender card and accuse people of targeting them due to their memberships in certain groups and of committing hate speech. If they are willing to introspect, they would find out that it is often their conduct that made them hated in the first place.
If Claudine Gay, the current president of Harvard University, is hated by students, it is not likely due to her race. It is much more likely due to her unwillingness to condemn antisemitism on Harvard's campus and her very lack of accomplishments as a president, or even as a senior scholar (few publications and no scholarly book with a prestigious publisher). Let's talk about body size. If I detest the overweight woman colleague whom I encountered some years ago at a CA law firm, it was due to her lack of self-awareness and her hypocrisy (e.g. lecturing me on good health, claiming to be considerate by moving behind me to smoke and blowing smoke to my back), not her body size. She could not have pulled her body size card, whatever it may be called, and complain of discrimination.
Some activists and politicians like to shout "no place for hate," as if there is anything wrong or immoral with this human emotion. I hope that they refer to hate speech, not hate. Otherwise, their advocacies are anti-humanistic and downright authoritarian as they seek to control how other people think and feel and suppress their natural and morally justifiable feelings. However, many of these people tend to be ideologically-possessed, to see the world through a simplistic, black-and-white lens, and to condemn "hate" as a negative emotion. Thus, I am not too optimistic.
(This new essay is a follow-up to a different essay on Heterodox Academy's blog some weeks ago, based on my challenging experiences in teaching hate speech in a multicultural classroom.)
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