Recent work has focused on the ordinary concept of hate speech. Yet, there remains little consensus on how to define it. Given this lack of agreement in the literature, a seemingly reasonable strategy for understanding hate speech, particularly prevalent in the philosophy of language, is to analyze what is often taken as its paradigmatic case: slurs. However, this strategy might lead us to idealize the nature of hate speech by inheriting certain assumptions present in influential approaches to s…
Read moreRecent work has focused on the ordinary concept of hate speech. Yet, there remains little consensus on how to define it. Given this lack of agreement in the literature, a seemingly reasonable strategy for understanding hate speech, particularly prevalent in the philosophy of language, is to analyze what is often taken as its paradigmatic case: slurs. However, this strategy might lead us to idealize the nature of hate speech by inheriting certain assumptions present in influential approaches to slurs. Resisting such an idealization, we argue, is crucial not only for intervention, but also for revealing and identifying more subtle cases of hate speech. Thus, in the first part of this paper, we argue against what we call the idealized view of hate speech. In the second part, we explore the phenomenon of hate narratives, and present two cases. Hate narratives are often obscured by the idealized view, so we must resist it.
