Drag to reposition

While Spain was conquering new lands in the Americas, foreigners arrived into their own—the Gitanos. Spain imposed a double-standard whereby their crossing into new, occupied, territory was legitimate, but the entry of others into Spanish territory was not. I compare and contrast these historically parallel movements of people using Deleuze and Guattari’s taxonomy of movement. I conclude that the double-standard of movement was due to differences of power between these two groups, understood in terms of material conditions, a prototypical “racial contract,” and differences in the relationship to land and space. This history and analysis of colonial Spain is a critical start for Latin American postcolonial theory; it gives us a framework to study philosophies of migration and nomadism; and finally, it introduces the Gitanos as an important population to complicate critical race theory or theories of ethnicity.

I claim that hate speech is actually antithetical to free speech. Nevertheless, this claim invokes the misconception that one would be jeopardizing free speech due to a phenomenon known as "false polarization" – a “tendency for disputants to overestimate the extent to which they disagree about whatever contested question is at hand.” The real polarity does not lie between hate speech (as protected free speech) vs. censorship. Rather, hate speech is censorship. It is the censorship of entire sectors of the population, a violation of their right to be heard, and at worse, an incitement to their extinction. The liberal attempt to try to fit the metaphorical round peg of hate speech into the square hole of free speech is impossible without revealing one’s reluctance to endow people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, and other socially oppressed groups as equal and deserving of full human dignity. I start by providing a clear definition of "hate speech", then I remind the reader of the original/historical political intent of the freedom of expression, and finally I illuminate the very real physical, psychological and social consequences of hate speech.