Angelique Richardson explores how social media has fuelled its own Orwellian ‘two-minute hate’ and ways to combat the racial and social fragmentation it produces
In George Orwell’s 1984, Julia spends “an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week… It paid, she said, it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”
The Equality and Human Rights Commission notes the boundaries between freedom of expression, unlawful discrimination and harassment, and hate speech. It also points out that while the term “hate speech” is widely used, it “does not have any legal meaning”. Generally, the term describes forms of expression that incite violence, hatred or discrimination against other people and groups.
Whether hate speech is unlawful, and falls outside of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (which protects the fundamental human right to freedom of expression), depends on the context of what is said and when. There is no easy way through the rules around hate. But the big one is surely that we need to learn to hate less, and be vigilant in courage and compassion.
There is a desperate need to address violence, and incitement to violence, and no shortage of examples that make this a moral absolute. A proliferation of discourse draws our attention to hate, but does it succeed in taking our actions away from it? Prolonged, even exclusive, focus on microaggressions may not necessarily address macroaggressions. At this crucial time, the left risks becoming dangerously, lovelessly, moribund, many of its members’ energies turned in on themselves and each other in a vortex of intra-identity fragmentations underpinned by hyper-marketisation.
A centring on individual identity, rather than collective struggle against an oppressive social structure, risks reinforcing the norms it set out to challenge.
Material Realities
Almost half the world’s population lives in poverty, defined as having under $2.50 per day. This is overwhelmingly racialised, and the direct result of the operations of global capital, first as imperialism and now as financialisation. Britain has a claim to having led the world in the invention of the whole sorry fiction of race – the separating of human beings according to skin colour for the purposes of capital.
In 1907 the Tokyo newspaper Hochi Shimbun published a letter in Japanese from the British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy in a series entitled 「日本に対する世界 名士の感想」 [‘Opinions on Japan, from prominent figures of the world’] in which he wrote “I can only express a hope, which is that your nation may not become absorbed in material ambitions masked by threadbare conventions, like the European nations and America”.
If we move away from a focus on material conditions we cannot address the atrocities attendant on these ambitions, and do the practical work that decolonising entails if it is to be more than a discourse. And if we remain defined and circumscribed, and divided, by self-definitions, however valid they may be, as much as by definitions by others, we reduce the possibilities of greater solidarities, notwithstanding a rhetoric of care and allyship.
Debates are rarely generous places of dialogue. They can be more about winners and losers…
Political action doesn’t have to be about you. There is an argument to be made that it should be about people who aren’t you, providing it does not involve speaking for others without first listening to them. You may not need a food bank, or housing assistance, or subsidised childcare, or an education, or a secure job. Political action is surely at least in part about how to help people who do. But this requires an imaginative suspension of the tyranny of the self, a thinking and feeling into someone else’s situation, and an attempt to do something useful about ameliorating it.
A materialist understanding of the world, which apprehends the economic basis of racial, no less than social, oppression, does not preclude ways of addressing its problems by drawing on a shared humanity, with shared and unshared histories. Indeed that is one way out from the inequalities that underpin social and racial injustice. This requires active resistance to the cynicism that hyper-capitalism both engenders and is predicated on.
Freeing Speech
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published half a century ago, and bearing the imprint of Fanon and Marx, the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire called us to the mutuality of human relations, to the dialogue that moves us to responsibility, humility and respect. We need to remember that we are not the first, or only, speaker, whether in the classroom, the pub or in politics, and must find expression that is not only free, but freeing.
In dialogue, we speak with others, to be heard and, in turn, to listen. If everyone is actively present, a radical sense of the future, and of hope is possible. Maintaining hope is imperative, even when, as the Black feminist philosopher and educator bell hooks writes “the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite”.
But dialogue cannot exist in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people: “love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue,” cautions Freire.
The dialogue Freire urges is one of hope, a search for the humanity denied by injustice, away from the stark polarities of oppressed or oppressor. It is a dialogue that discerns “an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people”, perceiving reality “as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity”, and “does not separate itself from action”.