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| Kenny Brechner | |
Last Friday, in his weekly PW column, Kenny Brechner, owner of DDG Booksellers, Farmington, Maine, argued that applying the UN definition of hate speech to works of literature is a "fallacy" because the UN intended the definition to apply to "direct interpersonal communication, not literature."
The UN's definition of hate speech is "any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor."
Both the American Booksellers Association and the Independent Book Publishers Association have come to rely on that definition of hate speech to decide, in the ABA's case, which books don't deserve its free speech support.
Brechner, who resigned from the ABA board last November after it decided to limit its support of free speech, quoted at length from the UN's introduction to the hate speech definition, which states, in part, that addressing hate speech "does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech. It means keeping hate speech from escalating into something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law."
In addition, the introduction says that the "strategy and its implementation [is] to be in line with the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The UN supports more speech, not less, as the key means to address hate speech."
Brechner called this similar to the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from "abridging the freedom of speech" except speech that "would directly incite violence or provoke a violent act from a reasonable person."
He also described the UN hate speech definition as "anything but" an objective standard, writing, "Who can say to what extent a character is speaking with an author's voice? The narrator of Notes from the Underground is in constant violation of the UN definition for example. Almost any book could be found to contain hate speech."