Racism & Free Speech

I would have no problem in principle with hate speech laws and banning racist speech even over free speech arguments; after all, my primary argument for free speech is the Millian one that it allows us the chance to improve and progress/make progress.  

Thus, speech that only serves to advocate for/support policies/practices that are racist in their abridgment of individual rights and equality before the law can be banned without cost; we are not going to and shouldn’t make such change regardless.

(Of course, it could be objected that I am contravening Mill’s argument by saying that it’s settled at the outset that such change ought not be made, and that Mill’s argument that free speech promotes/enables progress is based on the idea of human fallibility.  This may be so/this is true, but I believe we can admit this as the only (or one of the few) exceptions to the Millian logic for a few reasons.  

The logical reason is that a sound deductive argument/proof cannot be refuted with more information and dialogue, so keeping questions open that have already been supplied with an argument of this standard for the sake of correction in case of error is pointless.

The constitutional reason is that these questions on equality are already settled at a constitutional level so deciding banning such speech to be permissible at the same constitutional level is not an issue; in order for the Millian argument to imply that racist speech should be constitutionally protected, it would have to be the case that the policy/practical changes such speech would enable would be constitutional possibilities, but they’re not.)

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So, no, I do not oppose criminalizing hate speech or racist speech for such high intellectual considerations on justice.  

I do oppose it for much more mundane reasons: that I don’t believe we can draw the lines delineating prohibited racist speech clearly and specifically enough, and fear that they would move and encroach more and more on speech I think ought to be legal.

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There is also the not negligible consideration that campus speech codes have punished more black people than white people and there is no reason to think that civil/criminal law would be any different—Henry Louis Gates Jr. found this in his analysis of speech codes on campus.

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I could definitely support regulating speech for hate speech and or racism is the letter of the law spelled it out specifically not categorically, such that there is no matter of interpretation and uncertainty of permissibility (which is a problem of course because it can be/lead to/become retroactive legislation, or at least is wrong/bad for the same reasons as retroactive legislation).