Ah, hate speech. The perfect way to find out if someone knows what the First Amendment actually says. I can tell you one thing, author Samantha Barbas certainly understands it, and the proof is her wonderful Hate Speech. (Please note, Hate Speech is the title, and I am not saying that her “hate speech” is wonderful. She doesn’t do any hate speech!)
Now I am going to say a term that is often the death of many books. I would characterize Barbas’s book as scholarly. Don’t run away! Wait! In this case, I mean that Barbas is writing with the intent of being factual with the aim of illuminating the way America has tried to deal with hate speech since 1900. Turns out, we tried to limit speech a lot more than I thought we did.
Barbas makes an excellent decision to use very recognizable events to tell her story. For instance, the first chapter is all about the backlash to the (rightly) reviled The Birth of a Nation in the early 1900s. The eternal questions are asked and still unanswered. Should we ever limit speech which doesn’t directly lead to violence? And even if we do, will it work? Barbas wrestles with these ideas through every chapter.
Ultimately, this is a very good book which I found very educational although 100 years of free speech debates can feel a bit slow and repetitive at times. For example, each chapter changes the driver of the free speech argument. One chapter might go from the NAACP, but the next would be the ACLU. Barbas has to reset the players, but the discussions often sound the same even if the results differ. This is a minor complaint and not one I think Barbas could have solved. This subject, handled appropriately, will ultimately repeat a bit. It shouldn’t make anyone shy away from picking this one up.
(This book was provided as a review copy by University of California Press.)
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