Is Free Speech Racist? by Gavan Titley (review)

In recent years, free speech and the debates surrounding it have been figured by a variety of commentators as marking a civilizational crisis with the fate and state of liberal democratic societies hanging in the balance. The intensity and fecundity of the free speech debate beg the question of whether it is something more than free expression that is at stake. In Is Free Speech Racist? Gavan Titley wades into this crowded field, exploring not speech in the abstract but its imbrication in dynamics of power, race, and social justice. Against accounts that frame freedom of speech in terms of idealized speech acts that serve both moral and utilitarian ends in avowedly enlightened, postracial liberal democracies, Titley asks critical questions about how invocations of free speech are being put to work, in service of whose interests, and to what ends. This framing pushes us past endless, circular debates about free speech as an abstract, idealized liberal democratic good and instead brings prevailing relations of oppression and exploitation sharply into focus. As Titley explains, "In contexts where there is intense political contestation and public confusion as to what constitutes racism, and who gets to define it, free speech has been adopted as a primary mechanism for validating, amplifying and reanimating racist ideas and racializing claims" (11–12).

Titley excavates this complex, power-laden terrain by attending to what he frames as three key dimensions of the furor over free speech: closure, culture, and capture. Closure considers the way invocations of "free speech" have been used to publicly adjudicate what constitutes racism, to freeze it as a set of ideas belonging to the past, and to affirm that contemporary power dynamics and widespread social phenomena are decidedly "not-racist." He sets this in context of a social media ecology characterized by "abundant, endless communication" that generates "'debate' as a structural driver of content dissemination and attention capture" (50). In such a context, anti-racism is figured as censorship and "viewpoint diversity" becomes the alibi for circulating racist discourse and reworking racism and racializing logics in practice.

In his chapter on culture, Titley turns to "the racializing work performed by freedom of speech when it is designated as an essential property or exclusive achievement of culture" and, specifically, its function as a key marker of integratability for nonwhite populations (23). Titley considers the rabid response of free speech warriors particularly to anti-racist perspectives and racialized subjects who have dared to challenge free speech absolutism. Core to this is the work free speech does as a "pedagogy of offence," an alibi for forms of expression that mock, degrade, and ridicule marginalized and oppressed people's lifeways and forms of belief, ostensibly as a route to cultural uplift and enlightenment delivered gratuitously by one's civilizational betters and graciously received by those degraded masses (93). Titley reads this against the conspicuous absence of concern expressed by those same free speech crusaders about massively expanded state and corporate surveillance and the direct, demonstrable erosion of political freedom and escalation of political violence it had contributed to.

In his final section on capture, Titley considers the deployment of free speech by the far right as a tool for "recuperating and amplifying racist discourse" (23–24). Titley demands that we look at freedom of speech not simply as an abstract liberal democratic entitlement operating in some idealized, friction-free space but as a social act set in sociohistorical context and worked over by prevailing power relations. He looks at the long history of fascist appropriation of free speech and draws important connections to prominent invocations of free speech today. Titley draws our attention to free speech events not merely as deliberative, rational encounters as they are framed in the liberal tradition but as public rituals for which the purpose is to circulate racializing discourse and reinscribe prevailing power relations under the sign of civil debate. As he shrewdly observes, in a media ecology characterized by proliferating speech and unending debate driven by...