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‘Hate’ Isn’t an Element in H2O
Hate isn’t part of the water. We can see it.
Santiago Villa wrote an interesting column about cancel culture in El Espectador (Bogotá, “En defensa de la ‘cancelación’”, 10 Nov 2022). It drove off of the following event.
Editorial Almadía, a private company in México, paid for the rights to two of Colombian writer Carolina Sanín’s books and then decided not to publish them. Why? Because Sanín repeatedly made anti-transgender tweets with an attitude simultaneously defiant and feigning innocence (“a veces pareciendo que no entiende que son discriminatorios, y a veces siendo desafiante con lo ofensivas que son sus posiciones”, as Villa put it).
Well then, Villa says, it’s the publisher’s prerogative to decide what it will do. Publishing isn’t just printing, it’s marketing, so a publisher always needs a working relationship with its authors. “Eso además no es nuevo,” he says; “that’s not new either.”
The only thing controversial here, he suggests, is that “discrimination against trans people is so normalized that we don’t see it when it’s in front of our faces” (“está tan normalizada la discriminación contra las personas trans que cuando la tenemos ante nuestros ojos no la vemos”). I think that’s a good observation. When certain people receive pushback on their anti-transgender comments, a large portion of society reacts in their defense as though they’d said nothing objectionable whatsoever. It’s as though the anti-transgender remarks are just part of the air and water.
Some Philosophical Underpinnings
In Colombia, freedom of expression covers a lot. You might find you can’t get away with expressing racism against the vice president, especially since it’s illegal to incite violence, but otherwise, Villa points out, saying something racist might not be considered as breaking any laws.
A related current debate is how to distinguish hate speech from discrimination. The distinction might determine whether a statement is legal, but Villa doesn’t see a clear marker. Construed as freedom of expression, hate speech is legal; construed as discrimination, it shouldn’t be legal.
“No hay definiciones únicas y universales de ‘discurso de odio’, ‘censura’…
