This essay from the Duke Chronicle is a real howler.

Free speech, Black lives and white fragility

As I write my first column, I am thinking a lot about speech. I am thinking about how an urgent and overdue conversation about racism—on our campus and across our country—has been derailed by a diversionary and duplicitous obsession with the First Amendment. I am thinking about how quickly the conversation has shifted from white supremacy to white fragility—and how this shift is itself an expression of white supremacy.

White fragility refers to a range of defensive behaviors through which white people (or more accurately, people who believe they are white) deflect conversations about race and racism in order to protect themselves from race-based stress. Because white people tend to live in environments where whiteness is both dominant and invisible, they grow accustomed to racial comfort, as a result of which even a small amount of racial stress becomes intolerable…

It has become almost a truism that there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Historically speaking, this is inaccurate. As M. Alison Kibler details in her “Censoring Racial Ridicule,” the U.S. has a long history of regulating forms of speech that expose racialized groups to “contempt, derision or obloquy.” Indeed, as recently as 1952, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law applying the standards of libel (another free-speech exception) to hate speech. It is only in recent years that the courts have, as the National Center for Human Rights Education puts it, “privileged white racists to express themselves at the expense of the safety of African-Americans and other people of color.”

Key to this new interpretation is a firm separation between speech and action, a legal variant on the old childhood adage: “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” The problem—as anyone who has been the victim of hate speech can tell you—is that this simply isn’t true. Words hurt as much as actions; indeed, words are actions. Within the context of white supremacy, any distinction between a defaced poster, a racist pamphlet and legal or extralegal murder can be only of degree.