Thoughts:
If a society is racist, in general, then legislation against hate speech (or the regulation of speech in general) will be used precisely against those it is designed to protect (ie. justice isn't blind, it's offensive). So much for legal neutrality (books by S. Bright, b hooks and A. Dworkin have all been confiscated under Canadian anti-censorship laws, particularly ironic considering Dworkin's work which contributed to the formulation of Canada's obscenity laws!).
Speech is not pure. There is no such think as "fascistic racist speech" in a metaphysical sense. The absolutes "only words matter" (hate speech sui generis) and "words don't matter" (sticks and stones) is misguided.
Is something is banned from thought / spoken / written word - it becomes *impossible* to critique (legally anyway).
There is no resolution to this problem --> free speech vs. the regulation of hate speech. *Both* sides are symbiotic and antagonistic. The best we can do is to make sure that we can continue to talk about it - to sustain the discourse. Following Gates Jr., we need to make sure that the First Amend. is backed by the Fourteen Amend (speaking USese). Benhabib calls this communicative ethics, Habermas calls it deliberative democracy, Arendt refers to an "enlarged mentality" Kant speaks of "reflective judgement" Castoriadis gives it the name "the project of autonomy" Salecl might use the term "politics of impossibility" Gilroy the "politics of transfiguration" and Zizek "ethics of the real" - whatever you want to call it --> it's about sustaining dialogue, which includes incorporating all of the elements (political, economic and so on) that make dialogue sustainable. There are no set "grammatical rules" or "illocutionary performatives" that are *essentially* hateful. Ban one sentence and someone will just write another ad infini-nauseum. The point is to change the way we think about things, call it "returning the gaze" or the "preponderance of the object" or "traversing fantasy" - it amounts to something similar.
ken
"Nothing is more detestable to wisdom than too much subtlety." - E. A. Poe (falsely attributed to Seneca)
PS. apologies for the mis-subject heading on my last post - that's H. L. Gates, Jr. not H. G. Gates, Jr.