Is Free Speech Racist? by Gavan Titley

Author:Gavan Titley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Sociology, Social Science, Demography, General
ISBN: 9781509536160
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2020-07-08T23:00:00+00:00

The right to offend

The 2015 attacks in France, Abdellali Hajjat notes, saw the increased circulation of the neologism désolidarisation, a demand for Muslims in France to openly mark their non-solidarity with the stabbers, shooters and bombers. The demand for a collective response imputes collective implication or even guilt, but even more basically, it presumes a collective: ‘So-called Muslims constitute a diverse population in terms of social class, nationality and political and ideological leanings, all of which is erased entirely by the call for désolidarisation’ (Hajjat 2017: 81). In the more conspiratorial, identitarian articulation of this call, promoted by France’s considerable cast of radical right public intellectuals, anything less proves that Muslims are a ‘people within a people’, bent on the destruction of an integral way of life. In a putatively more progressive iteration, marking non-solidarity demonstrates fidelity with a political way of life now under attack, thus requiring, according to the former Prime Minister Alain Juppé, ‘that French Muslims clearly state that they have nothing to do with this fanaticism, this barbarism, that they fully subscribe to the values of the Republic’ (Guénolé 2015).

Juppé’s rhetoric may betray the emotional intensity of the moment, but his basic coordinates locate this demand in a wider politics of integration ascendant over the last fifteen to twenty years in western and northern Europe. Often superficially described as a form of ‘civic integrationism’, varying political projects in this period have pivoted on articulating the value, or at least reality, of lived diversity. This vision of the globalized, post-migration nation de-emphasizes the assumed cohesion of ethnic homogeneity in favour of cultivating a unifying liberal-democratic culture of shared values. This cultivation is not primarily focused on forming a pluralist public sphere where differences can be expressed; rather it is focused on governing public subjectivities and demanding evidence of the active acceptance of ‘liberal values’ as a condition of entry to and contingent membership of the ‘national community’. The intensity with which gender equality, sexual freedom and free expression have been mobilized as defining of ‘our’ way of life as against the unsettling alterity of Muslims is a source of potent political confusion: how can it be ‘racist’ to insist that they integrate, and not threaten democratic life and egalitarian norms?

This tension between progressive rhetoric and coercive practice is less confusing if it is approached, as Elizabeth Povenelli (2011) argues in her discussion of what she terms ‘late liberalism’, as a form of governmentality, or management of population. Late liberalism, in this argument, is shaped through the mid-to-late-twentieth-century ‘legitimacy crisis’ generated by anticolonial and new social movements’ challenge to inequality and ethnicized citizenship. One pronounced response to these challenges has been the reflexive creation of ‘spaces within liberalism’ for ‘the recognition of difference’, such as the plethora of initiatives and rhetorical visions often stuffed, inaccurately and exaggeratedly, into the capacious category of ‘multiculturalism’. While, even across significantly divergent iterations in Europe, multiculturalism has very rarely amounted to more than a patchwork of initiatives and semiotic investments, the widely

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