Dear Reader,

Hate speech is not a passive form of public speech. One of the signs of an intolerant society is its hate speech, whether used jokingly or intentionally, aimed at specific groups of people. When this form of verbal abuse becomes part and parcel of the everyday parlance between people, we have created a society characterized by its zero-tolerance of inclusion and diversity, where name-calling becomes an accepted norm.

This political era has brought forward an unabashed, no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to invectives hurled at minority groups- LGBTQ+, Jews, Muslims, and African Americans, to name a few.

Let us not forget that the word and image of the f-word derive from a bundle of sticks for burning and that LGBTQ+ people were supposedly righteously burned at the stake in medieval England. And let us not forget Matthew Shepard, the  Wyoming student who, in 1998, was bludgeoned and left to die in near-freezing temperatures while tethered to a rough-hewn wooden fence because he was gay.

Racial epithets, like the n-word, are such a mainstay in the American lexicon that their broad-based appeal to both blacks, as well as whites, have anesthetized us not only to the damaging and destructive use of epithets but also to our ignorance of their historical origins.

Animus toward Jews is not new. It dates back as early as the Jewish Diaspora between the 8th to the 6th centuries BCE and as late as Hitler's attempted genocide of European Jewry. This year, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I watched the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz Liberation. One of the speakers quoted Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel about hate. "The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference."

We cannot be indifferent about hate speech. Language is a representation of culture, and it perpetuates ideas and assumptions about race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation that we consciously, and unconsciously, articulate in our everyday conversations about ourselves and the rest of the world—and, consequently, transmit generationally.

The liberation of a people is also rooted in the liberation from abusive language, which is essentially hate speech hurled at them. Using epithets, especially jokingly, does not eradicate its historical baggage or the existing social relations among us. Instead, dislodging these epithets from their historical context makes us insensitive and arrogant to the historical injustices done and continually to specific groups of Americans.

It allows all Americans to become numb to the use and abuse of the power of hate speech because of the currency these epithets still have. Any hate speech, sugarcoated with humor or irony or not, thwarts the daily struggle in which many of us engage in trying to ameliorate human relations.

~ Rev. Irene Monroe