Speaking Out Against Hate Speech (or Not)

The dinner-table conversation touched for a few moments on Usain Bolt, earth’s fastest biped, who’s in Scotland to ensure a win for Jamaica in the men’s sprint relay at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow (mission accomplished!). Apropos of nothing more than this brief mention, a 70-year-old guest at my table suddenly remarked with a scowl: “I don’t like Jamaicans.”

The conversation froze. Was this hate speech? The woman seemed serious: Somehow an entire nation of about 2.9 million people, plus its large diaspora outside the country, had incurred her generalized dislike. Yet she hadn’t actually made a defamatory generic claim about Jamaicans: It wasn’t quite like someone saying “That’s typical of the Jews,” or “Germans are such pigs.” Nonetheless, it seemed an extraordinarily prejudiced thing to say. An awkard lull descended on the table. My mind raced as the silent seconds ticked away.

The first Jamaican I really got to know was someone I met when I was 20. I married her. For many years I had a Jamaican mother-in-law and brother-in-law, and three Jamaican sisters-in-law who were raising my two lovely nieces and handsome nephew. My wife and I had Jamaican neighbours and Jamaican friends. We raised a son in North London’s racially diverse community.

Some of my Jamaican relatives by marriage were rich and successful, like Uncle Donald, an ambassador. Others were dirt poor, like the people who welcomed me warmly when we made a surprise visit to the settlement in the hills above Kingston where my wife had lived in idyllic rural poverty as a little girl (and where I was able to practice a little of my Jamaican Creole, a language that Jamaicans won’t usually speak with outsiders).

Further back than that was my time as a rock musician. My school friend Pete Gage and I formed a band fronting Jamaican blues singer Errol Dixon. Later we formed the Ram Jam Band, and often played clubs like the Flamingo in London and the Ram Jam Club in Brixton (named after our band) where the audiences were replete with Jamaicans.

Later at the University of York, where I began studying language, I met other Jamaicans, like the sociolinguist Pauline Christie. In all I’ve known hundreds of Jamaicans. And, it occurs to me (not that any general conclusion follows from it), I cannot remember one that I disliked.

Embarrassingly, the daughter of the septuagenarian bigot was present at my table. But in the event, she was the one who broke the icy silence. She asked her mother, “How many do you know?”

“Two,” said the woman. “Both in prison, actually.” (She had done some part-time teaching in a prison decades earlier, and must have encountered them there.)

My mind roiled with things to say, like: “Really! So you’ve met nearly a millionth of the population!”

But perhaps, I thought, it would be better just to explain that for many years I was a member by marriage in a Jamaican family (she didn’t know that).

Or maybe I should be more forthright: Throw the prejudiced old biddy out into the street and tell her never to sully my doorstep again.

Ultimately, with some exercise of willpower (or was it merely cowardly inaction?) I chose to simply remain silent.

It’s not my job, I told myself, to humiliate or berate or educate every prejudiced person I meet. I hadn’t been able to persuade my own mother to eschew racism (in her late 40s she had spurned my Jamaican wife sight unseen, on grounds of race alone). How successful was I likely to be with someone else’s mother, 20 years older?

Embarking on either a quarrel or a sermon would have embarrassed the daughter (a friend, who did know about the ethnicity of my first wife), and left the old woman sullen and angry. Probably baffled, too: Wasn’t she entitled to dislike Jamaicans, simply as a matter of personal taste?

In a way I feel that I failed a test: I had an opportunity to speak out in a social context against to a highly prejudiced remark, and I ducked it.

Yet in another way I’m proud I kept my temper and avoided a scene: The world doesn’t revolve around me, and I don’t need to seize every opportunity to demonstrate my ethnic broad-mindedness. Being morally in the right doesn’t guarantee being in a situation that is a suitable one for a public evincing of moral righteousness.

I still don’t really know whether to feel proud of my self-control and politeness or ashamed of my passivity and indecisiveness. Judge me as you think fit. But first think about whether you have ever been in an analogous situation, and about what you yourself would actually have said or done. Because when we legislate against hate speech on campus, we put in place moral quandaries of similar sorts that our students may sometimes have to face.