Huff Post opinion piece: Hate Speech Is Not Something That 'We Can Agree To Disagree' About [View all]

[gollygee]

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-miller-schlossberg-harassment_us_5b018833e4b07309e0598e4e

White people feel entitled to a lot of things, but their opinions ― especially on what America should be ― are at the top of the entitlement list. Last week, lawyer Aaron Schlossberg embodied this reality as he went on a public rant at a New York restaurant/market, berating and threatening employees for speaking Spanish at work. His vitriol was loud, pointed and took over the entire space as he painted a picture of what “[his] country” should be: English speaking, white-centered and subject to his comfort, opinions and expectations.

Schlossberg is a caricature of something that is very normal in America ― the unyielding defense of the notion that “white is right” and that anything that diverts from whiteness as normative deserves not only public verbal abuse, but needs to adjust to cater to him, to his whiteness. This sense of entitlement is easy and lazy, it doesn’t require truth or empathy; only conviction, a platform and some gusto.

This is the danger of a white supremacist society ― it always seeks to defend and legitimize itself to the detriment of everyone else.

What is more concerning than the incident itself (which is par for the course in Donald Trump’s racist America) is that people have come to the defense of Schlossberg. Angry citizens held a series of protests outside his home and place of employment, and taunted him with over 2,900 one-star Yelp reviews of his law practice that plummeted his public business rating. The general sentiment of Schlossberg’s defenders is that it isn’t fair or nice to respond to his bigotry in a way that makes him uncomfortable or threatens his livelihood, with seemingly no regard to Schlossberg’s threats to the livelihood of the Spanish-speakers he accosted.