Hate Speech and Institutionalized Society

Abstract

This article analyzes the related histories of institutionalization and hate speech in order to address the issue of hate speech as an accumulated result of structural violence, often stimulated by the state. Institutionalization, as an analytic framework, refers to a social mechanism that produces “unproductive” and “abnormal” citizens, or non-citizens, and incarcerates them both within and outside of society, all in the name of protecting the “society”. Individuals who can’t get their social position in legal or family structures found themselves outside of society's protective structures. I criticize how the contemporary tendency confines the criticism of hate speech to the rhetoric of “freedom of speech” and conflict between individuals and how it obscures, and thus perpetuates, the structural violence that facilitates hate speech. By addressing the concept of “institutionalization” as an analytic framework, this article highlights the linkage between institutionalized society, state power, and hate speech. In doing so, I argue that the rethinking of “human rights” can be a useful method to cut off the structural reproduction of hate speech.