Abstract: Recent work on hate speech has expanded what falls under that label: from discriminatory speech, derogatory language, or to the more general harmful or offensive language (see e.g. Popa-Wyatt 2020, Kindermann 2023, McGowan 2004, 2019, and also Luvell and Barnes, 2025). Given the abundance of definitions, authors like Brown (2017a, 2017b) have argued that the concept of hate speech should be seen as a cluster, or family-resemblance, concept.
Against these expansive views, I argue that we should narrow down what we understand by ‘hate speech’. There are two main motivations for this. First, expansive accounts of hate speech are either useless for regulations of hate speech, or, when deployed to regulate speech, infringe on free speech rights. Second, many accounts seek alternatives to taking hate speech as expressive of speech based on mistaken assumptions about expressive language. As I’ve argued (Marques 2023), hate speech is expressive of hatred. I will here supplement this claim with an account of how language can be used to perform what Timothy Snyder (2017), after Victor Klemperer, calls “shamanistic incantations”. This allows us to identify the narrow class of speech that merits legal regulation. The account includes all the cases of hate speech it should: cases of antisemitic campaigns in Germany in the 1930s, anti-Tutsi propaganda in the 1990s, etc., and none of other otherwise reprehensible speech.
