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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

> a proposal that many felt was unnecessary and unfairly tarnished the image of the South Asian community

I'm white yet I don't feel "unfairly tarnished" by the banning of white supremacy.

Nevertheless, plenty of Americans (mostly but not exclusively white) do oppose legislative constraints on white supremacy and I think it's fair to say that they "feel tarnished" by them. My read is that this opposition comes from the same place.

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Difference being that discrimination by race is already illegal and therefore banning white supremacy amounts to limiting speech. Banning white supremacy would be equivalent to banning support of caste discrimination, which is different from banning caste discrimination itself.

White supremacy is not protected speech.

> there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...

Yes, but that does not mean al speech is permitted in the workplace. A company that permits employees to display neonazi posters will not last very long.

You can be an open racist or you can collect a paycheck but you can't do both.

I'm pretty sure it is protected under the first amendment, especially as long as you don't actively advocate direct violence etc.

Not in the workplace it isn't. If you allow employees to openly use racial slurs and supremacist ideology in the office the courts will happily throw the book at you when someone files a discrimination complaint.

Will they throw the book at you or at the company?

"Pretty sure" is not gonna cut it here. White supremacy is nothing but a threat.

Ok, I'm absolutely sure that hate speech is protected under the first amendment.

> White supremacy is nothing but a threat

That's not what the supreme court seems to think.

White Supremacy isn’t a monolithic specifically defined thing. There are certainly kinds of white supremacism protected by the first amendment. For example, the ideas and works of Spengler.

> banning white supremacy amounts to limiting speech

I'm saying that I'm not threatened by the existing constraints on white supremacy: not limitations on speech, but the actual bans on discriminatory practices.

Ah I misread your first line. I don't think many people, white or otherwise feel tarnished by the banning of literal race discrimination such as white supremacy, which probably contributed to my misreading.

I figured you were referring to banning it even in the way that white supremacists currently exist (ie noisy bigots who would get in legal trouble if they actually discriminated in a meaningful way), which I think more people would oppose on principle.

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