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“We Refuse to be Silenced”: Writing a Fallist Politics into the Criminalization of Racist Hate Speech in South Africa
Abstract
Recently, the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development opened the long-awaited Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill up for public commentary. The Bill introduces, amongst other legal novelties, the criminalization of racist hate speech. While South Africa's civil society has been preoccupied with the Bill's potential “chilling” effect on the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression, few have critiqued the Bill for its bypassing of the complex matrix between race, racism, and power in a post-apartheid South Africa that continues to wrestle coloniality, as has been articulated by the Fallist Student Movement. In this paper, I borrow from the Fallist movement's dense archive to offer a problematization of the Bill for failing to provide a useful response to racist hate speech. I argue that the Bill ignores the political, historical, and structural dimensions of racism in post-apartheid South Africa. In doing so, I hope to offer a challenge to the drafters of the Bill to desert its apolitical ahistorical and acontextual response to racist hate and to be bold enough to construct a version that is more in sync with contemporary calls for decolonization.
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