The easy way out

Today is "racism is bad" day. And a federal government press release just went out announcing The Action Plan Against Racism, which has been allocated 56 million smackers over five years. Yet more background here. (Ignore the usual insipid pre-fab quotes -- zip down to the meat.)

Here's a couple of the more interesting bits:
One project will standardize the collection of data related to crimes and incidents motivated by hate;
Another will examine perceived racial-profiling and the over-representation of certain groups in the justice system.

It all sounds good. Until you get to the cybercrime stuff. "Countering Internet-Based Hate Crime (Justice Canada) proposes to combat hate via the Internet by working to establish a tip line to facilitate reporting, and working with Internet service providers to identify online hate." The feds want to shut down hate sites (and hate speech is illegal in Canada).

Regular readers will know that I'm a civil libertarian on such matters, and consider the criminalization of personal opinions to be contradictory to all that is good and just, plus it's just a stupid thing to do (like the world needs more friggin martyrs to the cause of racism).

But of course there's a price to pay for that attitude. Extra hate requires extra work to fight it off.

I so much want to believe that I can bring the misguided around. We all want to believe that education can work.

That's not necessarily true. "We expose our senses primarily to information that reinforces our own ideas," wrote William L. Rivers in the 1970 tome, "Politics and the Press." "This the psychologists call 'selective exposure.' In one test of it, Wilbur Schramm and Richard Carter of Stanford University found that Republicans are almost twice as likely as Democrats to watch a Republican-sponsored telecast. We also tend to see what we want to see -- 'selective perception' -- which social researchers have shown so often that they now have approximately the same compulsion to demonstrate it again that a mathematician has to show that two plus two equals four. Some of us go to ludicrous lengths to perceive 'facts' that will support our prejudices. In one experiment, anti-Semites looked at editorial cartoons that ridiculed religious bias and saw them in reverse -- as glorifications of Anglo-Saxon lineage."

Does that mean education can never work, and we should give up? Of course not. People can change. And if not them, then their children. Or their children's kids.

But criminalizing speech doesn't fix the problem, it just sends the bile underground. Banning is easy, and change, it turns out, takes work.