ABSTRACT
Motivated by an alarming increase in racist incidents, universities throughout the Nation have turned toward the task of restraining racist expression. The justification for these restraints, and their relationship to first amendment values, has become a matter of intense controversy. Even a brief survey of the contemporary debate reveals it to be rich with textured and complex characterizations of the harms of racist expression. A recurring theme in the contemporary literature is that racist expression ought to be regulated because it creates what has been termed “deontic” harm. Universities and colleges characteristically seek to regulate racist communications that “directly create a substantial and immediate interference with the educational processes of the University,” without articulating exactly how racist expression can cause that interference. The very reason that racist speech harms individual persons is because it so violently ruptures the forms of social respect that are necessary for the maintenance of individual personality.
