Susan Benesch, a law professor at American University who researches dangerous speech and how to prevent it from becoming violence, at her home in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
When
Susan Benesch began looking at how speech could incite mass violence, her
research took her to far-flung places like Kenya and Burma.
Lately,
she’s been unable to ignore a case study at home in the United States.
The
American University law professor and Harvard University faculty associate has
grappled for months with whether Donald Trump’s rhetoric constitutes dangerous
speech as she has come to define it. She has examined election-year
speech vefore, but only abroad where the risks of mass atrocities were great.
But in
the past week, with Trump claiming that the election system and the media are
rigged against him, his messages have the type of undertone that increases the
risk of violence between groups, she said.
Benesch,
52, has dedicated the past six years of her life to developing and testing a
framework for identifying dangerous speech. To rise to that level, at least two
of these five indicators must be true:
- A powerful
speaker with a high degree of influence over the audience.
- The audience has
grievances and fears that the speaker can cultivate.
- A speech act
that is clearly understood as a call to violence.
- A social or
historical context that is propitious for violence, for any of a variety
of reasons, including long-standing competition between groups for
resources, lack of efforts to solve grievances or previous episodes of
violence.
- A means of
dissemination that is influential in itself, for example because it is the
sole or primary source of news for the relevant audience.
“Trump’s
speech is very difficult in the sense that he is so often slippery with it,”
Benesch said in a recent interview. “The meaning is so often ambiguous.”
But
when Trump said his supporters could use the Second Amendment against Hillary
Clinton, “it seems to me impossible that people didn’t understand that as a
reference to violence,” she said. Or when he suggested that Clinton and
President Obama were founders of the Islamic State, something he alluded to
again at Wednesday’s final debate, that was a “hallmark of dangerous speech to
describe an in-group member as the enemy,” she said.
And
now, with Trump trafficking in the conspiracy theory that if he loses the
election it will be because of a rigged system against him, he’s definitely
laying the groundwork for potential unrest after the balloting. Direct
incitement of violence is illegal, but Trump falls short of actually calling
for any kind of civil disobedience.
Because
of that, it’s still a gray area that surrounds whether Trump does use dangerous
speech.
“Trump
may well be undermining the extent to which his supporters trust the essential
institutions and practices of U.S. democracy,” Benesch said. “Some of them —
those who are most susceptible to being inflamed by such messages — may
therefore be more likely to commit violence. However, the United States is not
in danger of mass intergroup violence, in my view. It is deeply irresponsible,
though, since it can undermine some Americans’ belief in our own democratic
institutions, which can make them more susceptible to dangerous speech going
forward.”
Still,
that she’s getting the question so often is in itself stunning.
“I
didn’t imagine that so soon after beginning this work I’d be asked to explain
it to someone abroad who would want me to describe a case study,” she said,
“and choose a case study in my own country.”
‘No one
is born hating’
On an
unseasonably warm fall afternoon, Benesch sat barefoot on the stone steps
outside her townhouse on a tree-lined street in Washington’s popular Logan
Circle neighborhood. Inside, a young researcher was hunched over a laptop at
her kitchen table. Her home is also the headquarters for her Dangerous Speech
Project, which was born out of research grants she received from the MacArthur
Foundation.
Outside
the kitchen window is a massive vegetable garden she built on the roof of her
garage. Her home, an eclectic mix of mismatched furniture and art, doubles as
an “eco-friendly community arts space” that features local musicians at a
monthly dinner party she hosts.
Benesch,
who was born and raised in New York City, said she comes from a lineage of
“immigrants, refugees and people who were killed because other people had been
taught to hate them,” but that’s all the personal detail she will divulge.
She is eager to discuss her work, but, perhaps because she is an
expert in speech, is precise in what she shares, careful not to make
generalizations or overstatements.
She
credits spending much of her adult life immersed in the mass atrocities people
commit against one another all over the world — first as a foreign
correspondent for the Miami Herald in Latin America and then as a human rights
lawyer — for her drive to understand why and how people turn to violence.
As a
young lawyer, she did international work in the aftermath of the ethnic
conflicts in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. As they pored over whom to
prosecute for the terrible crimes, Benesch was drawn to the question of whether
one could detect warning signs for genocide before one occurred. People do
not wake up in the morning and simultaneously decide to kill their neighbors,
she thought.
This
question resurfaced several years later when she was teaching a clinic at
Georgetown’s law school representing refugees in asylum cases. As she and her
students worked to help people piece their shattered lives back together, she
began thinking anew about whether there was a way to foresee the crises that
created refugees.
It was
around that time that two good friends asked her, in the course of casual
conversations, what she would do if she had one full year to work on anything
she wanted without any concern for finances. Her answer came easily: She wanted
to figure out whether someone could identify the kind of rhetoric that brought
about social conflicts, and then whether someone could interfere with it
without suppressing freedom of speech. In other words, could genocide be
thwarted by simply drawing attention to the “dangerous speech” that precedes
it?
“I’ve
learned a few specific things about humanity,” Benesch said. “First, people do
not hate spontaneously. No one is born hating, or wanting to see or do
violence. Also, no particular group — religious, ethnic, cultural or
national — has a monopoly on dangerous speech. It isn’t that there is something
wrong with one group or another, as some have alleged. All people are capable
of producing and being influenced by dangerous speech. I see that as an
opportunity.”
Countering
dangerous speech with comedy
For
Benesch, it’s important that people understand that the type of speech she
wants to counter is different from hate speech, which she says is a broad
category for which there is no agreed-upon definition. An advocate
for free speech, she does not believe that hate speech can or should be
silenced. In fact, it’s one of the central reasons she sought to differentiate
dangerous speech.
There’s
no way to say definitively when speech led to genocide or mass atrocities,
because there are many contributing factors, or conversely whether Benesch’s
efforts to counter that speech has succeeded in quelling what would have
otherwise been a mass violence situation. But she has anecdotal evidence that
leads her to believe that both are significant factors.
After
the results of the 2007 presidential election in Kenya were disputed, there
were attacks that left more than 1,000 people dead and 500,000 displaced. In
the lead-up to it, political leaders used incendiary language about other
ethnic and tribal groups. One group, for example, said that those in another
were like weeds that needed to be pulled out so “there would be only one tribe
here,” Benesch wrote in a research paper.
Benesch
did her first field study for the Dangerous Speech Project in Kenya leading up
to its next presidential election, held in March 2013. While there she helped
oversee several projects that sought to diminish the impact of dangerous
speech, including one writing four episodes of a popular Kenyan courtroom
comedy in which the actors discredited inflammatory statements. The 2013
election produced little violence.
She is
continuing to study how to effectively respond to dangerous speech. Right now,
she’s looking at the impact that shaming the speakers or using humor to
minimize them may have.
Her
work has inspired others to take up the cause. This year the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum published a
guidebook on countering dangerous speech, and its author credits
Benesch as the inspiration for it.
Rob
Faris, director of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, where Benesch is a
faculty associate, described her work as “innovative” in how it attempts to
delegitimize dangerous speech rather than try to stifle it, thus protecting
freedom of speech.
