Words, intentions, and actions
In July 2004 the British Crown Prosecution Service decided not to
charge Kilroy-Silk with the offence of ‘incitement to racial hatred’
or any other under the Race Relations legislation. The CPS
concluded that Kilroy-Silk’s remarks against Arabs and Muslims
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were not ‘intentionally insulting’. Indeed, Kilroy-Silk had
apologized for the remarks, claiming in the next day’s Daily
Express that he had never intended to insult the world’s 200
million Arabs’ and that he had ‘aimed his criticism at a number of
repressive, autocratic governments in the Middle East and the
extremists they sheltered’. In the Sunday Express a week after the
original article, he pointed out: ‘I didn’t intend to say that all Arabs
are uncivilized because clearly I don’t believe that. That’s stupid.
That’s nonsense.’
The question of whether racism is an intended or unintended aspect
of any particular statement or utterance is clearly important,
especially in the legal context such as the issue of Kilroy-Silk’s guilt
or otherwise.
Racist utterances do not prove that the person or group making
them intended the remarks to be understood as racist and would be
hurtful in that specific manner. Nor do they mean that that person
or group will necessarily and automatically carry out other kinds of
discriminatory practices or has done so in the past.
This is not simply a matter of academic or research interest. It can
become a vital issue when judgements are being made about racist
behaviour. A remarkable incident that emerged in the trial of the
white youths accused of the racist murder of the black teenager
Stephen Lawrence in 1993 in London aptly and tragically illustrates
the importance and often intractability of this issue.
In order to gather evidence against the five white youths suspected
of having committed the murder, police secretly filmed the suspects
at home. The footage shows the young men shouting racist
obscenities and play-acting with knives. But the film was not used
as evidence. It would have been easy for the youths to argue in
court, as they had done publicly, that they were only ‘fooling around’
or ‘messing about’, and that the incidents reveal nothing about their
intentions or their guilt in actually committing the murder of
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Stephen Lawrence. The youths have never been convicted of the
murder of Stephen Lawrence.
The issue of the relationship between speech acts and other forms
of discriminatory behaviour remains problematic, and inferences
have to be made with care and close attention to context and other
behaviour. What might seem plausible at a common-sense level
does not necessarily convince when judgements of proof beyond
reasonable doubt have to be made.