Member

What did I learn from this incident a decade ago? I learned that as a bystander, every one of us has a key role to intervene to reduce the tensions in any such incident and to publicly support the victim at the time. Imagine if it were your child, an elderly parent or a close friend facing this sort of treatment alone. But imagine that the person you are seeing it happen to is someone you should stand up for. It is a reality of the last five years or so that many—not all—people who only thought racist, homophobic, transphobic, disablist abuse about people now believe that they can say and do anything they want with impunity under the banner of freedom of speech. It is often targeted at the individual with that characteristic. This is free speech designed to harm, under Mill’s definition.