Onde reside o ódio no discurso de ódio "suave"

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the hateful discrimination involved in public messages in which a Portuguese politician alleges wrongdoings by members of the Roma community. The messages, which brought the hate speech charge on the politician but didn’t get him convicted, are analysed as cases of soft hate speech (Assimakopoulos et al., 2017): while they do not necessarily explicitly state that somebody is to be hated, they crucially provide the underlying rationale in support of discriminatory hatred. In order to uncover this underlying rationale, I discuss the premises that are communicated in the messages and reconstruct the overall argument that links them with special attention to the argumentative potential (Mohammed, 2019; see also Kjeldsen, 2017; Serafis, 2022). The analysis reveals an implicit meaning that is not just discriminatory, but also inciteful to actions that could be violent against the Roma community. Consequently, it explains what makes soft hate speech perilous: while the messages are not necessarily legally culpable, they are nevertheless discursively responsible for inciting hatred, discrimination, and-maybe-violence against the already disprivileged minority group.