No. Everybody does not win.

The woman who is afraid to leave her house because of thugs in the neighborhood does not win.

The girl on the bus who is being harrassed by boys does not win.

People who would have benefited from an open dialogue about other ethnic groups and our rational and irrational fears about them do not win. The truth will remain unspoken, and I don't think saying someone is afraid of someone else is hate speech, inflammatory or anything else. I think it is necessary for security reasons to be able to say who we are afraid of. We will be surprised who is afraid of whom..and we might not ever find out who is bothering whom and who is being just a bit paranoid and could be calmed down with statistics about how safe this particular group really is. Or if the particular group is really engaging in thuglike behavior, then that behavior needs to be corrected. In this case, the person..Williams..needs to be reassured that he is going to be OK. Probably. Usually. No guarantees in this life.

But if we stifle this particular type of freedom of speech, and I for one am not for unbridled freedom of speech, we take out one of our first lines of defense against criminal, threatening behavior, which was not the case here, but could be in other cases. THere are situations I am afraid of. I want to be able to say so without fear of losing my job, my library card, my bus pass or whatever, and I want other people to have whatever rights I want for myself.

I think there are probably Muslim or Arabic women and men who feel unsafe in certain arenas and perhaps neighborhoods. I want them to feel safe and to be able to say if they don't feel safe and why. Then it can be addressed, again either by reassuring them that they are really quite safe, or addressing underlying problems that might not make them merely feel unsafe, but actually be unsafe. Hiding emotions like fear under the rug is not going to help racial relations, international relations, etc. mg