Religious Minorities and Polarized Communication: The Impact of Offensive and Hurtful Speech

Offensive speech in public discourses increasingly involves religious groups. The present paper focuses on hate speech targeting religious minorities and discusses its potential to reinforce their subordinated social statuses. By propagating negative representations, hate speech contributes to depriving its addressees of the preconditions for acquiring recognition at the social level. This can denigrate the identities of minorities in the eyes of society and, in turn, negatively affect the self-perception of their members, nurturing an “identity of the excluded”. We begin by outlining a multifaceted understanding of the notion of minority which combines objective and subjective elements and then go on to argue that Honnethian recognition theory offers resources for framing the subjective aspect of minoritization processes. Finally, we suggest that the harm of hurtful speech has to be assessed on a contextual basis and taking into account its potential to undermine the identity of the targeted groups.