Who Could Have Known?

Checking Our Assumptions

In today’s hate-charged environment it’s all too easy to make assumptions about how other people think about sensitive subject. For example, we’ve recently been browsing the 2017 Cato Institute research report on hate speech and the following datapoint jumped out at us:

Question: Would you favor or oppose a law that would make it illegal to say offensive or insulting things in public about white people?

I don’t know about you, but this datapoint sure challenged our preconceptions. Could this be showing us that the more people have experienced hate speech personally the more sensitive they are to its impact on others? What else do you think might lie behind these simple numbers?