UT communications professor John Haas won the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression for a recent book that he co-authored.

The award recognizes outstanding scholarship in the areas of free expression and freedom of speech and was awarded to “The Communication of Hate” co-authors John Haas and Michael Waltman of the University of North Carolina.

“Michael and I have been friends, and both of us have been part of academia for a long period of time,” Haas said. “I met Mike when I was working on my master’s degree, so I have known him for about 30 years.”

Each of the co-authors’ interest in the topic was sparked by different events in their lives.

Waltman’s interest in how and why people broadcast hate messages was kindled when his son was very young.

“Mike was very, very interested in how messages affected people, and after he had his first son, he was increasingly concerned about the messages youngsters were exposed to, and in particular, on the Web,” Haas said. “Mike brought to this a personal interest of learning why it is people are trying to promote, in this case, hate and the ways in which they are trying to do that.”

Haas learned from a very young age the effects that hate speech can have on society, especially if a large amount of people believe in the hate speech being transmitted.

“My path to it was a little bit different,” Haas said. “My mother lived in Germany during World War II. For me, growing up, I heard stories of the awful consequences of hate and what people are capable of doing to each other and the ways in which they defended or explained or tried to promote those ideas. So that, for me, sparked an interest in why does the people promote hate and how it is they go about doing it, and how some are able to persuade a large number of other individuals to engage in behavior which, on the surface, appears to be horrendous.”

“The Communication of Hate” covers different aspects of how hate speech affects people and how people broadcast hate speech.

“We do several different things,” Haas said. “We start out by explaining how we might think about hate speech and the role hate plays in this.”

Haas said sometimes in society people use hate as a way to show anger or frustration against something that has happened in everyday life.

Hate speech focuses on turning an entire class of individuals into a class of sub-humans, he said.

“Human beings tend to think in terms of categories,” Haas said. “We literally can’t not think about other people, unless we’re thinking about them in terms of categories: liberal, conservative; old, young. For many people, if we have a negative association to some group, we are able to suppress it. For some segment of the population, they are really not able to suppress those beliefs, for whatever reason, and they feel very comfortable making clear they think this one class, or several classes, are not the equivalent of the in group they are part of.”

Although the book covers various aspects of hate speech, it also looks at domestic, as well as foreign hate speech.

“The electronic corner has changed the way that people who are engaging in hate speech will operate,” Haas said. “For example, in Germany, it is illegal to use swastikas or any other symbols that are associated with Nazis or to openly engage in hate speech. What ends up happening is that those people that are proponents of a particular belief — and they are using hate speech to advance their cause — will get service in the United States.”

Towards the end of the book, Haas and Waltman make the argument that, although they are against the dehumanization that hate speech seeks, they are not against a person’s First Amendment right to be able to say what he or she believes is correct.

“The Communication of Hate” was published in January 2011, and the co-authors were informed of receiving the award in early July 2011.

“John Haas and his co-author have produced an outstanding work of scholarship on a very important topic,” said Mike Wirth, College of Communication and Information dean. “As the college and the university strive to encourage and promote civility on campus and throughout the community, this book makes us more aware of the problems associated with hate speech and helps us learn how to combat it.”