Abstract

In this paper we analyse utterances that, without explicitly constituting hate speech, nevertheless convey a hateful message. For example, in the headline “Iraqi Refugee is convicted in Germany of raping and murdering teenage girl”, the presence of “Iraqi refugee” does not seem arbitrary. To the contrary, it is responsible for inviting a racist inference against Iraqi refugees. We defend that these inferences cannot be described as slurs, ethnic or social terms used as insults, dogwhistles or conversational implicatures. Rather, we propose that these inferences are insinuations, specifically provocative insinuations, as no conversational response seems effective at blocking them.