Collected writing on campus activism, free speech, and safety
I am posting about this just once, in a compilation, because I realized the other day that this has become yet another unproductively polarized political identity: are you in favor of free speech or prejudice-free spaces?
These are not mutually exclusive possibilities. But I worry that people are going to see them that way if we don’t stop and look at ourselves.
From my perspective this is just two groups of people who are asking for the same thing using different words: Everyone wants to be able to express themselves without facing oppressive backlashes. The two camps are roughly organized into people who feel threatened by prejudices and non-inclusive environments, and people who feel threatened by shifting social norms that can feel arbitrary and hostile.
I want to be above-it-all and to read and post writing in both “camps” and reflect on the valid concerns and emotions expressed in these op-eds. But. I’m also a person has felt threatened by spaces dominated by white-male-sensibilities (I’ve shared some of those stories in other posts). And I’m a person who has been accused of being over-sensitive and attention-seeking when I’ve expressed these natural reactions to microaggressions. I am a person who has been told to ignore herself in favor of the status quo.
And as a woman of color who has chosen a career as an academic scientist, I understand that I am likely sacrificing any chance to work in spaces where I can safely express all of my identities.
So, some of the “free speech” essays can be hard to read analytically — it’s like trying to read a scientific paper while being repeatedly slapped in the face. It’s hard to concentrate instead of reaching up to slap back. And I find the pro-safespace essays healing, and I want to share some of what they are saying.
Which is all to say, I recommend reading these 4 essays, and I apologize for the bias — and I hope that it does not contribute to the polarization.
“The default for avoiding discussion of racism is to invoke a separate principle, one with which few would disagree in the abstract — free speech, respectful participation in class — as the counterpoint to the violation of principles relating to civil rights. This is victim-blaming with a software update, with less interest in the kind of character assassination we saw deployed against Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown than in creating a seemingly right-minded position that serves the same effect…
This rhetorical victory recalls the successful defense in the George Zimmerman trial, which relied upon the tacit presumption that the right to self-defense was afforded to only one party that night — coincidentally, the non-black one. The broader issue is that the student’s reaction elicited consternation in certain quarters where the precipitating incident did not. The fault line here is between those who find intolerance objectionable and those who oppose intolerance of the intolerant…
The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one’s liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another.”
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“Largely missing from the outcry has been a discussion of the underlying issues that prompted the demonstrations in the first place. Instead, the demonstrations are caricatured in the media, conventional and social alike, as the result of hypersensitive, thin-skinned students of color, many of them highly privileged students, protesting minor provocations insisting that schools respond to their every whim. Stories about Jonathon Butler, the hunger striker supported by members of the University of Missouri’s football, focused on the fact that the graduate student came from a wealthy family, raising the question of whether you have to be black and poor to complain about entrenched racism.
Missing from the discussions is a willingness to confront the very real complaints of those students. Those complaints include the fact that too often those schools, many of them segregated by law or practice until very recently in their histories, have failed to address the persistent reminders to students of color that they are not fully members of the college communities. Complaints that black students, in some instances, can expect to be subjected to emotional or physical harm because of their race or ethnicity, as evidenced by the death threats received by protesting students at the University of Missouri and elsewhere…
Ironically, the phrase “political correctness,” ostensibly invoked to promote free expression, is often actually the protest of being called to task for the first time for the consequences of previously unchallenged statements and conduct. Its purpose and effect is to belittle and demean the call for other people to recognize the humanity and feelings of others. Putting aside the too often forgotten fact that the First Amendment protects against state suppression of speech and assembly and not interactions between private citizens, the fact that you have the right to say something doesn’t mean you should. Sometimes healthy doses of humility and empathy are called for, values academic institutions should also foster.”
“What do pundits mean when they say that students have grown too sensitive? They usually refer to some isolated incident when students become enraged by what seems a minor provocation, like an e-mail from a university administrator about Halloween or about fitting in. But why not turn the question back on the carping columnists? Given the grave issues facing the world, why are pundits so focused on the micro issue of protests on college campuses?
Conservative columnists are aghast that students from groups long discriminated against aren’t just grateful to their institutions for allowing them on campus. Defenders of the land of opportunity don’t mention that those institutions have long practiced affirmative action for the over-tutored but often still dim offspring of wealthy donors. And liberal columnists, for their part, can’t understand why the particular struggles of their heroic youth aren’t simply taken up by their militant descendants. Ought these writers really be shocked when their own hierarchy of values based in secularism and fair procedures (values I share) aren’t simply embraced by students from groups who have seen how “fair procedures” can obscure discrimination, intimidation and worse?…
These are not “minor” or “micro” issues, and our students know it. They are faced with a world beyond the university that is threatened ecologically, economically and culturally, and they are doing their best to prepare themselves for these challenges. They are studying physics and religion, design and economics, and sometimes they stand up and make themselves heard. Sometimes they are filled with rage, sometimes with fear. They will make mistakes, but they don’t need columnists to tell them that the main problem isn’t Halloween. If only it were.”
“almost immediately the Mizzou student actions became a battleground over the first amendment, media and fascism when at a rally some protestors formed a human shield to block a photographer from campus media from recording the protestors…
All press benefits as much from social change as it benefits from the status quo. That means the press, especially corporate media, is always serving two masters.
The press has rights but so do persons and sometimes we define those rights by working through the moments when they clash…
It’s not just that the moment is important. It’s not just that the students are still very much in danger for doing something important. It is that hand-waving about a fascist state can confuse us about what making democracy looks like…
Mizzou student organizers used social media because it allows some of that control, granting access to media organizations on their terms and sometimes denying it altogether.
They did this knowing that sensationalist headlines are used to generate revenue and sometimes the algorithmically driven choices can malign as much as they can report.
They did this knowing that the media may not have a great record with labeling racism as such but it does have a record of using the mugshots of black criminal defendants at higher rates than do those of white criminal defendants.
They did this in a media culture that can be the disinfectant but that has also historically been the infection. Given this, the rhetoric got heated.”
Interesting point — not everyone can trust the media. It would be naive to trust that not just the journalists, but the editors of the newspapers and magazines they represent, are going to be fully educated on racism, and the specific events at that location, and therefore capable of delivering objective reporting without biasing toward the sensibilities of their mostly white audience.
I want to see some complicating of “freedom of speech”
