Apparently freedom of speech is a tool of “White Supremacy”, and only by silencing incorrect speech can people become free… to blindly agree with hard Left racial bigotry.
A literature student at Duke University penned a whiney diatribe about how free speech is LITERALLY killing oppressed Black individuals, and how the powerful evil White people doing these oppressive things are really just so fragile…
And so, a fisking!
“As I write my first column, I am thinking a lot about speech. I am thinking about how an urgent and overdue conversation about racism—on our campus and across our country—has been derailed by a diversionary and duplicitous obsession with the First Amendment.”
The importance of some of our most basic and fundamental liberties is not a “diversion”. The 1st Amendment exists to protect all individuals from the machinations of the state; it is not a tool of oppression.
“I am thinking about how quickly the conversation has shifted from white supremacy to white fragility—and how this shift is itself an expression of white supremacy.”
LOL Wut? How is fragility a tool of supremacy and oppression? To the Left, anything “White” must necessarily be evil and oppressive. Heck, if every White person were rounded up and killed as part of a wide-spread genocide, the Left would claim that to be “White Supremacy”!
“White fragility refers to a range of defensive behaviors through which white people (or more accurately, people who believe they are white) deflect conversations about race and racism in order to protect themselves from race-based stress.”
The “people who believe they are white” claim that “White” was invented to oppress “non-Whites.” Here we see the old Marxist obsession with oppressors vs. oppressed. It purports that “White” was invented to transform various European ethnicities into a singular one… which is treated as concomitant with American. Thus the identity of being American is denigrated into an exercise in evil and therefore turning America into a collective “un-person”.
“Because white people tend to live in environments where whiteness is both dominant and invisible, they grow accustomed to racial comfort, as a result of which even a small amount of racial stress becomes intolerable. This helps explain why talking about white supremacy can feel more painful to white people than white supremacy itself, why the ostensible “stifling” of debate can feel more pressing than the literal strangulation of Eric Garner and how “free speech” seems more important than Black lives.”
Apparently White people are so powerful as to oppress everyone else, yet so fragile that any little thing will tear it all down.; in other words, a paper tiger. How so very Maoist in thought. This “oppression” apparently entails LITERALLY killing Black individuals by not “stifling” open debate and free speech. Apparently words can kill:
“Needless to say, it requires an astounding degree of narcissism, ignorance and— yes—fragility to scan headlines detailing the daily, state-sanctioned slaughter of people of color and somehow conclude that speech is the real problem. White fragility weighs the minimal discomfort of being confronted with painful realities about race and racism against the literal death of Black and brown bodies and decides that the latter matter less than white discomfort. Which is how we end up here, talking about speech on campus and reading a dozen iterations of the same editorial in which students describe—with utterly unintentional irony—how being called out by anti-racist activists makes them feel upset and hurts their feelings.”
No. It is about how people are tired of being designated as evil incarnate about how there is a “state-sanctioned slaughter of people of color” based solely on “great lies” such as #HandsUpDontShoot. Having a problem with being the declared boogie-man isn’t “fragility”.
“This leaves those of us committed to abolishing white supremacy in a double bind. To engage with this debate is to fall for a diversionary tactic in which we again center the conversation on white feelings. To refuse to engage grants the latter a monopoly on the airways, drowning out more vital issues in an ocean of white noise.”
Oh those wily, yet fragile, White people who always make everything about them! We can’t let White people have a say, yet we can’t stop White people from their evil “white noise”!
“Still, in the interests of the open, honest debate the free speechers ostensibly advocate, let me try to address the constitutional and philosophical principles at play here.”
This should be good…
“The first point to make is that, despite the hand-wringing, I have yet to see a single example of student activists violating the First Amendment. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how they could do so, given that the latter proscribes government abridgment of speech while student activists are private citizens. Many seem to confuse “free speech” with some banal notion of civility, forgetting that the very freedoms they invoke to defend racist drivel permit anti-racists to respond—whether by calling someone out or calling for their resignation.”
Student activists violating the First Amendment? If you haven’t seen it, then it is clear that you haven’t been on a college campus in recent years. Civility isn’t “banal”, it is the sign of a civilized people; the Left, of course, aren’t.
“This would seem to set up a nice equivalence between racists and anti-racists—both exercising free-speech freedoms, which must be equally and indiscriminately defended.”
Yes. Yes they must. Policies and laws must be content neutral in this regard. It’s called equality.
“What this ignores, however, is the centuries-long history of racialized oppression to which hate speech contributes. Hate speech is thus both violent and an incitement to further violence. The courts already prohibit walking into a crowded theater and shouting “fire.” How is this any different from walking into a white supremacist society and shouting racial slurs?”
Do you even know how to “analogy”, bruh?
“It has become almost a truism that there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Historically speaking, this is inaccurate. As M. Alison Kibler details in her “Censoring Racial Ridicule,” the U.S. has a long history of regulating forms of speech that expose racialized groups to “contempt, derision or obloquy.” Indeed, as recently as 1952, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois law applying the standards of libel (another free-speech exception) to hate speech. It is only in recent years that the courts have, as the National Center for Human Rights Education puts it, “privileged white racists to express themselves at the expense of the safety of African-Americans and other people of color.”
Limits to free speech are very, very limited in America. There must be actual and measurable damage, as with incitement to violence and libel. The Beaurarnais case was about libel, and more recent Supreme Court cases have been far more protective of free speech.
“Key to this new interpretation is a firm separation between speech and action, a legal variant on the old childhood adage: ‘sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.’ The problem—as anyone who has been the victim of hate speech can tell you—is that this simply isn’t true. Words hurt as much as actions; indeed, words are actions. Within the context of white supremacy, any distinction between a defaced poster, a racist pamphlet and legal or extralegal murder can be only of degree.”
Being called a racial slur and being lynching because of your race aren’t just about a difference in degree. They are completely different things. Defacement (a crime) isn’t even comparable to murder (or delusions of state led murder), let alone to a pamphlet that is racist or hateful.
” At the same time—and here I’ll throw a bone to the civil libertarians—I’m unconvinced that hate speech legislation can resolve this. Not because hate speech isn’t violent, but because the state is. As others have noted, we often view the state like some strange sort of Jekyll and Hyde—as if the very government quite literally built on white supremacy could somehow save us from its effects. I’ve sometimes noticed the same double vision among campus activists, who both call out Duke (quite rightly) for institutional racism yet also call on the administration to fix it.”
America was not “built on white supremacy”. It was built upon a base of English culture and traditions from the colonists, and further enlarged by the legal immigrants that America has increasingly accepted of all races.
“So where does that leave us? With the painful yet empowering realization that no one will save us but ourselves. Rather than relying on the state to censure hate speech, anti-racists can assume that task—calling out and shouting down every expression of white supremacy as we work to build a genuinely free society.”
In other words, dissent must be silenced. Because we can’t have freedom in a “free society,” right?
“In the meantime, we can construct safe spaces for ourselves where hatred is barred at the door. In other words, the exact work that campus activists are already doing.”
Stop channeling Gov. Wallace.
“Cowardly racists and homophobes who deface posters or vandalize dormitories are not heroic defenders of free speech. The true heroes are those who have spoken out against injustice, time and again, in the face of both material and psychological retaliation. Everything else is just white noise.”
Yet “anti-racists” who do the same are considered heroes by the Left. Silencing dissent isn’t done by the oppressed, but by those with power and privilege.
Universities now-a-days seem to do nothing but pump-out totalitarian little [CENSORED].
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