Speech that silences

The SAC at U of L is no stranger to religious extremists, such as the one pictured fuming above from last year.

By Rae Hodge

FACT: If I catch you on my campus using a roped-off Free Speech Zone to yell pro-slavery and anti-gay sentiments to a group of black students within earshot of the Office for LGBT Services, I will repeat WILL publicly humiliate you in front of your intended audience by demolishing your arguments until you are speechless, befuddled and blushing deeply. My rhetoric will be swift, uncompromising and executed with extreme prejudice.

And, yes, thats exactly what happened Tuesday when Drake Shelton, the white supremacist would-be leader of the as yet unformed Protestant Christian Church of Louisville, jumped on his racist soapbox at U of L to beat his separatist drum to the tune of Leviticus 25:44, with a sign propped at his feet reading: This colony never kidnapped slaves from Africa.

While I would love to detail how this interaction unfolded, whats more important here is recognizing how this incident reflects two major problems with the debate regarding hate speech on public college campuses. The first problem is that debate has so far been framed as one where First Amendment rights are at odds with eliminating racism. The second is that the proponents for the protection of hate speech rarely, if ever, think to build an argument that can withstand the christening edge of my bloody axe. U of Ls patron is Minerva, goddess of both logic and war; bigots should therefore be prepared for both from this campus.

Charles R. Lawrence III, a remarkable author and law professor at Georgetown, published an article back in 1990 in the Duke Law Journal called On Racist Speech. In it, he forms a profound interpretation of Brown v. Board as a free speech case when he argues that segregations inherit problems include the message of inferiority to black students. The cases success, then, is in part its elimination of that system of messages in schools.

Students often gather outside a roped off free speech area near the SAC to confront.

Lawrence makes a crucial distinction in the essay: that hate speech in public is not regulated because it is assumed that the listener can escape without being stripped of rights; a black student on a campus is an unwilling listener who cannot escape hate speech without de facto segregation. Safe passage in common areas, then, is part of a universitys obligation to provide equal educational opportunities.

Lawrence also speaks to the silencing nature of hate speech, which is counter to the aims of free speech and seeks to exclude and minimize the voices of its victims. He posits that If the purpose of the First Amendment is to foster the greatest amount of speech, racial insults disserve that purpose.

In a climate of racial harassment, the speech and political participation of students within a racial minority becomes subdued. If a university is asking black students to bear the burden of insult in the name of free speech and for the greater good, then those students must be fairly represented in the universitys deliberations on the matter.

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Speech that silences