The Skanner News – Commentary: Free Speech Hypocrisy

Details Written by Lee A Daniels, NNPA Columnist Published: 03 April 2015

This winter the medias been ablaze with stories about racist, homophobic and sexist slurs being hurled this way and that by college students and other adults.

Revealingly, those that have captured the most attention all involve Black Americans as the targets of the racist speech or action: the members of the University of Oklahoma chapter of one prominent White fraternity singing a racist ditty that referenced lynching a Black man; the sexist slur hurled against adolescent baseball star MoNe Davis by a college baseball athlete, and the attempt by the Sons of Confederate Veterans of Texas to force that state to produce a license plate with their symbol, the Confederate battle flag, on it. This latest effort by Confederate sympathizers to obscure the racist rebellions ineradicable stain of treason in the defense of slavery, as one analyst wrote, has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the case last week.

The controversies have provoked a growing volume of commentary and opinion columns. Most of those Ive seen have declared that, while offensive speech and ideas are despicable, they must be tolerated in the name of freedom of expression so that society can benefit in the short- and long-term from the free flow of ideas.

Im a free-speech advocate myself. But in recent years, whenever these free-speech controversies have burst into the open, Ive increasingly noticed some important things missing from the general run of commentary and opinion columns. For one thing, I dont see them grappling with the question of why those who spout the slurs do so.

For example, shouldnt we be examining why a group of White college students, most of whom come from middle-class and upper-middle-class families, would gleefully traffick in expressions of racism?

And why a White college baseball player would feel the need to use a slur of sexual degeneracy against MoNe Davis, the 14-year-old Black American girl whose athletic prowess and off-the-field poise has won her well-deserved national attention?

Why should any public entity sanction the lies Confederate sympathizers continue to spout? The Confederacys own documents among them, the Confederate Constitution of 1861, and the individual ordinances of secession of each of the Confederate states make clear its driving force was the maintenance and expansion of its slave empire. If states that have these revenue-generating vanity-plate programs must open them to Confederate sympathizers, must they also accept the requests of drivers who want plates bearing the flags of other systems of extraordinary evil such as the Nazi flag, or the flag of ISIS too?

Part of whats bothering me is that when these controversies explode, I dont see the fierce condemnation of the values of the wrongdoers and their parents, neighborhoods and entire racial group thats standard procedure whenever some Black youth has done something wrong. Instead, I see many free speech advocates rush right past any consideration of the pain the offensive words cause to loftily order the individual and the group targets of the hate speech to ignore it or be better than the bigots.

In doing so, they deliberately ignore the reality that the old saying sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you has always been only partially true. Black American history is replete with many tragic episodes of racist slurs used to provoke and sustain racist violence. And now, the virulent online expressions of hatred against women whom misogynists feel are too assertive underscore the fact that sometimes offensive speech isnt just expression. Sometimes its used as a weapon to intimidate its target into silence.

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The Skanner News - Commentary: Free Speech Hypocrisy