Censorship can't cure Oklahoma frat racism

Robert Shibley 11:24 a.m. CDT March 13, 2015

The University of Oklahoma football team and coaches walk into practice wearing all black in protest of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma on Monday, March. 9, 2015. The Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity has been banned from campus after several members of the fraternity took part in a racist chant caught on video.(Photo: Nick Oxford/AP)

The Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter at the University of Oklahoma is giving America another crash course in how offensive people can be when they put their minds to it. Members of the now-defunct chapter are featured in a video singing a song that works in the n-word no fewer than three times, references lynching and pledges allegiance to an odious form of racial discrimination.

And if you're against racism, you should be glad they could do it. Free speech has many benefits, but one of the most overlooked is its ability to warn us of truths about the world especially when we'd rather not hear them. Doesn't the video tell us something we need to know about the racial attitudes of at least some OU students? The protesters on the OU campus must think so.

University President David Boren wasted no time condemning the SAE chapter, expelling two of its members and giving the others a day to clear out of their house. Though OU may punish SAE if it finds the chapter actually engaged in unlawful discrimination against African-American students, it shouldn't punish the fraternity members solely for the content of their expression.

Many people might find this disappointing. Indeed, punishing those who engage in offensive expression is perennially popular because it gives the impression that we're "doing something" about the problem of racism, sexism and bigotry. In France, for instance, Holocaust denial has long been illegal, and just this year the country arrested more than 70 people for praising the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.

Yet according to the Anti-Defamation League, 37 percent of the French harbor anti-Semitic opinions. In the U.S., that number is 9 percent, among the lowest in the world. While this comparison can't capture all the differences between the two nations, it strongly suggests that punishing expression is no real cure for bigotry, and refusing to punish hateful speech does not lead inevitably to its spread.

Censorship isn't necessary for those who are confident in the truth of their views. Somehow, college administrators are convinced that if they don't officially punish racism, their students will be drawn to it like moths to a flame. But there's no reason to expect that. There are myriad reasons to expect the opposite.

Instead of government crackdowns, it is far better to let the marketplace of ideas determine the social consequences for racist speech. In this instance, the OU members of SAE are not only likely to spend the rest of their college careers as pariahs but also to be hounded on social media and exposed for posterity on Google.

Baseless bigotry won't survive in a free marketplace of ideas which is what our campuses are supposed to be. College students are adults. Let's allow them to make up their own minds about what to believe, free from the coercive power of the state.

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Censorship can't cure Oklahoma frat racism