Current issues having to do with free speech are repetitive, boring and obfuscating in that they have to do with defending the rights of people not to be insulted and that makes what is no longer permissible speech very broad rather than limited to only important exceptions from free discourse. This idea that people are free from being offended has been a major change in discourse, and was inaugurated, as best I can tell, when universities decided or some of the students decided that classrooms were safe spaces where professors had to be warned if they said something controversial or contrary so as not to make students uncomfortable rather than regard classrooms as places whose purpose was to make students uncomfortable with their received opinions. There are any number of school boards who insist that the curriculum should not include books or ideas that offend either Blacks or whites, as when Governor of Texas Greg Abbott says that no group is to be denigrated in history books, which means you can’t decide that slavery was a bad thing because the white people cannot be thought of having done bad things. I think of such people as Gov. Abbott as being culturally illiterate because they are opting out of trying to understand how complicated things are but retain a naive view of all people as being well meaning rather than having views placed in their own contexts that nonetheless result in differential advantages. Neither slave owner or enslaved can be condemned, in that point of view, even though they are all long dead, and that is to the detriment of all and whatever are the descendents.
Here are two recent examples where speakers are punished for misunderstanding what the speakers had said. Whoopie Goldberg, on the view, had said that the holocauset was not racist because it involved white people persecuting other white people. She was criticized on her program right away and that should have been the end of it, the purported view of “The View '' is that women present their own points of view on controversial issues. But instead, CBS suspended Gopdberg for two weeks for having said what she said, which seems to me an insult against free speech even if it were done by a network rather than the government. Goldberg had been hyperbolic and inartfully stated but she had a point to make that is worth listening to even if I disagree about it. What she was saying is that racial warfare is the only real conflict, and should not be considered as genocide because white people have been killing off white people for a long time and for many reasons but racial genoicide has to do with the great divide between whites and blacks. The Holocaust was a sideshow and Goldberg not needing to add a deplorable one, that avoids the central issue. I take the alternative view that genocide is genocide, whether in Armenia or Cambodia or in Western China. After the Second World War, the mantra was “never again” not only for Jews, but the truth is that there have been so mny genocides in Rwanda and Sbrinitza, that it is laughable to invoke that mantra. Whatever the size of the genocide it is always outrageous and not to be circumscribed to be applied to only black people, who are being vainglorious to make that claim for just themselves. I thought a friend had it right when she said she would not have had the intestinal fortitude to survive the Middle Passage and I agreed that I would not have had the fortitude to survive Auschwitz, assuming courage might have made a difference. Don’t engage in comparative genocides. But Goldberg did make that point and should be left to be criticized by her colleagues.
It is a cultural fact, however, that groups that become prominent or vindicated overdraw the significance of their own accomplishments or put them under the limelight. Big studio executives emphasized the Irish and the Italians so as to gather their immigrant histories as part of the American enterprise. Current focus on African Americans overdo the significance of African American history as when the placards illustrating the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture (written anonymously by a company hired to put the exhibit together) claim that the Black slaves had produced the economic surplus tht allowed the Northern industrial states to prosper, when in fact money was sent from North to South and the South was in economic poverty throughout the ante Bellum era and through Jim Crow, except for Texas because of oil. But the danger here is to overreach, to make racism and the Black population the central feature of American history, which is what the 1619 Project claims, even though “central feature” is a vague analysis, and is wrong in that the Northeast and the Great Plains were independent sources of wealth and influence in America, having their own resources and distinctive peoples, while the South was just one region allowed to linger in its ancient ways until after the Second World War when it became unseemly to allow its southern racil customs to remain.
This again becomes a free speech issue because local groups want to censor history so as to insure that no white students are offended even s black students are not to be offended by being shown in history just how awful slavery was, how demeaning and exploitive it was, something anticipated in Ellison’s “Invisible Man” where white benefactors are to be exposed to some lamentable black conditions but not the most lamentable of them lest their benefactors be turned off their munificence. So leave Goldberg alone. What she said was incorrect or exaggerated but just a comment made on a program where people are supposed to say their points of view and so not to be punished, however mildly.
Here is another example of this same sort which relies, I think, on a deliberate misunderstanding of what has been said. One Ilya Shapiro is a lecturer of Georgetown Law School who was suspended because of a statement she uttered on January 26th and was subsequently suspended. She said that Biden should nominate Sri Srinivasan as the first Asian Indian American. “But she doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser Black women.” This might seem a perfectly reasonable judgment. The claim is not that other Black women are not qualified, only that the most qualified is disqualified however much she is dark skinned, a person of color. What is required these days is an African American woman. Hardly upsetting except for those who take offense given that Kamala Harris was openly criticized as not really Black to some because she is part Asian and part Jamaican and so not at all African American. We parse ethnic lineages as we please except when they become an object for outrage. How dare you make a commonplace and get your career put in jeopardy.
Rather than consider only the principles of free speech and the distortions that turn it into censored speech, consider the social facts and processes by which free speech is alive and conventional. The usual view is that the American people voice their god given right to sound off on any matter that concerns them, as old as and not in principle different from the town hall meetings in New England, according to de Tocqueville, when citizens gathered together on market day to say whatever they wanted to say about common affairs and resulted in a binding vote for the community. Free speech is a birthright and a custom. I would suggest just the opposite. Even if you have the right to yell at the umpire, the fact of the matter is that people are reticent about saying anything controversial to their peers or their colleagues, much less their social and political superiors. Outspoken people are regarded as loudmouths and embarrassments. Better to stay cool. People are deluded into thinking otherwise is, in part, the result of public opinion polls regularly reported by news reports about what people think about various issues and whether the nation is ‘in the right direction” or not or who they plan to vote for. But these are forced choices in that people are asked to answer what has been put in front of them as the alternatives. I am not at all sure that saying America is on the right course is meaningful. On which issue or what indicator? Maybe economic growth is good, if you are aware of the facts, or abortion is bad because that is the signal issue that shows America is off course or just demented? A plan to vote for Biden or Trump would seem clear enough because those are the two names that have been bandied about, but in the early primaries someone can say they will vote for whatever name on the list is a name that is familiar and people don’t want to seem ignorant of what are the available names.
My sense, based on speaking with students for many years, is that many of them do not vote because they do not feel confident enough about who is running and what are the issues and so don’t bother taking part in the vote. They are intimidated by the political process and demure even though they have cultural issues which lead them to support orn not support abortion or a Build Back Better Bill because of what they have heard from influentials such as clergy or the guy at the bar or an articulate fellow student.Politics is, therefore, just the opposite of always being local. It is about what are in the currents in the air which made some people to decide to give Trump a chance because how bad could he be and knowing for some reason that Hillary was said by others to be duplicitous or untrustworthy.The result is that people are passive in their free speech and so leave speech to the few who care about it. Custom will change soon enough, one slogan or fad replacing another, and so people will think for a while that Trump is outsp[oken rather than just nasty and then move on to deal with how Biden speaks so slowly and mildly, however decisive as he may indeed be, and those momentary and distorting impressions, are the substitute for the exercise of free speech. Tom Paine’ “Common Sense'' is supposed to have electrified the American populace, and maybe that did happen in that revolutionary climate, but most of the time, politics is a low priority if there are reruns of Lawrence Welk available.
So most people don’t exercise free speech in that they are open to be convinced by others to change their mind, but rather go along with the groups of which they are a part as to how to vote or express themselves, should they be inclined to express thought rather than have a slogan on a placard whereby to identify themselves. Black voters march to the polls together, and so do other ethnic groups like orthodox jews or members of a union local or following the advice of an evangelical leader who doesn’t know much about politics even if he is well read in Scripture. Free speech has nothing to do with it-- except at those points in time when uneducated people decide to exercise their influence through thoughts unclearly developed but seem spurned by an outrage grown not out of downward mobility but rather the sense that upward mobility makes them feel free to exercise their clout whether or not they have pondered the alternatives, at which that point, they have become free radicals looking to find a bond, which seems to have been the case of January 6’ers who did not consider how grave it is to inflict a violent insurrection for the first time in American history. They did not know what they had unleashed. Can Mitch McConnell put the genie back in the bottle and go back to a time when the population and the electorate are compliant and free speech is the avail of elites concerned about it, as when deciding whether Joyce’s “Ulysses” can be published in the United States and whether to pre-censor the Pentagon Papers, rather than on whether school boards can decide that “Maus” presents a rather uncomfortable view of the Holocaust and so should be toned down, those by people who do not think that literature is to be challenged rather than comforted, as by their politics, where getting what you so obviously and confusedly want, regardless of how politics and the Constitution operate.