I know what “okay” means in normal conversation. But if you ask me if I am okay with the KKK marching on campus, I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean that I think they might have the right to do so under the Constitution, or that I would be happy to see them march there, or something else?
The city attorney of Berkeley doesn’t get to interpret the First Amendment in a way different from the Supreme Court.
As to this:
I’m getting pretty tired of this kind of comment, but I guess I will say it’s pretty ironic if black people think the Constitution mainly protects white people.
I would also urge @TheAtlantic to note the direction this discussion has taken. This is what I was talking about.
Bay, you seem to be saying that at colleges in the US, students already have the right to sing songs like the SAE lynching song in public. I shouldn’t worry that students with that right will turn their colleges into Lord of the Flies University, because students already have the right, and yet colleges haven’t turned into Lord of the Flies.
I say that students do not believe they could sing happy lynching songs at their college in public without official sanction. Good grief, Oklahoma just threw two kids out of school for singing the song in private! A student would have to be truly oblivious to think they could get away with it in public.
“I’m getting pretty tired of this kind of comment” You mean you’re getting tired of me presenting an AA’s perspective on this whole SAE thing? I’m sorry, is CC reserved for whites only?
I disagreed with Hunt about the frats, as I thought and still think that a university has the right not to be forced to support an organization so opposed to its ideals and mission.
However, I always agreed with Hunt regarding the individual students’ right of free speech. The Lord of the Flies vs Arcadia vision seems to overlook the most powerful weapon, which is for us to exercise our own free speech.
We should be expressing our opposition just as loudly and just as publicly. Would a group of rich white kids march across the quad singing about lynching if they knew from previous experience that their own peers would reject them if they did?
It isn’t the isolated punishment of specific individuals that fights this pernicious and casual racism. What allows the creeping growth of racism is when a friend at lunch makes a racist comment and we sit silent, or worse, when we smile however weakly at the joke because the one who made the joke is rich, or has a higher title, or is more popular. Or when we get a racist cartoon in our email and just let it go without comment. Or when half the members of Congress saw video of a man man spitting on Rep John Lewis, and said nothing, because the spitter was the correct party. Or when pictures of the anniversary of the Selma march are emailed around with the caption “there must be a KFC on the other side of the bridge”, and the people on the email chain respond “LOL”.
It’s the constant casual acceptance of racism that leads the ignorant or weak minded to believe it’s all ok. It’s not up to the government to police this. It’s up to the rest of us to grow a backbone and speak up, and not just in chat rooms, but on the equivalent of our own frat buses that we figuratively ride every day.
Hunt, it’s breathtakingly obvious that if students sang that lynching song in public on purpose on any campus, they’d get punished. The punishment might later be overturned in court, but most kids don’t want to be test cases to protect their right to sing racist songs. They are deterred from singing racist songs in public (assuming they would like to) because they know full well they’d be punished for it.
@LakeWashington why would I read material from some one who supported the war in Iraq, is anti abortion, is a member of the conservative Cato institute, believed in weapons of mass destruction and got fired from the Village Voice??? If I want to do that I can turn on fox news
Not at all. My position is that people DO control their behavior for fear of punishment, illegal or otherwise. I argue that students DO refrain from speech that would be punished, even if the punishment would be illegal.
I say that when Hunt runs the University of Hunt, and announces that lynching songs and rape songs are perfectly allowable, some students are going to prance around campus singing the SAE lynching song, and chanting “No means Yes, Yes means anal.” We already know some students like those songs and chants, and now you’ve announced that they can sing them and chant them in public, so they will.
Hayden, I actually agree with you. My beef with Hunt and Pizzagirl, etc. is not so much on the legal aspects of the “hostile environment” argument. Rather, I am upset that they would make light of the idea that AAs could possibly FEEL threatened by such talk. Well, I am an AA and I feel threatened by such talk. They have both posted words to the effect that it is ridiculous for anyone to feel directly threatened by the words of a bunch of "good’ white kids who happened to be drunk and get a little out of control. Well, I would feel directly threatened by such kids. Maybe you think I’m crazy for feeling this way. Or weak. But, I would venture to say that I am not alone in this.
Where’s @TheAtlantic ? I’d like him or her to note this, for educational purposes.
But Zekesima, rather than just calling you out for saying something about me that isn’t true, let me ask you a question. What exactly is the threat that you feel exposed to by the OU chant–or what threat you believe an AA student at OU would feel? Do you mean to say that you would feel there was a danger that you would be lynched, or physically harmed? Or do you mean something else?
Sorry, Hunt, I didn’t mean that you in any way approve of rape songs and lynching songs. I don’t for a moment believe that. But when you have your press conference, and the reporter asks if University of Hunt allows students to sing rape songs and lynching songs without official punishment, you would say that it does, correct?
A very recent First Amendment case out of a Court of Appeals. Missouri tried to ban protests outside houses of worship. A clear First Amendment violation.
I liked the ACLU spokesman’s comment saying that it’s as if the Missouri legislature asked “What would Putin do?”
No, I would say that our school strictly adheres to the First Amendment, and each case will be judged on the specific facts. And that’s what I would do–as opposed to what Boren did.
@zekesima “My beef with Hunt and Pizzagirl, etc. is not so much on the legal aspects of the “hostile environment” argument. Rather, I am upset that they would make light of the idea that AAs could possibly FEEL threatened by such talk.”
Can you be specific about this? Please add a specific quote from them. I suspect that may not be quite what they said.
I don’t have the time now to look it up, but there was an AA kid repeatedly harassed at Cal State San Jose recently by his hallmates over several weeks. THIS is the kind of thing I would be afraid of in an environment where such a song could be sung so publicly (to me, singing on a bus with 50 people is public). I would not want to send my children to the kind of school where kids feel comfortable singing such songs and openly expressing such sentiments.