is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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on free speech, civility, and white privilege.
Words have a history, and can mean different things. Sometimes this matters not only because usages might be misunderstood if we don’t get our definitions straight, but because privilege imposes itself through certain ways of speaking. Recent defenses of “freedom of speech” against students of color protesting on campuses across the country fall into this category.
I’ll begin with an example from another kind of conflict, to set the scene for the point I want to make. The academic discipline of philosophy (which I would like to hold separate from philosophy as a practice or a way of living) is very white and male. If you look at who has the jobs and power pretty much anywhere, you can verify my claim. That is one reason why “civility” is a fraught term within the academic discipline of philosophy. There is a by-now long history of women and people of color trying to give voice to what’s wrong with working conditions or disciplinary boundary-policing and being silenced or ignored by the majority or those who have power (white/male). Then perhaps those women and people of color decide to repeat themselves, or speak more loudly or insistently, because they know when they aren’t being treated well. Then they’ll be called uncivil. Another silencing tool: those who have always failed to hear you will now tell you how you ought to frame the thing they aren’t going to listen to anyway. In doing so they’ll blame you for their own failures of hearing. It isn’t that they won’t challenge their own presuppositions or interrogate their own privilege, they claim, it’s that your speech is not civil enough to be heard or to get the job of good argumentation done.
This is a tough one for me, because I think civility is an important virtue. Coming from a family full of yelling hotheads, I have worked hard to cultivate civility as my own property. And it often pays handsome dividends. But I am also aware of how easily claims about civility can be used as a form of silencing. The word has a double valence. And those who use it as a silencing tool tend to be those who have the most white privilege and, perhaps, the least consciousness of how whiteness is not neutrality but a well-developed field of valuation that has already ruled out many other valuable ways of being.
So, while I value civility, I am not going to let demands for it overrule other important values like equality or justice.
Now, back to recent college protests. Meaningful freedom isn’t absolute license. It is a liberty measured against other important values. If you want to claim the freedom to speak, you ought to give careful thought to the conditions you’re creating in the specific context in which you are making that claim. If students of color don’t want to talk to the press at every moment (given how little true understanding the press tends to give to minority populations), or if they are trying to tell you that they do not feel safe on your college campus because of institutional racism and/or your own assumptions about what neutral speech is, or if they are calling for limits on racially harassing language, why aren’t you listening? Why are you, instead of listening, demanding to be heard and then calling that freedom of speech?
Brittney Cooper makes the point in a recent Salon article: “The suggestion that Black college students who ask not to be confronted with Blackface on Halloween or not to be called ‘nigger’ as they walk through campus are somehow seeking to undercut the power and importance of the Bill of Rights evinces a poor understanding of American History. If the defense of freedom means always defending the right of white people to engage in racial recklessness at the expense of racial minorities, then perhaps we should consider whether freedom is the thing for which we are really fighting.”
In other words, your demand to be heard without listening is not a defense of freedom of speech, it is a defense of white privilege. If you paid attention to the specific context in which this clash of values surfaces, you would see that freedom of speech freed of that context is too blunt an instrument. Cooper points out that if those who are outraged by imagined infringements of their freedom of speech really listened to what students of color had to say, a whole new field of values about what matters about life on college campuses would come into play. Freedom of speech, critical thinking, open dialogue and the challenging clash of different ideas would still matter. But so would policing practices, diversity of faculty, staff and students, the invisibility of privilege to itself, and awareness of more cultures than the white norm of the average elite institution.
So, while I value freedom of speech, and would defend that value even for those who are speaking words that I do not agree with, I am not going to sit here and let you tell me that what you are defending is freedom of speech when you haven’t taken the time to listen to the thing you claim represents a threat to that freedom. This is no small issue. Every day the news provides us with new examples of how lives depend on it. Unarmed black men are shot in the street while white mass murderers are taken alive. Over and over again. It should not be possible any longer for anyone to hide from the truth that this comes from a deeply entrenched heritage of white supremacy.
So, if you’re white and you think what is happening in this country has nothing to do with you, ask yourself why you think that. It might be because you think you’re not racist and have never done anything to harm anyone else. But even if that’s true—and it might not be—but even if it’s true, you are using the wrong idea of responsibility to think about this. It’s not about what you’ve done and intended. It’s about what you’re part of.
You are part of a society based on white privilege. And that means that if you are white, a lot of things you take for granted are unfair to other people. It is easy, if you don’t go out of the way to look, to neglect to see that, because that’s how privilege works.
White privilege does not mean that your life has been easy, that you are rich or have never faced serious obstacles. It does not mean you haven’t worked for what you have. It means that you are white and therefore have been given certain benefits that non-white persons cannot take for granted and may never receive.
When you think you are only responsible for things you actively do, and you know you don’t actively do racist things, it’s easy to feel fine about your contribution to a larger social setting. But racism doesn’t thrive only because overtly racist people do bad racist things to other people. It thrives because lots of other people either don’t notice the injustice or do nothing about it because they don’t feel responsible for it. But if racism is thriving because these good people are doing nothing, they are responsible too. We are all responsible for the worlds we build. And we build worlds by living the way we do. That is the story about responsibility you should be telling yourself, if you want to be an ally against racism. Ask yourself, what is the best way to live equally with others?
Learn how to think about your own privilege. Do that for the sake of others, but also do that for yourself.
On the other hand, if you’re white and you are upset by what’s happening and you do feel like you are responsible but have no idea what you should do about it, I think the most important thing you can do is learn to listen. Don’t enter conversations assuming you already know what the right answer is, what a just outcome is, or how to fix things. Your privilege will have made you blind to some realities that you won’t know about unless you take the time to hear about them from others. Lots of people who want to do what’s right and think they are listening are also constantly failing to hear. Don’t be that person. Teach yourself to listen for your own failures of hearing.
And remember to do more than listen. Whenever you see or hear someone being racist, say something. It’s up to you to decide how much engagement you want, and what kind of engagement. But don’t just ignore it. Make racism visible. Participate in transforming your surroundings.
Ask yourself how your own assumptions about truth and value may have contributed to building this world that supports oppression, discrimination, even death—in the name of what? Freedom of speech or the liberty to own a gun? To put this with as much civility as I can muster: No.
11:15 a.m. - December 03, 2015
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