Giving a Damn by Patricia Williams

Author:Patricia Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-04-01T11:26:38+00:00

V. ‘The Eyes of the Jungle’

‘I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy.’1

We don’t like to talk about our history; we don’t like our misperceptions to be challenged. And so we live with hypocrisy and blatant double standards. When one thinks of the culture wars, one must recall that one of the most hotly contested issues of the last twenty years has been the question of freedom of speech. When university students of colour have protested the use of ethnic slurs, they are routinely met with robust cries of ‘censorship’. Yet it is rare that what goes on in universities actually constitutes legal censorship. After all, the First Amendment to the US Constitution only protects Americans from government censorship; jurisprudentially it is defined as ‘prior restraint’ by an empowered authority, usually the government. As unpleasant and wrong-headed as it may be, it does not generally encompass campus fracas in which angry, hurt, or crying students tell each other to shut up.

The true power of censorship is the chilling effect on political systems, of being surveilled and knowing you’ll be punished by state action for expressing views that are not in accord with state authority. Censorship is when politicians decide that union membership is ‘communist’ and communism is conflated with treason, as Senator Joseph McCarthy did. Censorship is when you express sympathy with #BlackLivesMatter, or take a knee, or prosecute an officer for excessive force, and, in retaliation, the police department decides it’s not going to respond to your phone calls for help in an emergency.2 Censorship is when football players who wish to express a political opinion by assuming a prayerful position – who literally get down on their knees in a posture of peace – are taunted by the President of the United States with calls that they be summarily fired.3 Censorship is when government has the power to read your emails and secretly interview your neighbours and employer and forbid them to say anything to you about it, as the USA Patriot Act putatively allows.4 We should be at least as worried about that as we are about whether sophomoric shouting matches, literally among college sophomores, constitute anything like the same.

Censorship is also voter suppression. And censorship is when the chief executive recasts the free press – the very embodiment of the First Amendment and public accountability – as ‘the enemy of the people’.5 Censorship is when a president decides to punish anyone who asks him a tough question by banning them from the White House press corps.6

The American Constitution enshrines freedom of speech, worship and publication as central in the rich tradition of Anglo-American jurisprudence. As a cultural matter, however, freedom of expression carries symbolism that exceeds legal discourse or political libertarianism; it has become a very anxiety-provoking concept at the center of our culture wars. The First Amendment is rather too often invoked as a right to spew invective or to set up conversational roadblocks, as in ‘I have my right to call you a rapist parasite, so you shut up about it.

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