April 2015
Is an academic discussion of free speech potentially traumatic? A recent panel
for Smith College alumnae aimed at “challenging the
ideological echo chamber” elicited this ominous “trigger/content warning” when a
transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: “Racism/racial slurs, ableist
slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant
language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence,
references to antisemitic violence.”
No one on this panel, in which I participated, trafficked in slurs. So what
prompted the warning?
Smith President Kathleen
McCartney had
joked, “We’re just
wild
and crazy,
aren’t we?”
In the
transcript, “crazy” was replaced by the notation: “[ableist slur].”
One of my fellow panelists mentioned that the State Department had for a time
banned the words “jihad,” “Islamist” and “caliphate” — which the transcript
flagged as “anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language.”
I described the case of a Brandeis professor disciplined for saying “wetback”
while explaining its use as a pejorative. The word was replaced in the
transcript by “[anti-Latin@/anti-immigrant slur].” Discussing the teaching of
“Huckleberry Finn,” I questioned the use of euphemisms such as “the n-word” and,
in doing so, uttered that forbidden word. I described what I thought was the
obvious difference between quoting a word in the context of discussing language,
literature or prejudice and hurling it as an epithet.
Two of the panelists challenged me. The audience of 300 to 400 people listened
to our spirited, friendly debate — and didn’t appear angry or shocked. But back
on campus, I was quickly branded a racist, and I was charged in the Huffington
Post with committing “an explicit act of racial violence.” McCartney
subsequently apologized that “some students and faculty were hurt” and made to “feel unsafe” by my
remarks.
Unsafe? These days, when students talk
about threats
to their safety and demand access to “safe spaces,” they’re often talking about
the threat of unwelcome speech and demanding protection from the emotional
disturbances sparked by unsettling ideas. It’s not just rape that some women on
campus fear: It’s discussions of rape. At Brown University, a scheduled debate
between two feminists about rape culture was
criticized for, as the Brown Daily Herald put it, undermining “the
University’s mission to create a safe and supportive environment for survivors.”
In a school-wide e-mail, Brown President Christina Paxon emphasized her belief
in the existence of rape culture and invited students to an alternative lecture,
to be given at the same time as the debate. And the Daily Herald reported that
students who feared being “attacked by the viewpoints” offered at the debate
could instead “find a safe space” among “sexual assault peer educators, women
peer counselors and staff” during the same time slot. Presumably they all shared
the same viewpoints and could be trusted not to “attack” anyone with their
ideas.
How did we get here? How did a verbal defense of free speech become tantamount
to a hate crime and offensive words become the equivalent of physical assaults?
You can credit — or blame — progressives for this enthusiastic embrace of
censorship. It reflects, in part, the influence of three popular movements
dating back decades: the feminist anti-porn crusades, the pop-psychology
recovery movement and the emergence of multiculturalism on college campuses.
In the 1980s, law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin showed
the way, popularizing a view of free speech as a barrier to equality. These two
impassioned feminists framed pornography — its production, distribution and
consumption — as an assault on women. They devised a novel definition of
pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights, and championed a model
anti-porn ordinance that would authorize civil actions by any woman “aggrieved”
by pornography. In 1984, the city of Indianapolis adopted the measure, defining
pornography as a “discriminatory practice,” but it was quickly struck down in
federal court as unconstitutional. “Indianapolis justifies the ordinance on the
ground that pornography affects thoughts,” the court
noted. “This is thought control.”
So MacKinnnon and Dworkin lost that battle, but their successors are winning the
war. Their view of allegedly offensive or demeaning speech as a civil rights
violation, and their conflation of words and actions, have helped shape campus
speech and harassment codes and nurtured progressive hostility toward free
speech.
The recovery movement, which flourished in the late ’80s and early ’90s, adopted
a similarly dire view of unwelcome speech. Words wound, anti-porn feminists and
recovering co-dependents agreed. Self-appointed recovery experts, such as the
best-selling author John Bradshaw, promoted the belief that most of us are
victims of abuse, in one form or another. They broadened the definition of abuse
to include a range of common, normal childhood experiences, including being
chastised or ignored by your parents on occasion. From this perspective, we are
all fragile and easily damaged by presumptively hurtful speech, and censorship
looks like a moral necessity.
These ideas
were
readily absorbed
on college campuses embarking
on a commendable drive for diversity. Multiculturalists sought to protect
historically disadvantaged students from speech considered racist, sexist,
homophobic or otherwise discriminatory. Like abuse, oppression was defined
broadly. I remember the first time, in the early ’90s, that I heard a Harvard
student describe herself as oppressed, as a woman of color. She hadn’t been
systematically deprived of fundamental rights and liberties. After all, she’d
been admitted to Harvard. But she had been offended and unsettled by certain
attitudes and remarks. Did she have good reason to take offense? That was an
irrelevant question. Popular therapeutic culture defined verbal “assaults” and
other forms of discrimination by the subjective, emotional responses of
self-proclaimed victims.
This reliance on subjectivity, in the interest of equality, is a recipe for
arbitrary, discriminatory enforcement practices, with far-reaching effects on
individual liberty. The tendency to take subjective allegations of victimization
at face value — instrumental in contemporary censorship campaigns — also leads
to the presumption of guilt and disregard for due process in the progressive
approach to alleged sexual assaults on campus.
This is a dangerously misguided approach to justice.
“Feeling realities” belong in a therapist’s office. Incorporated into laws and
regulations, they lead to the soft authoritarianism that now governs many
American campuses. Instead of advancing equality, it’s teaching future
generations of leaders the “virtues” of autocracy.
Wendy Kaminer is the author of eight books, including “A Fearful Freedom:
Women’s Flight From Equality.”
Washington Post, February 20, 2015.
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