Discussing free speech in the United States is a losing proposition. Every political demographic screams about hypocrisy, but doing so misses the larger point: it’s impossible to lionize speech as understood in this country without also being hypocritical. That’s because civil liberties are indivisible from the needs of power. In many cases, speech isn’t performed as a freedom; it’s an asset exploited by the shrewdest consumers.
I’m uninterested here in abstract and legal discourses on free speech. Anyone so interested can consult centuries of detailed treatises on the subject. I’m concerned with ideological conditions that inform civic participation and exclusion. Who gets to speak? Why? Under what circumstances? To which audiences? Whose speech is rewarded? Whose is punished?
Mainstream analysis of free speech doesn’t normally explore these questions, preferring the self-satisfied sensationalism of one-upping political rivals. It’s important to acknowledge that free speech isn’t ultimately an individual possession, but a luxury conditioned by status and power. No discourse exists without constant mediation. Even if somebody’s speech rights are violated, seeking redress in court can be a stressful and expensive process; becoming whole in the legal sense doesn’t always rectify the personal fallout of repression.
Free speech promises universality (and sometimes achieves that promise in court proceedings), but in the public sphere it is inconsistent, largely based on its proximity to orthodox politics or its usefulness to people invested in the status quo. Nobody gets into trouble for humoring the boss.
Recrimination for certain kinds of speech depends on insidious forces. Loss of employment (or worse) usually occurs with comments deploring sanctified institutions (police, military, borders, Wall Street), any speech, really, that considers racism or inequality a fundamental aspect of capitalism or that questions the splendor of US exceptionalism.
Nazism, for example, is more tolerated than anti-Zionism.
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Don’t act too surprised. Plenty of evidence supports the assertion. The following sections will provide a few examples. Like many outspoken anti-Zionists, I have experience of this phenomenon, so I’ll start with two events from my former life as a professor:
In the fall of 2017, students discovered that Virginia Tech, my employer for eight years, had a Nazi grad student in the English department (my former home). The Nazi threatened a Jewish classmate with mob violence on his Facebook account. Refusing to remove the student from campus or cancel his graduate assistantship, the university cited the importance of the Nazi’s “free speech.” Four years earlier, when I questioned the phrase “support our troops” in an article for Salon, the university condemned me repeatedly; some administrators wanted me fired. At the time of my tenure application in 2009, a Zionist professor attempted undermine the promotion. The same professor chaired the department that refused to discipline the Nazi.
In 2014, I sent out tweets condemning Israeli war crimes in Gaza. In response to Zionist pressure, the University of Illinois fired me from a tenured position. At the time, the university boasted an explicitly white supremacist emeritus professor who never earned managerial reproach (he’s still on the website). The university also has a decades-old history of punishing students and faculty who protest the racist “chief” mascot.
Upper administrators exalt “free speech” to the degree that it can facilitate conformity. White nationalists are inconvenient, no doubt. They cause headaches and bad publicity. But short of a national ruckus that damages the brand, they don’t bother big-money donors and other stakeholders because ethnonationalism is compatible with—and in some cases conducive to—schemes of extraction and accumulation.
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A similar case recently in the news is that of Steven Thrasher, a newly-minted PhD who provided the student address at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences commencement ceremony. In his speech, Thrasher condemned “the apartheid state government in Israel” and praised the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS] movement, something university governing boards and presidents uniformly despise.
NYU’s administration exacerbated the predictable backlash. President Andrew Hamilton deemed Thrasher’s comments “one-sided and tendentious” and then consulted Thrasher’s social media backlog, where he discovered “vile and anti-Semitic tweets”—in other words, he found displeasure with ethnic cleansing.
In principle, Thrasher said nothing inflammatory; he pointed to the evils of inequality and validated the importance of student activism, standard topics for a commencement speech. The problem wasn’t in the act of condemning an injustice, but in the subject of condemnation. Lionizing rather than complicating “free speech” can hinder a recognition that discourses circulate through and within structural disparities. Free speech cannot ascend into a universal good because in practice it functions as a limited commodity, generating strife or support depending on its service to power. Thrasher’s comments weren’t incendiary on their own, but in relation to the demographic they targeted. Context, not speech, informs the performance of civil liberties.
NYU management was more sanguine seven months earlier when word got out that neo-Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos would visit a classroom to discuss political correctness and Halloween costumes (at the invitation of now-retired professor Michael Rectenwald, another alt-righter whom management has yet to condemn). Reacting to pushback, NYU spokesperson John Beckman released a statement proclaiming, “At NYU, academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas are fundamental, guiding principles. In line with these principles, faculty have wide authority over academic matters, such as their pursuit of their research and the conduct of their classes.”
Failing to portend NYU’s one-eighty vis-à-vis Thrasher, Beckman continued, “Many institutions in our society speak with a single voice. That is not true of universities. The role of universities is to be a forum for many voices and many ideas, sometimes even ideas that are repudiated by much of the community. A controversial speaker’s appearance at a university must be understood not as the institution’s endorsement of the speaker’s views, but as the fulfillment of its commitment to the free exchange of ideas.”
Yiannopoulos’s visit was “postponed” only after New York City mayor Bill de Blasio intervened, citing safety concerns. President Hamilton has yet to disavow public support of apartheid, land theft, juridical racism, and ethnic cleansing (i.e., Zionism) at the university.
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In November, 2018, Marc Lamont Hill delivered a speech supporting Palestinian freedom at the United Nations in New York City. Zionists disliked the speech and, as is their custom, agitated to have Hill punished. CNN responded by firing Hill, a longtime analyst for the network. Temple University, Hill’s academic employer, stopped short of dismissal (though the university clearly sought ways to do it), but nevertheless validated (and encouraged) online outrage.
As the controversy gained steam, Temple’s president, Richard M. Englert, released a statement noting that “Professor Hill does not represent Temple University, and his views are his own,” while also affirming Hill’s right to speech. Through suggestive generalities, the statement hinted at the possibility of recrimination: “Temple condemns in the strongest possible terms all anti-Semitic, racist or incendiary language, hate speech, calls to violence, and the disparagement of any person or persons based on religion, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation or identity. The university, in the best interest of its community, will take necessary and proper action to protect these values when they are threatened.”
Temple’s chairman of the board, Patrick O’Connor, wasn’t as circumspect. “I’m not happy. The board’s not happy. The administration’s not happy. People wanted to fire him right away,” he declared, adding, “[Hill] blackens our name unnecessarily.” At best, charging Hill with “blackening” Temple’s name is deeply unfortunate phrasing; more likely, O’Connor was dog whistling to a reactionary donor class or disparaging the Black internationalism for which Hill is known, a politics that terrifies the establishment. In any case, intended or not, O’Connor reinforced the longtime interplay between Zionism and anti-Black racism.
The university hasn’t always been so concerned with humanistic values. In March, 2017, white nationalist groups plastered Temple’s campus with hateful stickers, leading to significant concern among ethnic and religious minorities on campus. Although the university’s student government and Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy and Leadership condemned the display, Englert and O’Connor didn’t view the neo-Nazi invasion as cause for comment.
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UC-Berkeley, perhaps the USA’s preeminent public university, brands itself as a bastion of free speech. In September, 2016, it departed from this self-image by abruptly cancelling a student-run course, “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis.” Berkeley administrators cited procedural irregularities as the reason for the cancellation, but that excuse proved faulty when the course’s instructor, Paul Hadweh, produced evidence illustrating meticulous adherence to protocol.
43 pro-Israel groups had complained to Berkeley about the course, along with Zionist faculty members. The Electronic Intifada reported “indications of pressure from the Israeli government as well.” Management had caved to their demands. After a competing backlash, Berkeley reinstated the course, but continued to harass Hadweh. Berkeley has a long history of suppressing pro-Palestine sentiment.
Then-chancellor Nicholas Dirks, who once spent $9,000 on an emergency door to escape protestors, announced that “the Dean is very concerned about a course, even a student-run course, which espouses a single political viewpoint and/or appears to offer a forum for political organizing rather than an opportunity for the kind of open academic inquiry that Berkeley is known for.”
Dirks’s bizarre closing comment left no doubt that he cancelled Hadweh’s class in order to appease Zionists: “Berkeley also takes great pride in our new kosher dining facility; vibrant Hillel chapter; the broad range of other Jewish student groups; the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies; The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life; and our Center for Jewish Studies.” The notion that a “kosher dining facility” or a collection of “Jewish Art” is incompatible with a course on recent Palestinian history exhibits more anti-Semitism than anything even the vilest Arabs of the Zionist imagination are capable of producing.
Although Hadweh, an actual student at the school, needed to be shut down, Berkeley administrators have proved more hospitable to white supremacist visitors. A few months after it nixed Hadweh’s class, management refused to cancel a Yiannopoulos event. Protestors, some using violent means, prevented the speech from happening. Then in September, 2017, Yiannopoulos was scheduled to return, along with a gaggle of prominent reactionaries.
Dirks’s successor, Carol Christ, embraced conservative marketing of the visitations as “free speech week,” announcing that “UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view.” Christ actually justified neo-Nazi grandstanding beyond free speech boilerplate: “But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint—that we’re required to allow it—but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university.” Nobody would blame Hadweh and his Palestinian colleagues for wondering why the same lofty mission didn’t apply to them.
Christ also issued the following dictum: “If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.”
This threat excluded the speakers, who were visiting specifically to perform violence, and implied that speech and terror are somehow distinct. The chancellor assigned barbarity to anti-racism activists in advance of actual mobilization, a terrific example of how white supremacy pervades the discourses of free speech and civic responsibility in the United States.
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I consider free speech necessary. Keeping censors and police away from dissent is indispensable to democracy. In a capitalist economy, though, corporations limit speech beyond reach of the state. (It happens in any kind of economy, but under capitalism repression is built into the profit motive.) Coercion haunts the pursuit of livelihood. And the state selectively defends civil liberties based on ideological need.
For these reasons, free speech absolutism—the notion that all speech should be equally protected under the law—is less attractive than it sounds. It doesn’t adequately address the inequalities that attend to acts of testimony and witness. In particular, it elides the use of free speech as a discourse to foster notions of civility that dispossess communities lacking political or economic status. All too often “free speech” is a pretext for luminaries of the pundit class to shit on communities they deem barbaric.
The examples I’ve discussed in this piece all involve Black and Arab scholars, which isn’t a coincidence (although focusing on them was a choice). Time and again we’ve seen university administrators accommodate neo-Nazis with pious encomia to free speech only to cosign or encourage repression when it comes to Palestine and other matters of anti-racism. Those administrators aren’t governed by atavistic loathing; they loath the idea of offending sites of power.
And they know that white nationalism isn’t a hindrance to capitalism; in fact, it facilitates the civic rituals that reify their class interests. Black and Palestinian activism, in contrast, is inherently revolutionary. That’s why either is unwelcome on campus—and why together they’re capable of forcing the ruling class to abandon the lie that liberty is universal.
Thank you for this post. It is excellent, and articulates so much of what I want to say but haven’t been able to (at least as clearly).
You betray your rhetorical excesses and political illiteracy when you call Michael Rectenwald “alt-right.” You cannot provide a shred of evidence to that effect. No wonder your speech is curtailed. You’re off the rails.
The students within the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement have amply displayed their preference of violence when pro-Israel speakers come to speak. Perhaps that is why a class promoting such incitement to violence was cancelled. It is only natural that the Jewish community, proud Zionists and worried parents, would protest the use of university grounds and public funds for such a class.