Imagine for a moment that you’re a black student at the University of Missouri, lodged deep in the heart of Middle America at a university where you are treated more like a renter or interloper than as a full owner in your academic experience. Imagine that as you’ve watched protests to your east spin out of control in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting, you’ve seen the environment at your own school trend from inhospitable to outright hostile. You’ve watched as even the most respectable of negroes were shouted down as “nig***s,” as peacefully vigilant protesters were met with similar racial epithets, and as your calls for a more inclusive campus prompted your fellow students to quite literally smear shit in the shape of a swastika, all over a bathroom you supposedly have an equal right to use.
Now imagine that the leader of your university—the man charged with creating a space where you can learn and feel at home—takes days and weeks to truly respond to your concerns. Imagine that when he does, in the face of clear and incontrovertible evidence of a racially hostile campus climate, he whitesplained to black students on just how sorry he was they “felt” there was racism.
Now imagine that in the face of this, while your campus has been turned into the functional equivalent of post-integration Birmingham, white folks claiming to span the political landscape responded for the first time not with outrage at the racism you faced, but rather, with feigned concern about protections of a First Amendment they for the first time held dear.
As white folks, we’re routinely dead wrong and dangerously so in our response on issues of race. When Freddie Gray had his neck broken by Baltimore police, I observed that the dominant white respond was fake concern for the poor business owners who might have their property damaged when justified anger spilled over onto the streets. I wrote that black people were shown justified in their anger because, to prevailing White America, there was more interest in protecting white property than speaking up on behalf of severed black bodies.
In Missouri, we see something different, but it’s all too familiar. As white folks, in response to claims of racial animus that hit too close, we’re too often engaged in a search for the first respectable distraction. It’s a cop-out of the worst kind, a means of deflecting attention from the problems at hand while shifting responsibility to do something different to those people complaining about very real racial discrimination in their corner of the world.
We choose positions that we view as unassailable. In Baltimore, we chided the black protesters for “looting” and burning property and cars. Even those white folks who weren’t calling the protesters “animals” found their feet in offering support for the faceless CVS owner who will have to re-build with the help of a healthy insurance payout. In Missouri, our search for the first respectable distraction has led us to spirited defenses of the first amendment.
It’s in these stances that writers and average Americans alike show their moral mushiness and lend credence to the claims of those black students. No one dare stand against the First Amendment, of course, so articles constructed in its defense are fighting invisible opponents. They’re strawmen designed to attach absurdity to the protesters in hopes of de-valuing the things black students are concerned with in the first place.
Let’s make one thing clear — black students at the University of Missouri aren’t undermining the foundations of the First Amendment.
Sure, it may be true that a small group of student protesters took issue with an unknown student reporter coming to take their picture. And it may also be true that a white assistant professor got way over her skis in trying to protect those students from what she believed to be a hostile media response. No irony should be lost on the fact that many articles lambasting the student response have used this white professor, and not the black students in question, as an example of this movement’s disrespect for the First Amendment.
The truth is that none of that matters. What matters is that White America has spoken up for the first time in Missouri not out of disgust for a racial climate that’s emblematic of a nation-wide problem on campuses, but rather, in support of vague notions of freedom of the press that weren’t much of a concern until White America found utility in this support.
Black students at Missouri are not pissed off that people are exercising their First Amendment rights; they’re angry with the way people are exercising those rights. Pseudo-intellectual material from the likes of Conor Friedersdorf in the apparently liberal Atlantic bemoan the fact that protesters have “weaponized” their expectation of a “safe space.” It’s the sort of tripe that could only be written by someone so detached from the realities of right-wing racial terrorism that they view hate speech as benign. In a year in America where black men are scarcely able to approach a white woman in a parking lot asking for a cigarette lighter without having guns pulled on them, and a few months removed from a young white man wiping out nine churchgoers in an act of racial terrorism, the demands of black students that they be given a safe space to learn are far from empty. They’re the cries of students who’ve come to understand that no amount of education, no amount of perceived respectability, can protect them and their bodies from destruction.
Who can blame students for demanding a safe space when dozens of black churches have been burned across the South and Midwest in response to the BlackLivesMatter movement? And who could blame them now, in an American where mass campus shootings are a new normal, after two white students were arrested for threatening to “Stand Their Ground” while murdering every black person in sight?
Of course it’s stupid to push out a member of the student media looking to cover the response to the firing of the university president. And it’s especially stupid to do so when one of the central tenets of protest is to draw media attention to the cause in question.
But who in their right mind could be critical of black students for doubting whether a reporter is there to report, or whether he’s there to distort? One doesn’t have to be a media ombudsman to find examples from the past year where media painted peaceful protesters as animals, criminals, or worse. The media in general has been no friend to the #BLM movement, insisting upon an equal time narrative in which intolerance and intolerance of intolerance are given equal respect by a disturbingly uncritical media. We exist in a media climate where local and national news sources contribute in part to perceptions among the public that black men are criminal or dangerous. Where FBI directors are allowed to spout unchecked lies about how the new movement is contributing a more dangerous operating environment for police officers.
Good and smart and effective protests don’t fear the light of media because they understand that light illuminates truth. And to point, those who would defend the First Amendment are not wrong. But they’re not right, either. They’re not right because they’re engaged in the new normal for White America. We drive along the interstate, headed toward an uncomfortable truth on the state of race in America. We slow our car to a snail’s pace, hoping desperately for some magical exit to appear like Bagger Vance out of the nothingness. We open our eyes and there it is, the chance to avoid an uncomfortable conversation by backing a horse that has no opponent. The First Amendment is important!, we scream, as if we’re going to encounter some resistance.
And when we do it, those black students and their concerns and confirmed for all to see. We don’t comment for the first time when we find that black students at our universities are being made to feel like unwanted interlopers. We don’t find the outrage or occasion to speak up when black students live under fear and school administrators use words like “feel” in the face of real racial discrimination. None of that bothers us. But let one reporter catch flack from one group of celebrating students and their misguided professor, and people who never knew they valued the press are posting menial platitudes about how “Freedom of Speech Protects us All.”
Of course it does. But forgive the black students in places like Missouri for pointing out that the first time you cared to exercise yours was not in response to hatred and bigotry, but to defend the right to use speech that you seem unwilling to unleash. Forgive the black students in places like Missouri when they point out that you’re more willing to defend the principle of freedom of speech than you are to use that freedom to speak up on their behalf. You might forgive them for de-valuing your freedom of speech, if they have done so, when you’ve de-valued your own by remaining silent in the face of demonstrated systematic oppression.