Must we allow symbols of racism on public land?
Colleen Walsh, Harvard Staff Writer/ Harvard Gazette
June 19, 2020
A 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center found there are more than 1,700 monuments to the Confederacy still in public spaces. Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian of U.S. slavery, legal scholar, and member of the Presidential Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, spoke with the Gazette about the issue. Gordon-Reed is a professor of history and the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School. She won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her explosive 2008 work, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.”…
GAZETTE: What do you say to those who argue that the removal of such statues in prominent public settings dishonors the memory of those who died fighting for the Confederacy?
GORDON-REED: I would say there are other places for that — on battlefields and cemeteries. The Confederates lost the war, the rebellion. The victors, the thousands of soldiers — black and white — in the armed forces of the United States, died to protect this country. I think it dishonors them to celebrate the men who killed them and tried to kill off the American nation. The United States was far from perfect, but the values of the Confederacy, open and unrepentant white supremacy and total disregard for the humanity of black people, to the extent they still exist, have produced tragedy and discord. There is no path to a peaceful and prosperous country without challenging and rejecting that as a basis for our society.
GAZETTE: Many believe that taking the statues down is an attempt to cover up or erase history. Do you agree?
GORDON-REED: No. I don’t. History will still be taught. We will know who Robert E. Lee was. Who Jefferson Davis was. Who Frederick Douglass was. Who Abraham Lincoln was. There are far more dangerous threats to history. Defunding the humanities, cutting history classes and departments. Those are the real threats to history.
Joshua F.J. Inwood, Associate Professor of Geography Senior Research Associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State
Derek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee
The Conversation
June 4, 2017
Monuments and other commemorative sites tell at least two stories, according to sociologist James Loewen. The first is the story of the people and events commemorated by the memorial. The other is a deeper tale of how the monument was created, by whom and for what political purpose.
Memorials, thus, are shaped by a broad range of political, economic and social relationships. For example, the contested Confederate memorials of New Orleans, along with those in many other cities, were dedicated during a Jim Crow era in which whites actively discriminated against African-Americans.
In this respect, the monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans and many other cities are doubly problematic. They not only publicly honor the Confederacy, but also are a symbol of an era that saw the continuation of institutionalized racism and black disenfranchisement. During the era of segregation white elites employed these statues to take advantage of the racial anxieties of poor whites and to remind civil rights-seeking black communities of who really mattered and belonged (and who did not) in the city.
Hopefully we can at this point dispense with any absurd rebuttals from any free-speech absolutists about <something something> slippery slopes and <something something> letting ideas defeat ideas, or similar nonsensical pronouncements, pronouncements which only seem reasonable to people who reside in a snowglobe of safety and privilege.
I addressed this (to quote a politician many here may be familiar with) malarkey in a previous diary:
White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy: hate speech is never harmless. (Sept. 26, 2017)
Those that insist on an absolute ‘all speech must be allowed’ standard, and claiming the First Amendment requires this, rely on an unsupported assumption: the absence of substantial harm caused by the simple act of utterance of hate speech. This assumption is false.
The assumption that to allow hate speech to be expressed is, by itself, harmless, if not ‘beneficial to the marketplace of ideas’, and similarly, the naive belief that ‘the best ideas will win out’, only have merit in the abstract, and come from a place of privilege.
No reasonable reading of American or world history bears these assumptions out.
Hate speech is always harmful, as Prof. Frederick Schauer explicates in his article The Sociology of the Hate Speech Debate, published in the Villanova Law Review:
I do not believe that we protect speech because it is harmless,or even because its harms, individually or in the aggregate, are smaller than the harms caused by non-speech conduct.23 Rather,existing free speech principles are based on protecting speech despite the harm it may cause. My aim here is not to explain why this is so. Rather, it is merely to point out that insofar as widely believed free speech rationales (whether sound or not) do in fact focus on harmlessness (and note here the frequency with which the harmlessness claim is cloaked in "speech is the symptom and not the cause" language), then those who rely on such rationales are open to the claim that because this speech is harmful then it may be regulated consistent with an existing understanding of the First Amendment.Thus, when those who are injured by hate speech call attention to that injury, and challenge those who deny the injury (usually by using the term "offense," the word most commonly employed by those who want to trivialize what someone else claims is a harm),2 4 the step from the injury to regulation is one that paradoxically has been created by much of the free speech culture itself… (pg. 805)
The process of normalization of bigotry, for example, allows it to flourish, thus leading to more hate speech that is not recognized as such, and to overtly violent and destructive acts. Each time hate speech is promoted, it both a) injures people, and b) contributes to the culture in which bigotry is reified as the norm…
Only those that live in a world of privilege and security have the luxury of claiming ‘all speech must be permitted, in all circumstances’, because they are not on the receiving end of the brutality of bigoted culture, and the speech that perpetuates it:
… the true objects of these regulations are the legions of students and faculty who, as a result of this whole controversy, are now more sensitive to the possibility that what they say may seriously impair the educational opportunities of others. Maybe, as proponents of the "anti-political-correctness"movement would have it, some of this reluctance to speak has been unfortunate. 38 But not every socially-induced refusal to speak, even on a university campus, is a bad thing, and although it is unfortunate when things that should be said are not, it is also unfortunate when things that should not be said are said. (pg. 819)
To disregard the severity of the variety of harms caused by hate speech is to minimize the suffering of those injured— itself an expression of the inherent bigotry of the society, in which the suffering of those subjected to the effects of bigotry is of no importance, or is claimed not to exist as real suffering, or real harm, at all, because it is only their perception. (This is a familiar dodge on the part of white supremacists, misogynists, religious bigots and homophobes: their hate speech has been ‘misperceived’ by its intended victims).
Profs. Katherine Gelber and Luke McNamara, writing in the journal Social Identities, dismantle the fiction that there harms of hate speech are inconsequential, or non-existent:
Evidencing the harms of hate speech
In assessing the harms of hate speech, there are two distinctions in the literature we will disaggregate for the purposes of our argument. The first is a distinction between two types of harm, and the second is between two types of hate speech events. Both are addressed in our study. The literature distinguishes between constitutive and consequential harms (Maitra &McGowan, 2012b, p. 6); namely, between harms that are occasioned in the saying of a hate speech act, and harms that occur as a result of it. The former includes the work of Langton, who has argued that ‘speech can subordinate in virtue of unfairly ranking women as inferior’,and Hornsby and McGowan who have separately shown how hate speech can silence its targets(cited in Maitra & McGowan, 2012b, pp. 7-8). Matsuda has written persuasively of individual harms including psychological distress and risk of destruction to one’s self-esteem, and social harms such as restrictions on freedom of movement and association (1993). This is consistent with findings from psychology that individuals subjected to non-physical discrimination suffer harms to their physical and mental health (Meyer, 2003; Vijleveld et. Al., 2012; Anderson,2013; Paradies et. Al., 2013; Gee, 2002; Harris et. Al., 2006; Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, 2012). Indirect effects include harms to dignity, ‘disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard’ (Williams, 1991, p. 73), and the maintenance of power imbalances within social hierarchies of race (Allbrook, 2001; Bloch & Dreher, 2009; Dunn &Nelson, 2011). (pg. 2, emphasis added)
By listening to the accounts of those subjected to hate speech, and documenting its effects, Gelber and McNamara make plain that the damage of hate speech is all too real, and devastating:
Being racially abused on a train and in a supermarket, ‘In both incidents, I deeply felt my human right as a citizen or simply a passenger was violated.’ (13)Interviewee was told that he couldn’t be seen in the dark: ‘he was like saying that we were too black and that he couldn’t even recognize that there were people there. He could only [see] the white people in the room.’ (24b) (pg. 8)
On media commentary on who ‘qualifies’ as a ‘real’ Aboriginal person: ‘So they’re taking away the right of self-determination of Aboriginal people to define ourselves as people.’ (3)‘You didn’t want to be identified as a Vietnamese person.’ (18)‘Those women wearing hijab are targeted by young people … some women even desperately avoid wearing hijab.’ (29)‘I stopped speaking Arabic in public after the Tampa.11 Because Mr Howard stands there in parliament, “We don’t want those kinds of people”. I have been in Australia 30 years by then. And I was very, very offended.’ (33)‘Well in my workplace, and I work in a government department, I definitely never use my language or my ethnicity ... I just wanted to fit in like everyone else, because I heard a lot of the crap that was going on about Arabs and Lebanese and ... I was not one of them, I was Australian.’ (39) (pg. 8)
What is overlooked, ignored, or simply unrecognized by free speech absolutists is that when hate speech is permitted, the social environment becomes a landscape of direct, unremitting personal injury to those subjected to it:
… the harms attested to by interviewees – as experienced, perceived and feared – bear a close resemblance to the harms alleged in the literature, and are both constitutive and consequential. Consequential harms included persuading others to believe negative stereotypes, conditioning the environment such that racism is normalized and causing hearers to imitate the behaviour of hate speakers. Constitutive harms included subordination, silencing,fear, victimisation, emotional symptoms, restrictions on freedom, lowering of self-esteem,maintenance of power imbalances, and undermining of human dignity. (pg. 9, emphasis added)
To claim that the society benefits ‘as a whole’ when we tolerate hate speech, is to exclude those harmed by it from the ‘society as a whole’, and in this sense, perpetuating the very aims of those that propound bigotry.