Hate Speech

The legacy of the Civil War has been making a lot of news in recent months. Foremost has been the summary expulsion of a chapter of ΣΆΈ from the University of Oklahoma when some of its members were found to have been singing songs filled with racial epithets and threats of lynchings. More recently, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a lawsuit resulting from the refusal of the State of Texas to permit the Sons of the Confederate Veterans to offer a vanity license plate that featured the image of the Confederate battle flag.

The behavior of the college boys was appalling, and the refusal of Texas to endorse an image that is indelibly associated with racially-based American slavery was courageous. In a society such as ours, with many conflicting interests and concerns, nothing is ever simple, and a discussion of them that tries to address the issues tends to become so nuanced that it cannot hope to persuade anyone that it is correct. Even in the wave of outrage that approved the actions taken by the University of Oklahoma, and in the discussions of the Texas license plate case, there could be heard the reminders, first, that they raised First Amendment issues of freedom of speech and, second, that popular speech does not need a legal protection. These are important points to keep in mind.

Such events are merely the latest incarnations of an enduring problem of how a changing American society deals with the racist elements of its past – not merely the legacy of slavery but the extended post-Civil War period in which racial injustice was enforced by law and largely condoned by white society.

In the late 1850s the New York Tribune stated that Senator Stephen A. Douglas regularly swore and used racial epithets in debates on the floor of the United States Senate – the article alleged that his language was cleaned up in the transcripts of the proceedings. In an unrelated episode Senator William H. Seward said either to or of Senator Douglas that no man would become president who spells Negro with two Gs. In 1860 the same epithet was used as a common term of speech in all sorts of newspapers, north and south, pro-slavery and pro-abolition. The 1860 edition of the Dictionary of Americanisms contained an entry that described the word as a "vulgar pronunciation" rather than a word vulgar in itself.

Times have changed. The news media avoids using the epithet in question even when their reporting is limited to stating only the hard facts. My impression from reading the news and seeing video clips of the episode involving the University of Oklahoma is that if you did not know what the epithet was, you could not guess. This restraint reflects a judgment made by the society at large that it will not condone, in public or, increasingly, in private speech, statements that could be construed as intentionally or incidentally hurtful based upon elements of identity – such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, appearance, disability or sexual orientation. We denigrate this societal judgment by calling it "political correctness", but it actually has shaped our speech and thoughts in various ways, curtailing the uses that can be made these identity differences as either a sword or a shield. It has not made us a society of saints, but it has caused us to become generally more aware that we are talking about people, not stereotypes, and the people we are talking about are our neighbors.

Tempting as it may seem, the solution to the problem of words, images, symbols and ideas that may be construed as intentionally or incidentally hurtful based upon elements of identity is not to suppress and expunge them. To ban books such as Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird because they contain racial epithets is to deny ourselves the example of stories that celebrate an awareness of humanity and the courage to stand up against popular prejudice. To suppress the facts of the past is to deny ourselves the ability to learn history's lessons that might enable us to improve our present conduct.

In many southern towns there is a monument to the soldiers who fought for the Confederate cause just as in many northern towns where is a monument for those who fought for the Federal cause. In each case these monuments were erected by the surviving veterans and by the friends and immediate family of the fallen. Most were men who fought honorably to defend the principles in which they believed and the communities in which they lived. Both the Confederates and the Federals fought to protect the political liberties of the dominant portions of their respective societies. The Federals fought to preserve the liberties established under the 1789 Constitution. The Confederates fought to rid themselves of the threat to their liberties that they feared if they remained under the 1789 Constitution – their rebellion was no less principled, and no more unlawful, than the rebellion of the 13 colonies from the rule of the British crown and Parliament in 1776, and the Confederates saw themselves, not without justice, as the rightful heirs of the earlier revolutionaries.

I accept as a fact that the Civil War was fought over Constitutional principles and not over slavery, although the Civil War resulted in the end of slavery. It did not rid society, north or south, of its attitudes and customs of racial injustice and oppression. It was not fought between a side that promoted slavery and a side that opposed it but rather between a side that practiced slavery and a side that did not.

The difficulty of celebrating the Confederacy in the present day is that it was a regime founded to protect racially-based slavery, which society today generally regards as unworthy and repellent. While some may claim to honor only the praiseworthy aspects of the Confederates' fight and disregard or even disparage the root cause of the regime's existence, others argue that to honor the fight is to honor slavery. I assume for the sake of this discussion that both views are held honestly and not for the sake of socio-political advantage, and, accordingly, I cannot conceive of a solution that would satisfy all concerned.

In the case of the Texas vanity license plates, I don't see why the Constitution should require the state to employ the Confederate battle flag, which some see as morally objectionable, on the license it requires by law to be displayed on vehicles. On the other hand, I don't think that the state ought to be able to prevent private individuals from displaying the image of the Confederate battle flag. And if the Sons of the Confederate Veterans want to put decals of the Confederate battle flag on their bumpers near their license plates, an area not regulated by the state, more power to 'em.

Needless to say, no one has floated my name for nomination to the Supreme Court.