Pretend that you are among the 1 percent of black students at UCSD. As you walk to class one Thursday, a white girl casually hands you a newspaper displaying, on its front page, a sloppy caricature of two thick-lipped black girls eating watermelon in slave garb while masturbating each other. Next to them, a black man in gangsta gear holds two pistols to the head of a man who appears to be standing behind a cash register. Above the picture runs a headline reading: “Cocked: A lifestyle rag for nappy Niggas and Hos to spend welfare money on.” Ridiculing your race as being overly fond of fried chicken and handgun violence, this imaginary publication argues that blacks should “be sent back to Africa where they can kill each other and save our tax dollars.”
Those who oppose banning intolerant statements within the university decry limiting free speech just because it hurts people’s feelings. The First Amendment, they argue, cannot be limited for making others feel bad.
But, as the above example illustrates, the kinds of statements that speech codes should prohibit — if they were allowed under the rules of a university such as UCSD — do much more than merely hurt people’s feelings. Whites and other members of general majority groups cannot fully comprehend the violence of these statements, because they are necessarily ignorant of the context in which they are received.
Consider your imaginary black identity. As one of the least-represented minorities on campus, you spend most of your day around students who look differently from you. Not only does skin color make you stand out, but your life experiences vary greatly from those you share a classroom with — few know anything of racism first-hand, or understand in real terms the struggle you may have undertaken for the right to show up at UCSD today.
So when you see that newspaper, it’s not merely offensive. It assaults and ridicules every aspect of your identity, from the way you look to the cultural heritage that defines you in every way you know. Then the newspaper says that you don’t have a place here, that your culture and that of your family and friends is fundamentally inferior and unworthy of existence.
While I generated this imaginary example in a deliberate effort to shock, publications trumpeting similarly intolerant views are, as any Koala reader knows, well established on this campus. In 2003, the Koala printed its now-notorious “Jizzlam” issue, which viciously mocked Islam, inciting outrage among campus Muslims and physically violent backlash against Koala members.
Statements of violence like these, which single out specific social groups for public humiliation and assault, are not part of the marketplace of ideas that universities should promote — in fact, they directly inhibit the school’s role as a host for reasoned, informed and intelligent debate. While contrarian provocation is certainly a valid tool for intellectual stimulation, verbal assault interferes with the ability of students to concentrate academically and function as productive members of their community. Universities intent on maintaining a relaxed, productive intellectual environment therefore have an obligation to draw a line defining statements of social intolerance as being outside of the bounds of appropriate conduct.
Defining certain words or arguments as unacceptably violent, harassing or hateful not only halts the rights of people to use them, it gives rulemakers power to determine what others can and cannot say — but, importantly, only in certain situations. Seeing the need for free speech codes in the university environment is not equivalent to believing that the First Amendment is fundamentally flawed — it’s only understanding that certain environments foster an intellectual creativity too valuable to let it be threatened by bigoted spew from the ignoble basement of human social thought.
While issues of black/white equality rarely cull the kind of open intolerance students nowadays reserve for gays and Muslims, no violent expression is more acceptable than any other. Conservative Christians have recently been trying out the argument that campus tolerance codes limit their right to free expression by defining their religious beliefs as intolerant toward homosexuality. The key difference, they say, between racial intolerance (which they decry) and their perspective is that sexual orientation is voluntary, while ethnicity is not.
Conservative activists correctly point out that equating homosexuality with race puts evangelical Christians in the same bin as racists — and it scares the heck out of them. But whether or not their beliefs are as morally reprehensible as racism, they are similar to racism in that they assert a basic inferiority of a fundamental aspect of others’ identities.
These kinds of assertions threaten the function and freedom of the university to such an extent that the First Amendment should be limited to mute them within that precious context. The argument of the American Civil Liberties Union and others that limiting the speech of some limits it for everyone only applies in this case if campus authorities go out of bounds and interpret the code to limit more than viciously intolerant, identity-assaulting statements. Criticism, even that informed by cultural differences, should not be limited unless it directly and cruelly challenges the basic rights of others to exist as they please.
Limiting free speech must never be taken lightly. But members of the community with more mainstream identities cannot fully comprehend the devastation of having one’s social identity publicly deprecated in what is intended to be a relaxed, creative environment. As unsettling as they may be to Americans accustomed to free expression, speech codes help secure a university community where so many viewpoints and lifestyles must productively co-exist.
