A few days ago I wrote about an incident from last fall in which author and attorney Wendy Kaminer used a racial slur illustratively in the course of a panel discussion on freedom of speech on campus, and in fact encouraged the audience at the panel to call out that slur.
That incident — and the op-ed that Kaminer wrote about it last week — came up last night at a debate I participated in on whether “liberals are stifling intellectual diversity on campus,” and I’d like to take a moment to discuss some of the issues raised there in greater detail than the debate’s format allowed.
First, I’d like to address a complaint that was made on the stage. One of my opponents, Kirsten Powers of Fox News, claimed repeatedly that I misrepresented Kaminer’s actions when I described to them last night. I’m pretty confident that I didn’t, and that what I said there was consistent with both my characterization of the event in my earlier essay and with a transcript that I’ve checked against an audio recording of the Kaminer panel. Until the IQ2 video is released I can’t be 100% certain, however. When the video is available I’ll put my comments up here so that readers can judge for themselves, and in the meantime I’ll just say that the account of Kaminer’s actions that appears in my previous post is one that I stand by.
[Update: I’ve appended the relevant section of the debate transcript below.]
Second, there is the question of censorship. Last night I noted that Kaminer had accused her ideological opponents of “censorship” three times in her op-ed, though she did not, in my view, identify a single instance in which anyone’s speech had been censored. This was, I suggested, symptomatic of a tendency among critics of liberal-left identity politics to tar legitimate debate as “violent” or “censoring” or “silencing.”
In response to my claim, Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education argued that Kaminer had in fact been censored, because a transcript of the debate had expurgated words that the transcriber found offensive.
I find this argument unconvincing. Here’s why.
The transcriber of the panel was a recent graduate of Smith College operating on her own initiative. Hers was not an official transcript of the event, nor was she representing any public entity. She was simply a person interested in the subject who wanted to bring wider attention to what had been said. To call her a “censor” because she chose not to spell out every slur that was uttered is incorrect — the right to free speech includes the right to use asterisks or brackets in one’s work, even when quoting others.
Last night I asked Greg if he believes that it is censorship for a newspaper to maintain a policy of not printing the word “nigger.” He said he believed it was. I believe that it is not, and if, when our debate is broadcast on NPR, the slur I had to utter to ask the question is bleeped, I will have no cause to complain that my free speech rights have been violated.
There’s another issue raised by the Kaminer piece that we were only able to touch on briefly last night, and that is the fact that her charge of censorship was not limited to the transcriber discussed above. In her op-ed Kaminer recounted a litany of negative responses that she and others received. She was, she said, accused of committing “an explicit act of racist violence.” Smith College’s president subsequently expressed regret that students “were hurt” by her remarks. In a similar incident at Brown University a debate about rape culture was criticized in the student newspaper as undermining “the University’s mission to create a safe and supportive environment for survivors,” and the college president invited students troubled by the planned debate to attend a different event instead.
Here’s what Kaminer said at the close of this litany, in her first use of the word “censorship” in her op-ed:
“How did we get here? How did a verbal defense of free speech become tantamount to a hate crime and offensive words become the equivalent of physical assaults? You can credit — or blame — progressives for this enthusiastic embrace of censorship.”
Clearly, “censorship” in this passage is not referring to a student’s amendments to a transcript. It’s referring to critics who called Kaminer a racist and declared her speech to be violent, to a college president who characterized her words as hurtful, to a student newspaper that criticized others’ views on rape, and to a college president who invited students to attend a lecture.
None of these things are censorship. All of them are speech acts. For Kaminer — a member of the board of advisors of the civil libertarian group that Greg Lukianoff heads — to characterize such speech as censorship is wrong. It’s factually wrong, and it’s morally wrong.
Both Lukianoff and Powers expressed concern about the chilling effects of intemperate criticism last night. Powers, in particular, argued that using the term “racist” to describe speech that is not racist can silence speech. I disagree with that — if I retain the right and the capacity to speak my mind, the fact that someone else criticizes my ideas, however harshly, cannot be said to have silenced me. But if we are going to make the case that criticism from a student journalist or a mild rebuke from the president of a college with which one is not affiliated can be silencing, how much more silencing must it be to see oneself and one’s allies described as censors by a civil libertarian attorney in the pages of one of the nation’s leading liberal newspapers?
The question posed in last night’s debate was whether liberals are chilling speech on campus. By the end of the evening I think all of us agreed that free speech is under attack on many campuses, and that many of those who are doing the attacking would describe themselves as liberal. In that sense, the proposition that was put forward was accurate.
But that’s not the sense in which commentators like Wendy Kaminer or Jonathan Chait or other critics of “PC culture” would construe the claim. To them, liberal and left campus culture is distinctively hostile to freedom of speech, and the very speech that emerges from that culture — robust, aggressive, freewheeling debate about contentious social issues — is offered as proof of that hostility.
Wendy Kaminer is not censoring her critics when she accuses them of being enemies of free expression, any more than they are censoring her when they condemn her own intentionally provocative speech. But the view of campus leftists as enemies of freedom that she and others promulgate is, as I argued last night, a grossly distorted one. Moreover, it’s one that hampers our ability to engage in clear and substantive discussion around issues of great importance to our society.
And I’d like to see more of free speech’s defenders saying so.
Update | Here’s how I glossed Kaminer’s remarks in the debate:
“In an event which was sponsored by a campus, in which they were talking about free speech and racial slurs … she used the word — which I will refer to as “the n-word” — three times, and not only did she do that, she also, in using the word “n-word” — and please don’t do this — she said, ‘When I use the word — when I say “the n-word,” what word comes into your mind?’ soliciting the audience to say back the slur.”
I don’t see any misrepresentation here. I made it clear that Kaminer’s use of the slur came in the context of a discussion of free speech, I accurately described the number of times she used it, and my paraphrase of her question to the audience was fair. (Her exact question was “When I say “n-word,” or when Jaime says “n-word,” what word do you all hear in your head?”)
Second Update | Yes, NPR bleeped me. And no, I don’t feel censored.
6 comments
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February 25, 2015 at 10:41 pm
aburstein
First of all, nice job on the debate. I just finished watching the whole thing (it’s at http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1310-liberals-are-stifling-intellectual-diversity-on-campus , go to the “Video/Audio” tab). I don’t agree with your position at all, but you put up a valiant effort attempting to defend it.
Secondly, regarding the Kaminer characterization, I would agree that you mischaracterized it. Here’s why: When I read your piece from a few days ago, you made it sound like her whole goal was trying to get the audience to do something deliberately offensive and provocative, which I didn’t see to be the case at all. She was simply asking a reasonable question of the audience, not getting them to engage in a rah-rah cheer of the offensive word. I didn’t find what she did to be any more problematic than saying the word itself, which I should add – you did too, on stage! I was pretty surprised, but pleasantly so, to see you actually articulate the offensive word, on stage, on the record. I’d absolutely agree that it’s a horrible slur to refer to someone, but I think that there is nothing wrong with using that word in innocuous contexts as you did (and as Kaminer did), and that really showed some bravery on your part.
In the end, this debate accomplished exactly what all rigorous debate and free speech is supposedly to be about – to give each side the chance to fully present their position and let people judge them fairly on their merits, no holds barred. I’m glad that your side was given a chance to defend itself.
I’m wondering if the fact that you lost by so much makes you question your position at all.
February 26, 2015 at 10:27 am
Angus Johnston
AB, I’d argue that Kaminer’s question was wholly unnecessary — that it was a purely rhetorical move. We all know what the phrase “the n-word” refers to, and she could have said that without either saying the word herself or inducing the audience to do so. We see her rhetorical intent in the next sentence, where she says, “See, I said [the word], nothing horrible happened.”
As I said in the first piece, her intent was to demonstrate that saying the word was benign — she wasn’t just referring to it, she was using it rhetorically. That may be justifiable or not — and reasonable people can disagree about that — but it falls on the “use” side of the use-mention distinction, and it differs from how she characterized her statements in the Washington Post.
As for my own use of the word in the debate, I referred to it obliquely in my initial comments, but felt it was necessary to be more direct in my question to Lukianoff for the sake of clarity. That’s my approach generally — that if I can get my point across through circumlocution I prefer to do that, but I’ll say the word as needed.
And the reason I take that approach is that I know that any utterance of the word is going to make some people uncomfortable, particularly from a white person, and I prefer not to make people feel weird or gross or angry capriciously. I don’t think the word should be banned, but I do think that its use has consequences, and should not be taken lightly.
February 26, 2015 at 10:37 am
Angus Johnston
As for our side’s loss in the debate, I think it was pretty much inevitable. The undecideds split in about the same proportions as the pre-debate voters, who were stacked against us, so in that sense the outcome was unsurprising.
The way the question was phrased was also an uphill climb for us. If we’d been debating the proposition that conservatives face more speech suppression than liberals on campus, for instance, or the proposition that liberals on campus are less tolerant of dissent than conservatives, I’d have liked our chances a lot better. But we were asked what we were asked, and we said what we wanted to say.
Am I questioning my position? No, not particularly. As I said in my opening and closing statements, I do agree that there’s too much suppression of speech on campus today. I’ve been fighting against that suppression for a long time, whoever it’s aimed at, and I’ll continue to do so. And I thought that one of Greg’s strongest arguments was his statement that liberal administrators on campus are a lot less committed to free speech than they pretend to be — that’s also something I’ve been saying for a very long time.
I think it’s incorrect to say that campus liberals are typically censors and that their typical targets are conservatives, and I think it’s unfortunate that some on the right (and some “anti-PC” liberals) are claiming that the results of this debate vindicate that position. Because that’s not what we were debating, that’s not the position that Greg and Kirsten took, and that’s not what the evidence shows.
February 26, 2015 at 10:58 am
feministlib
Reflecting specifically on this point, Angus:
I think it’s incorrect to say that campus liberals are typically censors and that their typical targets are conservatives…
I just want to voice my agreement that left-progressive voices on most campuses are not the voices of people with institutional power. I live and work in Boston and it’s very clear to me that those with administrative authority in our local institutions of education may vote Democratic or Republican … but predominantly they promote policies that privilege those who already hold power. They maintain the status quo — an inherently small-c conservative position.
I also think the “institutions of higher education are bastions of liberalism” ignore the plethora of colleges and college experiences in our nation. I myself grew up in the midwest and attended a small liberal arts college founded by a protestant Christian denomination. The speech that was contentious and at times restricted by campus authorities was hardly an agenda set by the left — it was an agenda set by the conservative students and faculty who, for example, didn’t want their vision of homosexuality as a sin challenged on campus. What is deemed controversial speech worthy of containment and/or constraint depends to a high degree on the microculture(s) of a specific campus. College life in the United States is hardly a universal experience trickling down from a few high-profile East Coast campuses.
March 3, 2015 at 4:35 pm
wendy kaminer
I did not suggest and I don’t think it’s entirely reasonable for you to infer that I claimed to have been “censored” during or after the Smith College panel discussion on free speech that caused such a ruckus, (referenced in my February 20th Washington Post op ed.) Of course, I spoke freely during the discussion, (to the dismay of some,) and I have been free, since then, to critique what I consider some ridiculously overwrought reactions to my remarks.
And when I posed this question in my op ed: “How did a verbal defense of free speech become tantamount to a hate crime,” I was obviously referring, in part, to the accusation that by quoting the word “nigger” during a discussion of Huck Finn, I had committed an act of racial violence (in other words, a hate crime.) If equating my utterance of that word in that context with a hate crime does not represent an “embrace of censorship,” I don’t know what would.
Was I censored or silenced by the accusation that I had committed a hate crime? Of course not. I have a thicker skin and a clearer understanding of free speech that many speech code proponents who claim to be “silenced” by words and ideas that make them feel “unsafe.”
March 3, 2015 at 6:33 pm
Angus Johnston
Ms. Kaminer,
You say that your reference to censorship was “in part” a response to the Huffington Post piece in which a Smith undergrad described your comments as violent. What was the other part? Where else do you see the specter of censorship in the incidents you describe?
As for the statement that calling a speech act “racial violence” is the clearest embrace of censorship you can imagine, I’d say an actual call for censorship would be quite a bit clearer. I mentioned at the IQ2 debate that former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau recently described a letter some student activists wrote him as a “violent verbal attack.” Was he embracing censorship, or just engaging in hyperbole?