On Saturday August 19th on Boston Common, there was a triumphant living out of the right of free speech. Thousands of people gathered to listen attentively to speakers representing too-often-neglected points of view. Minds were changed, hearts were changed, the world was changed.
In other news, there was also a white-supremacist rally that completely fizzled, failing to grow beyond a tiny huddle of small-minded men. The triumph of free speech was called Fight Supremacy, and it was organized by Monica Cannon from an organization called Violence in Boston, with the assistance of a nationwide network of chapters of Black Lives Matter. The conversation around Saturday’s events in Boston has focused too much on the tiny handful of white people who feel like people didn't listen to them. Even traditional liberal redoubts such as NPR quickly fell prey to hand-wringing over the free-speech rights of a small number of people. Rather than focus on the failure of a sad gathering of people who did not even bother to attempt a speaking program, we should instead be focusing on the fact that tens of thousands of people on the Common did hear a speaking program. One where people of color—women of color almost exclusively—spoke about their deep convictions to a crowd of people who did not all view the world the same way. This is free speech in action. Our hand-wringing over the feelings of a few dozen white people reveals how resistant white people are to ever remaining silent. No Right to Control How Other People Respond Make no mistake, the white supremacists who gathered on Boston Common were there as an act of provocation. The few people who were involved in this event deny that this is the case, but their actions speak louder than their words. The event on Boston Common came into existence because of the white supremacist terrorism of Charlottesville. That violent day shined a spotlight on Boston, where a previously scheduled rally went from being a non-event to being headline news across the country. A group that had earlier in the year barely managed to turn out a few hundred people all of a sudden found itself with the attention of hundreds of thousands of people. They had a list of speakers which closely mirrored the speakers at the events in Charlottesville and because of this similarity the general public quickly came to view this as a follow up event, as Charlottesville round two. With the country freshly wounded by white supremacist terrorism, the organizers had a decision to make. Would they continue to organize this deeply provocative event as planned, or would they change course given what happened in Charlottesville? They chose to go ahead in spite of and in defiance of a public who manifestly did not want them. Choosing to go ahead with the rally as scheduled was in and of itself a form of political speech—one that people heard loud and clear. They could have made other decisions. They could have canceled the event entirely. They could have rescheduled for another time. “But why should they have to do that? What about free speech? Shouldn’t they be allowed to have their rally whenever they want?” The First Amendment prevents the government from censoring unpopular speech and, indeed, the government abided by the First Amendment. The white supremacists absolutely had a right to hold a rally--and they did indeed do so. They even had that right guaranteed at enormous taxpayer expense through providing a robust police presence at no cost to them. Far from censoring the white supremacists right to free speech, the city government afforded them a taxpayer-funded venue and taxpayer-funded protection. So I will say no more about any supposed First Amendment issues here. They had the right to have a rally, and they did indeed have that rally. What the white supremacists did not have the right to do was to control how people reacted to them. In choosing to go ahead as scheduled, the white supremacists had already engaged in political speech. In response, a wide and diverse coalition of ordinary people organized competing events in order to counter their message—and to do so loudly and unequivocally. What we saw play out on Boston Common was in and of itself a robust living out of free speech. Throughout the week people gathered in public parks and churches and union halls and on the internet to discuss what should be done. People thought through the issues at hand and made decisions about how they would respond. And which position won the day among the public was absolutely and abundantly clear. It was a fair fight, and the white supremacists lost in a humiliating one round knockout. The right to free speech does not guarantee anyone a receptive audience. The right to free speech is not the same as the right to make people listen to you if they do not desire to do so. An intoxicated man shouting on a street corner may, indeed, be angry that people aren’t listening to him, but he can hardly complain that his rights have been violated. Other Voices That Had Been Silenced Were Heard Throughout this country every day, the voices and perspectives of minorities are ignored and silenced. This is done in a host of ways—through textbooks in public schools that focus on Europeans, through film and television that resists diverse casting, through gerrymandering and voter suppression that minimizes political representation. In all these ways and more, our society actively chooses to ignore and overlook the voices and perspectives of minorities. What played out on Boston Common this past Saturday was a corrective to this. People of color were leading the march to the common. Women were holding the microphone (literally) and leading the crowds in chants and songs. On the common itself, the lineup of speakers was composed entirely of people of color. And people listened. Attentively. And they listened attentively because they believed that what they were hearing was persuasive. For an afternoon, the voices of people of color were actively elevated and given center stage. People listened. Minds were changed. Hearts were changed. Lives were changed. It is a living out of white supremacy to talk about the events on Boston Common as some kind of suppression of free speech. What happened was that normally marginalized voices were given center stage. Only a point of view that cannot abide being anything other than the center of attention would be threatened by such an event. The reality is this. If the sad white supremacists who were so roundly humiliated want to hold another rally on the Common, they are free to do so. But nobody is going to show up. Their own people might show up, but there won’t be thousands of protestors. The only reason why the white supremacists had such a grand stage on which to fail was because they chose to take up the banner of Charlottesville and wave it in the face of a nation still grieving. In another month, no one will care about them. This is the reason why they refused to reschedule. Not because of a point of principle. But because they know they are irrelevant. Their ideas have had a hearing in this country for centuries. It’s time for them to be silenced. They should be silenced by something much more powerful than the dictates of city government. They should be silenced by an engaged public actively deciding to demonstrate to them that their ideas have no worth. This is not a failure of the First Amendment or a failure of free speech. This is the triumph of free speech: when discourse plays out in public such that everyone can see what ideas have worth and what ideas are empty. If white supremacists do not like being publicly humiliated, they should either be more convincing or they refrain from entering into public discourse at all. To whine about free speech in this case is to fundamentally misunderstand how the marketplace of ideas works.
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AuthorI'm a Christian, a progressive, a pastor, and a community organizer. Archives
August 2017
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