BLM stops ACLU event: do they have a point?

[Darren_Garrison]

@adaher

To the extent I was thinking of African-Americans, it was to ponder why they would accept a white ideology as their own when the existence of their group is primarily about how white ideology seems to have failed them.

Yes, because an idea was developed by white people, it is forever fundamentally corrupt and must be abandoned. No chance that it might actually be a good idea.

[mikecurtis]

@greenmario

At what point do college students forget their politics? Is it between the junior and senior year or is it right after they are handed their diploma ?

College students don’t, necessarily “forget” their politics, but it’s easier when you’re a student to get all het up about things. These passions tend to be moderated when you get out in the real world and realize that not everything is as you thought it was from your ivory tower. As Kimstu points out, free speech protection does have its disadvantages for traditionally oppressed groups, but the benefits far outweigh them. and sometimes it takes longer to realize this.

And one demonstration at one school does not a movement make.

mc

[adaher]

I agree with you, I’m just trying to figure out how they are thinking. And even if minorities accept many premises of Euro-American philosophy as wonderful, they are still going to be putting a premium on developing their own ideas of what constitutes fairness and justice. Or borrowing ideas from their home countries, in the case of immigrants.

[Shodan]

@greenmario

At what point do college students forget their politics? Is it between the junior and senior year or is it right after they are handed their diploma ?

The freshman says “there is no God”. The sophomore says “there is no Truth.” The junior says “there is no Justice”. The senior says “there are no Jobs.”

@Budget Player Cadet

Let’s just say that the reason that these “white ideas” define the acceptable range of debate is that they’re the best we’ve come up with, and the alternatives are heinous. Everyone involved in this stupid protest would do well to recognize that. Throw out western democracy as “white supremacist”? Might as well throw out electricity, running water, and the germ theory of disease as artifacts of the patriarchy because they were developed mostly by men. I’m starting to understand what people mean when they talk about social justice as postmodernism.

QFT.

Regards,
Shodan

[John_Mace]

@Kimstu

Yeah. As an ACLU member and BLM supporter, I think the students were wrong here, although I can see their point about modern free-speech absolutism being in some respects a social luxury that is paid for mostly by members of disadvantaged groups. When we say that we must protect the First Amendment rights of white supremacists, for instance, it’s nonwhite people who generally bear the consequences of white supremacists being able to publicize their views.

How do you figure (emphasis added)? The power structure favors groups that are decidedly NOT disadvantaged, and since it is that structure that holds the keys to free speech if we decide there is “too much of it”, why won’t the disadvantaged bear the brunt of the silencing? Certainly the one example you gave is, well, and example, but how does it represent the bulk of what our umbrella of free speech covers?

Consider the consequences of the Trump Administration putting restrictions on free speech in the interest of “national security”. Which groups will pay the price?

[octopus]

@mikecurtis

First of all; they’re students. . . they are upset that “free speech” applies to oppressive speech. A position that is echoed by a lot of liberals - right here on this board, as well. They don’t fully understand the implications of deciding what is acceptable speech and what is not. Conservatives also succumb to this knee jerk as well - see any of the threads on anthem protests.

The thing is (and they, and others may never get it) is that free speech protection that doesn’t apply to everybody is not free speech protection at all.

mc

@RTFirefly

So, college students did something dumb and assholic, film at 11?

Shock and surprise.

Voting age adults shouldn’t get a pass on ignorance of junior high concepts. It’s like excusing a college student for the inability to multiply fractions, compute compound interest, read a map, or name 10 states.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@adaher

I was just intrigued by their “liberalism is white supremacism” chant. All Western ideologies are based on the ideas of white males for the most part. So in some sense their statement is accurate.

In the same way that their dorms having electricity and running water is white supremacism. This makes no sense.

@Kimstu

Yeah. As an ACLU member and BLM supporter, I think the students were wrong here, although I can see their point about modern free-speech absolutism being in some respects a social luxury that is paid for mostly by members of disadvantaged groups. When we say that we must protect the First Amendment rights of white supremacists, for instance, it’s nonwhite people who generally bear the consequences of white supremacists being able to publicize their views.

If I were them, I’d take the cost of having to occasionally listen to a white supremacist over literally being jailed for protesting legal discrimination. Free speech absolutism protects the marginalized far more than it hurts them. The first people to lose their speech when speech is limited are not the powerful majority.

I wrote a thing on my Tumblr about this. An excerpt:

Any movement associated with you has just been made poorer by this outburst. This could not have been more of an own goal if you had crashed a fucking search party for a missing child to complain about missing white woman syndrome.

This is the ACLU, one of the most obviously pro-social organizations in the US, holding a talk on why free speech matters. You know, free speech. The basis for essentially all of western civilization, without which science, democracy, and rational debate of all kind fall apart. The entire reason you’re allowed to stand there and chant and be complete SKELETON WARRIORS. And your response is to paradoxically use your free speech to argue that free speech is the tool of white supremacy. This shows such a complete lack of historical understanding that I think your high schools should refund your parents’ property taxes. Remember why Dr. King got arrested? The ACLU does.

[mikecurtis]

@octopus

Voting age adults shouldn’t get a pass on ignorance of junior high concepts. It’s like excusing a college student for the inability to multiply fractions, compute compound interest, read a map, or name 10 states.

I don’t think anyone’s giving them a pass - certainly I am not. We are saying it’s not surprising that college students may get carried away. Tell me you’ve never done anything as a younger person that you would no longer do.

mc

[iamthewalrus_3]

@adaher

The only change that’s super obvious to me is that we’ll become a more religious country. Not Judeo-Christian, but a much more diverse, but more devout country, with a lot more Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, plus growing numbers of religious minorities who we take in as refugees, like Yazidis and Ba’Hai. But let’s not leave Chrisitanity out, we also have a growing Latino population which is rather devoutly Catholic, an already religious African-American population, and it’s hard not to see white Protestants rushing to their churches as a reaction to all these other faiths popping up in their neighborhoods. The US will not be a great place to be an atheist in 2050.

That seems very unlikely to me. Do you have any support for this theory?

Are there any countries that became more religiously observant as they became more multicultural? Any developed nations that haven’t become less religious over time? Any examples of immigrant groups to developed nations that don’t assimilate and mostly become less religiously observant over time?

For reference, here’s religious trends over the last decade or so. Substantial increase in athiest or no religion, moderate increase in non-Christian religions, declines in many others (some that didn’t really change aren’t shown in the graph). When do you see those trendlines headed the other direction?

[Riemann]

@mikecurtis

And one demonstration at one school does not a movement make.

These ideas are not exceptional, they are mainstream in the academy. The students didn’t just pick this up these ideas in a vacuum. The academic social sciences are now dominated by ideas that derive from postmodernism, much of it at odds with traditional liberal values. In the social sciences, cultural relativism and identity politics rule the academy. Likewise, the ideology exposed in the events at Evergreen was not an exception.

An example relevant to the BLM situation described in the OP:

Critical race theory

…A critique of liberalism: CRT scholars favor a more aggressive approach to social transformation as opposed to liberalism’s more cautious approach, favor a race-conscious approach to transformation rather than liberalism’s embrace of color blindness, and favor an approach that relies more on political organizing, in contrast to liberalism’s reliance on rights-based remedies…

Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress—criticizing civil rights scholarship and anti-discrimination law…passing of the laws in the US was not because people of color were discriminated against, rather it was to improve the image of the US to Third World countries that the US needed as allies during the Cold War.

Some legal scholars have criticized CRT on a number of grounds, such as CRT scholars’ reliance on narrative and storytelling, or CRT’s critique of objectivity. Judge Richard Posner of the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has “label[ed] critical race theorists and postmodernists the ‘lunatic core’ of ‘radical legal egalitarianism.’”[35] He writes,

What is most arresting about critical race theory is that…it turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative. Rather than marshal logical arguments and empirical data, critical race theorists tell stories — fictional, science-fictional, quasi-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal—designed to expose the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today. By repudiating reasoned argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.

Of course, if you look at the most revered figures in postmodernism, take this list from the Wikipedia page for example:

Heidegger
Derrida
Foucault
Lyotard
Rorty
Baudrillard
Jameson
Kellner

…spot what they have in common?

[begbert2]

Aside from the rather unbelievable claim that it will include increased religiousness, what is this “non-white liberalism” expected to include?

[RTFirefly]

@D_Anconia

College students don’t grow up in a vacuum. They had to have learned these “ideas” somewhere–family, teachers, social media, internet, somewhere.

Oh no - indoctrination!!

@octopus

Voting age adults shouldn’t get a pass on ignorance of junior high concepts. It’s like excusing a college student for the inability to multiply fractions, compute compound interest, read a map, or name 10 states.

My point isn’t that they should be given a pass. (Not sure what it means to give or not give them a pass with respect to something like this, but whatever.)

My point is that college students have a fairly deserved reputation for doing dumb shit that you don’t see nearly as much of in the adult world at large. As such, construing anything college students do to be representative of anything that exists mostly in the adult world but also incidentally exists on college campuses is almost certainly a mistake.

IOW, if college students who are in BLM do stupid shit, that says something about college students (that we already know, duh) but little if anything about BLM.

[Leaper]

@adaher

I was just intrigued by their “liberalism is white supremacism” chant. All Western ideologies are based on the ideas of white males for the most part. So in some sense their statement is accurate.

I may be wrong, or only speaking for a limited few, but I’ve seen leftist criticism of “liberalism” before, and I always understood it as asserting a difference between liberalism and progressivism (especially socialist progressivism).

And the people I read who want to ban Nazi rallies and such simply do not believe in that slippery slope, pointing to Germany and Israel and similar laws in other countries (making for yet another debate that bears similarity to debates over gun control and universal health care). I also get the feeling they feel they have nothing left to lose, being on the receiving end of the Nazi ideology right now and feeling that the power structure in this country is racist and corrupt and shields the Nazi ideology at best, so the end result of the slippery slope would basically be their daily lives today.

[Kimstu]

@John_Mace

How do you figure (emphasis added)? The power structure favors groups that are decidedly NOT disadvantaged, and since it is that structure that holds the keys to free speech if we decide there is “too much of it”, why won’t the disadvantaged bear the brunt of the silencing?

They will indeed. That’s why I qualified my statement with “in some respects”. I’d also point out that both mainstream and conservative media have done a very effective job lately in presenting those comparatively minor respects as the current public face of free speech: i.e., the notion that free speech is mostly about allowing Nazi marches and campus trolling by conservative speakers. It doesn’t surprise me that some young and pissed-off student activists should have fallen for that line and decided to treat the ACLU as an adversary for its support of free speech.

In the bigger picture, of course, as you note, the ACLU’s free-speech activities are overwhelmingly in support of the rights of disadvantaged groups rather than of majority-population hate groups. Consider, for example, the ACLU’s stepping up to oppose disciplinary action against high-school athletes (mostly nonwhite) who take a knee for the national anthem:

School officials in Louisiana are threatening to punish student-athletes with suspensions, “extra running” and removal from sports teams should they choose to kneel during the national anthem, a report says. […]

“The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana put Louisiana schools on notice today, warning them that forcing students to stand during the National Anthem or punishing students who ‘take a knee’ in protest of racial injustice and police brutality would violate students’ First Amendment rights,” the ACLU said.

Marjorie Esman, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, claimed any punishment would be “antithetical to our values as Americans and a threat to students’ constitutional rights.”

“Nearly 75 years ago, the Supreme Court rightly held that state schools have no business forcing students to stand for patriotic rituals,” she said. “The Court also reminded public school administrators that part of their job is to train students for participation in our free society. This principle holds no less true today, and no less true on the playing field than it does in the classroom…Schools should respect students who embrace their constitutional rights and stand up to injustice – not punish them. And it would be patently unconstitutional for the school to do so.”

The William and Mary student protestors should have a good hard think about this situation, and countless situations like it, before they continue with their complaints about the ACLU.

At the same time, we in the ACLU need to do a better job of pointing out that there are indeed lots of ill-intentioned people nowadays using “free speech” as a shield for hate speech, and that supporting those people’s free-speech rights does come at a social cost that is mostly paid by members of disadvantaged groups.

[John_Mace]

@Kimstu

They will indeed. That’s why I qualified my statement with “in some respects”. I’d also point out that both mainstream and conservative media have done a very effective job lately in presenting those comparatively minor respects as the current public face of free speech: i.e., the notion that free speech is mostly about allowing Nazi marches and campus trolling by conservative speakers. It doesn’t surprise me that some young and pissed-off student activists should have fallen for that line and decided to treat the ACLU as an adversary for its support of free speech.

In the bigger picture, of course, as you note, the ACLU’s free-speech activities are overwhelmingly in support of the rights of disadvantaged groups rather than of majority-population hate groups. Consider, for example, the ACLU’s stepping up to oppose disciplinary action against high-school athletes (mostly nonwhite) who take a knee for the national anthem:
The William and Mary student protestors should have a good hard think about this situation, and countless situations like it, before they continue with their complaints about the ACLU.

At the same time, we in the ACLU need to do a better job of pointing out that there are indeed lots of ill-intentioned people nowadays using “free speech” as a shield for hate speech, and that supporting those people’s free-speech rights does come at a social cost that is mostly paid by members of disadvantaged groups.

Got it.

I agree that the right wing hate groups seem to be doing a lot of trolling: I double dog dare you to get physical with me! I hate to say it, but that’s kind of a smart tactic and I wish folks in opposition wouldn’t take the bait so easily. But I guess it’s like asking folks on this MB to DNFTT. Anyway, thanks for your efforts on the ACLU. We owe a debt of gratitude to groups like that, especially in these times when demagoguery is on the rise!

[Kimstu]

@adaher

To the extent I was thinking of African-Americans, it was to ponder why they would accept a white ideology as their own

To describe modern American civil-libertarian liberalism as “a white ideology” sounds SUPER weird to me. Why are we limiting the sources of this political view only to its white contributors? Yes, lots of dead white guys such as Thomas Paine, Hobbes, Jefferson, Condorcet, Mill, etc., contributed to the ideological formation of contemporary rights-based American liberalism. But so did a bunch of dead and living nonwhite people, including Gandhi, King, Thurgood Marshall, A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Nelson Mandela, etc. etc.

I am not too surprised that a bunch of young student activists would fall for the popular reductionism of giving white people all the credit for the development of contemporary American liberalism. But I am rather surprised that such a superficial distortion of history would manage to get traction here at the Straight Dope.

[mikecurtis]

@Riemann

These ideas are not exceptional, they are mainstream in the academy. . . .

They may not be exceptional, but I doubt they are mainstream.
When I was a hot headed college student, it was all about economic oppression and the military industrial complex; good ole hippy ideals. and we did our far share of disrupting the status quo, forcing “the man” to divest from apartheid backing companies, or sweatshop companies.
It’s what college students do, they take the zeitgeist and stretch it to see how far they can go.

…spot what they have in common?

The philosophies that are not written by white men that the youth favor can still be seen as progressive and liberal. As I mentioned; the particulars of the progressive movement will undoubtedly change (as the minorities move from those who need to be protected to those making the decisions about how things operate) but I can’t see it straying into conservative territory. It’s hard to embrace conservative philosophies when the “good ole days” were not so good for you!

mc

[Leaper]

@John_Mace

Got it.

I agree that the right wing hate groups seem to be doing a lot of trolling: I double dog dare you to get physical with me! I hate to say it, but that’s kind of a smart tactic and I wish folks in opposition wouldn’t take the bait so easily.

I think you underestimate how existentially threatened some people feel by today’s rhetoric, and how prevalent it is.

To many, this Nazi stuff isn’t just “bait,” but a promise of immediate and future action that is SUPPORTED and abetted by the very power structure of this country.

[carnivorousplant]

@Kimstu

The William and Mary student protestors should have a good hard think about this situation, and countless situations like it, before they continue with their complaints about the ACLU.

William and Mary students are members of BLM?

[carnivorousplant]

@RTFirefly

My point is that college students have a fairly deserved reputation for doing dumb shit that you don’t see nearly as much of in the adult world at large.

In college I was kept busy with Differential Equations and eating a foot long chili dog at 7:00 AM, hoping that I would die and not have to take an Electronics II test dealing with the high frequency response of transistor circuits.