Protecting Free Speech Isn’t Always Easy
At a White House press conference on Wednesday, a young, female White House intern reached to take a microphone out of the hand of CNN’s Jim Acosta, who was questioning President Donald Trump.
Acosta, a veteran broadcast reporter, held onto the microphone. The White House revoked his press credentials, and then Trump’s press secretary circulated an altered video that sought to prove Acosta was the aggressor.
He wasn’t. The press secretary and her video lied, and the journalism world erupted.
So, maybe now’s a good time to talk about the First Amendment and its role in protecting not the niceties, but the difficult speech: That includes the Nazis marching in Skokie, the damnable Westboro Baptist Church protesting at military funerals, the journalist aggressively asking questions at a press conference, the professor starting a hard conversation. That speech is protected — all of it.
In 2017, Johnny Eric Williams, a Trinity College sociology professor, shared two posts on his personal Facebook page that referenced a provocative essay that sought to answer the question: “What does it mean, in general, when victims of bigotry save the lives of bigots?”
The original essay was a response to the June 2017 shooting of U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise by a gunman who’d said he was upset about DonaldTrump’s election. The gunman was killed in a shootout with the police, among them African Americans, one a lesbian.
Scalise, who was seriously wounded in the attack, had a history of voting against rights for members of the LGBTQ community, and he once spoke in front of a white supremacist group (for which he later apologized).
The essay’s author suggested that if someone who belongs to a minority group sees someone in the majority choking, drowning or in some other kind of distress, then the member of the former group should do nothing, or “Let Them [expletive] Die.” Williams used that as a hashtag, and the conversation was off and running.
Williams, who served in the military, says he was radicalized in an unlikely place, Ouachita Baptist College in Arkansas. He studies white supremacy. He’s written extensively about it, and he approaches teaching as an active activity. Students, he said, should leave class feeling uncomfortable with new information that takes time to digest.
“A student should never leave the class thinking, ‘Oh, that just reaffirms everything I believe,’” Williams said. “That’s not how learning takes place.”
Still: The fake outrage machine was up and chugging before you could hit “post.” Williams was accused of being a racist, and of wishing violence on white people. Fox News couldn’t stop covering him. The outrage grew into death threats serious enough that Williams’ family left the state for a while. He was put on involuntary paid leave — though he was later cleared. Trinity closed for a day after a credible threat, and, in a disquieting overreach of power, two Trinity alums, state Sen. George Logan, a Republican from Ansonia, and House GOP leader Themis Klarides, a Republican from Derby, called for his firing.
The threats came by phone, by mail, online. One note suggested Williams get cancer and die — which was painful because Williams was dealing with an older brother who was, in fact, dying of cancer.
Nuance gets lost on people unable to hold two thoughts at once. #BlackLivesMatter becomes something other than a protest against police brutality and racism. A kneeling man — someone doing something as American as apple pie and protest — is labeled a threat, but the First Amendment wants those ideas out in the public square, so people can decide: Is this legitimate? Or is this nonsense that should be dismissed?
Williams says he wasn’t trying to be provocative for fun. He wanted to start a conversation. In a recent article for “Journal of Academic Freedom,” Williams explored how tenure doesn’t necessarily protect faculty members who are of the “wrong political persuasion, ‘race’ or religion.” He quoted activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and suggested institutions of higher education should pay less attention to donors and more to academic freedom.
There’s that word again. Freedom.