O (rwellian) U Speech

The facts seem simple. A bunch (not sure how many) of drunken frat boys from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter at Oklahoma University were taped chanting about ten seconds of a racist song.

There will never be a nigger at SAE
There will never be a nigger at SAE
You can hang him from a tree
But he’ll never sign with me
There will never be a nigger at SAE.

The national fraternity has now banned the chapter. OU has closed the doors to the SAE frat house and told everyone living there to find a new place to live. Two students have been expelled.

Howard (no last name given), the frat house cook and a black man, is now out of a job. Mercifully, some OU alumni have taken up a collection on his behalf.

Howard is collateral liberal damage.

Seraphic Secret is troubled by a few things.

• The racist song is disturbing. The last time we heard the word “nigger” was in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

• We are troubled that the frat house was closed down. This is collective punishment and seems the equivalent of carpet-bombing an entire city in order to destroy one small target.

• But we are also troubled by the expulsion of the two students who sang the awful song.

We have always believed that free speech includes the freedom to say uncomfortable, if not contemptible, things — absent a call for violence. Surely, we as a society should be more concerned with behavior rather than with thought or speech.

We also have a simple question: What if the frat boys had sung “kike” or “gook” instead of “nigger”? Would OU have taken the exact same actions? We think not.

And here’s a fun thought experiment: What if black frat boys had sung the same song about Caucasians?

Obviously, all minorities are not treated equally under the benevolent gaze of the liberal gatekeepers of language.

We find this entire episode to be a chilling reminder that freedom of speech is a precious right that can be snatched away all too easily — under the guise of tolerance.

Since we are neither lawyers nor experts on the intricacies of free speech, Seraphic Secret  refers you to Eugene Volokh for an in-depth analysis:

…Racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions — see here for some citations. The same, of course, is true for fraternity speech, racist or otherwise…Likewise, speech doesn’t lose its constitutionally protection just because it refers to violence — “You can hang him from a tree,” “the capitalists will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes,” “by any means necessary” with pictures of guns, “apostates from Islam should be killed.”…

To be sure, in specific situations, such speech might fall within a First Amendment exception. One example is if it is likely to be perceived as a “true threat” of violence (e.g., saying “apostates from Islam will be killed” or “we’ll hang you from a tree” to a particular person who will likely perceive it as expressing the speaker’s intention to kill him); but that’s not the situation here, where the speech wouldn’t have been taken by any listener as a threat against him or her…

Under the First Amendment, though, the government — including Oklahoma University — generally cannot add to this [social] price, whether the offensive speech is racist, religiously bigoted, pro-revolutionary, or expressive of any other viewpoint, however repugnant it might be.

More here.