Title: Collectively Speaking: A Teach-In on Free Speech
Date: October 31, 2018
Location: Outside the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
Description:
A gathering outside the Chan Centre, where the Free Speech Club hosted American conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. While our event is not a direct protest against Shapiro, it is a logical civic response to his presence on campus, and a form of resistance to the current conservative rhetorics surrounding free speech more generally. We hope to engage in community-based dialogue that demonstrates what socially-just public discourse really looks like, and to learn more together about what such discussions demand and why they are important!
Discussion questions from Teach-In:
-Is public speech “just ideas”? What effects can public speech have on the real world, and on our lives?
-Why is access to public speech important? Who gets to speak, and who gets to be heard?
-Does all speech deserve a public platform? Who is responsible for providing platforms? What responsibilities do we hold when accessing platforms?
-What is the place of protest in public discourse? What are the relationships between ignoring, active protest, and “deplatforming”?
-Where does the university as an institution fit into all of this? What about us as students and faculty, and as members of the public? How might we ideally want to engage – as private individuals and as communities and institutions – with public discourse?
Audio Recording:
Transcript:
Nodi Y: I would like to acknowledge that we are on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking Musqueam people. Now for those of you who don’t know what unceded means, that means that this is stolen, occupied land. It wasn’t surrendered through treaty or through sale or through any other means. And this acknowledgement that we are on occupied territory, is particularly important in the context of this teach-in because it makes us confront how colonialism sets the conditions of who can take part in public speech and who can be here, and on what terms. I also mentioned that the Musqueam people are hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking and I mention this because we are also holding this teach-in in English. And that also places limits on what can be said here, and how. So that’s also something that draws attention to the colonial conditions of public speech as we talk about public speech here. Going into the rest of the teach-in, we should strive to make the fact that this is colonial territory, something that we are thinking about and to think about the way in which public speech is actually affected by the colonial conditions of this land.
Having situated us on the land, I will also situate myself. My name is Nodi, I use she/they/zie pronouns. I am a Bangladeshi-Swiss international student and I’ve been a settler here on Coast Salish territories for four years now. My ancestry is South Asian. On my maternal side, we are Pathan and Bangalee, and on my paternal, we are Memon. I study at the Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice department, and I am also minoring in Computer Science.
Litsa Chatzivasileiou: Hi, my name is Litsa Chatzivasileiou. I am a sessional instructor at GRSJ. I go by the pronouns she/her/hers.
Nodi: Now I am going to quickly review our agenda. So the way this is going to work is first we are going to go over community guidelines, sort of baseline agreements that we can have about how we are going to engage here to make this a constructive space and a constructive teach in where we can all learn things. Then we are going to have something resembling a conventional lecture style, and give a bit of context surrounding free speech in Canada, legislation around it, as well as talk about a few developments and current events that are relevant here. And then finally, having given that context and something to kind of ground our discussions, we are going to go into a discussion portion in smaller groups and then talk back to the larger group about some core questions that are relevant to free speech right now.
We will be engaging in discussions of racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and a variety of other forms of violence. If we are planning to go into particularly fine detail about any of these or give a particularly graphic example, we will try to issue a content warning beforehand, and we encourage you to do the same. This can be helpful for people who have personal traumas or difficult experiences associated with these topics by giving them more information off which to make judgements about whether and how they are able to participate in this teach-in.
We are not here to question people’s humanity. We are here to have a discussion about civic participation. So in that spirit, I encourage us to refrain from questioning people’s lived experiences. We are all going to be coming here from different backgrounds and it is not our place to tell someone else – probably a semi-stranger who we just met at a teach-in – that we know their lives better than they do. It’s totally fair to ask questions in good faith and you want to learn things, but we have to be conscientious about what’s motivating us to ask questions – are we here to learn something or to prove a point. So for instance, it’s very different to come up to me as a complete stranger and say “Hey, do you have a dick?”, compared to asking me like, “Hey, I’m trying to learn a bit about trans people and their bodies. Would you like to speak a bit about your experiences with medicalism?”. They’re very different questions because the second question lets me say “yes” or “no”, and offer as much information as I’d like, and it’s respectful of my experiences. It’s not loaded to make me look bad.
That brings us to the conventional lecture and contextualization portion of this. What I wanted to start with, since this was motivated by Ben Shapiro, I thought I would give a little bit of context about who he is. Who is Benny Boy?
He is a conservative political commentator and writer. He has published 7 books. His first book was Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth, published when he was 17. He is currently the editor-in-chief for The Daily Wire and writes as a columnist for Creators Syndicate and Newsweek. He also hosts The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and radio show. It peaked at #2 on the American iTunes podcast charts on 8th August 2017, and has most recently been ranked at #25 as of 29th October 2018. Between 2012 and 2016, Shapiro was also the editor-at-large of Breitbart News, which is a far-right syndicated American news, opinion, and commentary website described by its former Executive Chairman Steve Bannon in 2016 as “the platform of the alt-right”.
To give you a sense of the kinds of arguments that Shapiro makes and why he would motivate us, especially as people involved in social justice work, to organise this teach-in, I’ve compiled a few of the claims he’s made… A sort of highlights reel if you will. Pay attention to how, while we have already stated that we are opposed to questioning people’s humanity and lived experience, Shapiro doesn’t seem as concerned with that.
I’m going to give a Content Note. This first example is transphobic. Shapiro has, on a variety of occasions, argued that trans persons are not the genders with which they identify, but rather the ones they were coercively assigned at birth. He has argued for the equation of gender with sex in a very clean distinction, and for the existence of a very strict male/female binary, going so far as to claim that recognising the genders of trans people is “mainstreaming delusion”(https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/07/20/ben-shapiro-files-police-report-against-transgender-reporter-zoey-tur/).
Content note for genocidal and colonial Islamophobia. He posted a tweet which is still up that says: “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock” (https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/25712847277)
Continuing in the same Islamophobic vein, he has also argued that the majority of Muslims are radicals who oppose “tolerant and liberal” values. He does this largely by equating Sharia Law with “radicalism”, without going to length to define radicalism or what that means in the first place (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7TAAw3oQvg)
Content note for abortion and sexualised violence. He has also argued against abortion. He has asserted that it’s murder and he maintains his anti-abortion stance in the context of pregnancy as a result of rape – a very, very staunch anti-abortion stance (https://www.facebook.com/203805062990264/videos/1352253278145431/?pnref=story)
Content note for homophobia and this one frankly amuses me a little bit. He has contended that there exists a “militant gay agenda” within University Arts programs, and especially in English departments. He says that these English departments are attempting to pedagogically instill homosexuality into students. (https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2003/08/20/militant-gay-english-on-the-rise-n1334827)
On top of all of this bigotry, he also is a vehement climate change denier. (http://www.theredlandsbulldog.com/ben-shapiro-climate-change-fact-versus-fiction/)
While he does motivate this teach-in, I want to underscore that he isn’t the entire scope of what we’re here to talk about. We must see him as part of a broader movement and political moment and project. I only bring up this “highlights reel” to give a sense of where we’re coming from when we say he motivated us to organise a teach-in as a civic response, and so that you know some of the context surrounding this teach-in, like immediately. But we also need to be looking at all of the other political actors he’s associated with and that will make us realize that this is really a much broader discussion. We can’t lose sight of the Daily Wire or Breitbart, other commentators like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos, politicians like Donald Trump, public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, and then concrete developments in public policy. All of these things tell us that this is a bigger thing than just Shapiro. We shouldn’t be limiting our discussion to just Shapiro. We should also be looking in the local context; we might look at controversies around the SOGI policies enacted by school boards across the province, ongoing gentrification, the opioids crisis – these are all things that relate very much to this discussion. To give a few more examples, I’m going to do a couple case studies that might be useful. These are current events. I’m going to be talking about the repealing of trans civil rights in the US and I’m going to be talking about the Tree of Life shooting. I think these are really important developments and current events as we go into the discussion portion of this teach-in.
Regarding, trans civil rights, a week-and-a-half ago, the New York Times published a report on a leaked draft memo which articulated the Trump administration’s plans to “define gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth”. Both immediately before the leak, and continuing after it, there have been legislative moves within the administration to “define trans out of existence”, which has given rise to the #WontBeErased campaign, among other resistances. This is a fairly significant development and it’s important when we are talking about public speech and its’ politics to have this context because firstly, it didn’t come out of nowhere – public speech like Shapiro’s that calls trans people’s existence and dignity into question, that reinforces prejudices against us as liars, as mentally-ill, as dangerous, for instance, these paved the way for this development, as well as the other steps that have been taking place in the US for the piecemeal dismantling of trans rights under the Trump administration, for instance the trans military ban. So public speech is very much implicated in this. These bits of legislation doesn’t come out of nowhere and that is where public speech is politicized.
Secondly, those very advocates of free speech who seem so determined to protect the civic liberties of, for instance, Shapiro to access the public domain haven’t really shown up for trans peoples’ civic liberty to exist in public, let alone access a public platform for speech. This marks a very interesting double-standard. There’s a potential for free speech discourse to be rhetoricised and only selectively mobilised when it protects speech that is in one’s own interests. These people get very hot and bothered when we say we don’t like what Shapiro is saying. They’re not necessarily as concerned when we say “okay now trans people are being denied the capacity to live, let alone speak in public”.
Finally, how this leaked memo, the one repealing trans rights, has been publicly discussed also indexes the limits of who can even be recognised as someone possible to discuss, or someone worth discussing, even if only to be denied their humanity, let alone someone worth including in discussion on their own terms. For instance, while we are engaging in undeniably important discussions about the implications of the memo for trans people, there is virtually no space being held for intersex people who are also affected by this development. (And, for those of you who don’t know, put crudely, intersex is when you’re born, the doctor looks at you and doesn’t really know whether to say “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl”. The result of this physiology is oftentimes that intersex people are subject to non-consensual and invasive surgical measures from very early infancy in order to make their bodies conform to the medical standards of the male/female binary, and often this is very traumatic for the intersex people themselves.) So they are also affected by these developments from that leaked memo, but we aren’t really talking about that and that is also something that we should be paying attention to.
Similarly, the entire discourse surrounding trans civil rights is about civil rights. It’s about making an appeal to the nation-state and saying “we want legislation passed by the nation-state to protect us and then we want the nation-state to use its monopoly on violence to protect us”. And the complication here, the thing that I am problemitizing, is that we had a land acknowledgment at the beginning of this; we were saying that the state of Canada is technically illegitimate and it’s land-grabbing by being here and doesn’t really have any jurisdiction here. So then for us to use civil rights discourse and say that the state should recognize our rights and protect them, that itself it also a limitation of our discourse. And I’m not saying that we should completely scrap civil rights discourse, but I’m saying that we have to be wary of this limitation. And think about what implications that has for Indigenous peoples, and for instance, for trans Indigenous peoples, who, on one level, would benefit from these civil-rights protections but on the other hand, may not be afforded them because of their Indigeneity.
Moving on to talk about the Tree of Life Shooting, and this one gets a massive content warning for anti-semitism. For those who haven’t heard about this, in Pittsburgh, there’s the Tree of Life synagogue and there was a shooting there last week and there were 11 deaths as a result. In the wake of the shooting, BBC writes that: “More than 70,000 people signed an open letter from Pittsburgh-based Jewish leaders saying that President Trump was “not welcome” in the city unless he “fully denounces white nationalism.” (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46038898)
This is an example of how speech and public discourse is not just a neutral sharing of ideas, but is invested with power that carries material consequences. In this instance, the shooter was not a Trump supporter, but his critics are pointing out that Trump sort of fomented white nationalism and neo-Nazi activity through his divisive rhetoric. So they are basically saying that his speech acts have created conditions for violence and that they are not just neutral things that he is saying. He is not just sharing ideas in a completely even marketplace of ideas. There are pre-existing terms of power when he speaks and that creates conditions where this kind of violence can take place.
On the flip side too, the fact that they are demanding that he denounces white nationalism also shows that public speech holds power when, for instance, Trump comes out later on and says “okay actually Nazism is bad”. I’m still waiting for him to do that but if he did, that has implications. It’s not just neutral to power. He holds power that he’s mobilizing power through the speech act that has implications on how safe Jewish people are, and anyone else who is targeted by the people that he is, at the moment, through his speech acts, condoning. This is important to acknowledge when we are talking about public speech: that there is actually power and it has material ramifications when speech is mobilized by certain people in certain contexts and certain ways.
The power of Trump’s public speech interventions in the context of the shooting also gesture to the broader politics of language and power today. We might look, for instance, at “dogwhistling” as a powerful tactic in proliferating hate ideologies and propaganda while eschewing accountability. Take, for example, Trump’s revival of the anti-semitic term “globalist” (https://qz.com/1433675/how-trump-defines-globalist-and-nationalist/).
Another example would be the use of “ironic” memes by especially the alt-right as a kind of dogwhistling, and it’s effective because when we name it as the propaganda that it is, then by design, it positions those of us doing that naming as irrational, as reaching, just taking a joke too seriously, or if all else fails, as policing the speech of others in the name of “political correctness”. By framing speech as “just ideas” – or as neutral to the politics of power – dogwhistling is a strategy used by those who already hold discursive power to make it impossible to challenge that power that they hold and to create accountability for its violent, material outcomes.
Having addressed some of this context and offered some analytic insights as well regarding speech that might be useful to us when we come to the discussion portion of this teach-in, I’ll now hand over to Litsa. She will be talking about free speech in relation to legislation in Canada and at UBC, among other topics.
Litsa: The title of my speech tonight is “Fascist Speech is not Free Speech” and I will explain to you why. The growing fascist movement globally and here in Canada often claims that it is promoting “free speech” and complains that the progressive left and other opponents are violating their rights. But the law does not protect the advocacy of violence any more than it protects incitement to genocide. Look up Canadian Laws on the freedom of speech: Freedom of expression in Canada is not absolute. Section 1 of the Charter allows the government to pass laws that limit free expression so long as such restrictions are necessary in order to limit political violence and guard against hate speech or the advocacy and incitement of genocide or violence against a particular racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and religious group.
Look up also the BC Human Rights Code against discriminatory publication that specifically addresses publicizing hate speech, such as Shapiro’s. And I will give examples why this speech is hate speech. So, back to BC Human Rights Code that says very explicitly : “not to publish, issue or display… any statement, publication with an intention to discriminate against a person or a group or class of persons, or subject them to hatred and contempt because of their race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression” and so on. As Reid Marcus, a student opposing Shapiro’s talk has already indicated, in giving a public platform to Ben Shapiro to express his hateful views, UBC as an institution violates Canadian law as well as UBC’s own policies, the BC Human Rights Code’s section on discriminatory publication, UBC’s policy on discrimination and harassment (Policy 3), as well as its Statement on Respectful Environment.
These well-established legal principles should be extended to prohibit the advocacy of genocide, the ultimate violence. And in my books, Ben Shapiro advocates for the genocidal policies of Israel against Palestinian people and publicly incites discrimination against trans people, and Muslim folks. Shapiro once explained his actual preferred solution to the problem of the so-called “dark Arab hordes” (these are his words): mass expulsion. As he said, “bulldozing Palestinian houses and subjecting them to curfews are insufficient ‘half-measures’: the only solution is to drive every last one of them forcibly from their homes and take their land.” (Source: Nathan Robinson: “The Cool Kid’s Philosopher”, https://static.currentaffairs.org/2017/12/the-cool-kids-philosopher). There are no other words to call this but ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Arguing about the free speech rights of advocates of genocide, Islamophobes, transphobes and imperialists is a trap. The issue is not speech, it is violence. The fascists do not want to argue with us, they want to kill us. Freedom of speech has limits, and the law is there to protect these limits. For instance, I am pretty sure that UBC would have used Canadian laws and the BC Human Rights Code to never consent having a speaker on university grounds that propagates ISIS ideology and the beheading of Westerners or exalts the benefits of the ethnic cleansing of the Yazidi minority in Iraq. Why then UBC allows for Shapiro’s right to free speech, an advocate of Palestinian genocide?
But what about Shapiro’s exaltation of U.S imperialism? In defending the invasion of Iraq, Shapiro specifically praised imperialism, saying that for the U.S, “empire isn’t a choice, it’s a duty.” For Shapiro, maintaining U.S. global power is an end in itself. Shapiro even endorsed invading countries that do not pose an immediate threat, suggesting other Islamophobic gems of Muslim genocide such as that almost any Muslim nation could legitimately be attacked if doing so served the interests of U.S. “global empire.” (Source: Nathan Robinson: “The Cool Kid’s Philosopher”, https://static.currentaffairs.org/2017/12/the-cool-kids-philosopher).
What’s more, Shapiro doesn’t believe that criticizing the American government during a time of war ought to be legal at all. Let me get that straight: the champion of Free Speech has literally called for reinstating sedition laws, and the suppression of speech and expression of opinion. When Al Gore told a Muslim audience that he believed the United States’ indiscriminate rounding-up and detention practices after 9/11 were “terrible” and abusive, Shapiro called the statements “treasonable,” “seditious,” and “outrageous” and demanded that the law responded in kind. (Source: Nathan Robinson: “The Cool Kid’s Philosopher”, https://static.currentaffairs.org/2017/12/the-cool-kids-philosopher)
Most freedom of speech debates now start on the false premise that denying someone a platform is censorship. So we must begin with the correct one, which is that freedom of speech is freedom from punishment. If you are not being convicted and penalized by the state for speaking, then you have freedom of speech. If just one channel of speech has been denied to you, you still have freedom of speech. We’re not talking about burning books here. Those who are truly denied freedom of speech are the disappeared of Egypt, the jailed and flogged blasphemers and the recent murdered journalists such as Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia, the arbitrarily detained bloggers and journalists of China.
Nodi: I have to jump in there, because I’m here in part because back in Bangladesh, they are killing anyone who expresses secular thought or anyone who expresses that they are queer so the state has sanctioned this. Tacitly they have because they know that this is happening and they have denied that it is happening. And there is no legal repercussions or investigations when this happens. It’s essentially state-sanctioned killings of queer people and of secularists so that’s what the taking away of free speech looks like. It doesn’t look like me showing up here and saying “I don’t necessarily like what Shapiro says.” There’s a difference between these things.
Litsa: That’s exactly the point I am trying to make. These people that Nodi is talking about are truly being denied their freedom of speech. It is an insult to their ordeals that we equate them with not wanting to hear the hateful speech of Shapiro. Their shutting down of their speech is censorship, Shapiro’s shutting down is not. That is not that complicated.
But this can backfire, we’re told. If we start banning those whose views we don’t like, what next? We could extend the right to platform to all, but what next? Child abusers’ speeches? That’s obviously absurd, but it highlights the fact that there are limits to freedom of speech, and they are broadly dictated by how much certain values are coded within our society. We don’t like child abusers, right? So, we don’t let them speak on their right to abuse. The reason free speech proponents are not out there fighting to hear from child abusers or some radical ISIS fighters is because society or the law regulate the more unpalatable or illegal views away before we even have to deal with them at public spaces such as UBC.
Freedom of speech is no longer a value. It has become literally a loophole exploited with impunity by racists, fascists, misogynists, transphobes, and ethnic cleansing advocates. They are aided by some liberals, the crowd that constantly hammers the empty cliche, “I defend to the death your right to say it”. These liberals particularly fear that if we censor the likes of Shapiro, this will give license to one day censoring also progressives. Hmm! Let me get that straight: These liberals care more about the cliche of “defending your right to say whatever violent messages you spew” and much less about how your hateful speech can be linked to violence against minorities, or how it compromises the safety of the oppressed.
Too often, these liberals, who should know better have screwed up priorities. They fight to their deaths to defend the rights of Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos and other bigots and peddlers of hate – but not the rights of the oppressed who are or feel attacked by the speech of bigots.
But words matter. They literally affect the life and death of the oppressed. Hate speech is the gateway to discrimination, harassment and violence. It is the psychological foundation for serious, harmful criminal acts. Without the precondition of hate speech, there would be no hate-motivated violent attacks on the Muslim, Black, Jewish and LGBTQ+ communities.
Witness what is happening currently in the U.S. I know that Shapiro is no fun of Trump but let us say that Trump’s racist words in his rallies have given license to white supremacist, anti-semites and other bigots to put bombs in the places where Trump’s critics live or to even slaughter 11 Jewish congregants in the Pittsburgh synagogue a few days ago. In other words, if we can stop the speech full of hatred and bigotry of hate demagogues, far right politicians and so called conservative intellectuals of the likes of Shapiro (who might not be an anti-semite but is definitely an Islamophobe), we will stop the prejudice that often spills over into hateful, damaging acts, such as racist and queer-bashing murders. On these grounds, laws against inciting hatred through public speech are ethically justified and have practical benefits.
Shapiro often points to his yarmulke and vehemently denies that he is a racist or a fascist or part of the far-right. This is typical fascism denial. As Zoltan Grossmann however claims: Fascism denial dismisses “any far-right action committed by an individual who doesn’t fit the simplified stereotype of ignorant KKK hicks or Nazi goose-steppers, or describe fascists as mere clowns. However, by now we should know better. The ‘alt-right’ movement should have alerted us that fascists could be wearing a suit and tie, or [a yarmulke like Shapiro] or posing as hipster libertarians attacking so-called ‘identity politics’ and defending ‘free speech’ and ‘diversity of opinion’ [like Shapiro]. We challenge fascists not because of their speech, but because of the actions that their speech generates, which we’ve seen up close this week,” with the fascist and anti-semitic attack in the synagogue in Pittsburgh. (Source: Grossmann: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/30/fascism-denial-ignores-some-inconvenient-truths/)
But let me be clear: free speech is not the issue here. Intellectual power is. No, you do not have the right to spew hate and violence at UBC in the name of sharing intellectual ideas because these are not intellectual ideas: they are prejudiced comments based on racial hate. No, your ideas are not intellectual because they are violent. And as Stephen Cohen said in light of the recent attacks on the synagogue in Pittsburgh: “When you spew hate speech, people act on it. Very simple.” Because words matter. Words are actions. Hateful and intimidating words not only threaten democracy itself but legitimize and inspire physical violence.
Here is another thing about Shapiro. Shapiro is a guy that styles himself as a conservative intellectual and a philosopher that fosters truth and intellectual dialogue based on argumentation. I am not sure what to make then of his name calling of those who disagree with him or protest against him. Here are some of the gems he has spewed against them: “You guys are so stupid… you can all go to hell, you pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses.” And some more gems to his opponents calling them “pusillanimous cowards,” “hard-Left morons,” “uncivilized barbarians”. Shapiro also loves facts but he cites “simple common sense as his source” when, for example, he makes racist statements like “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in a sewage” and “monitoring mosques is the simplest and most effective way of preventing terrorist attacks”. (Source: Nathan Robinson: “The Cool Kid’s Philosopher”, https://static.currentaffairs.org/2017/12/the-cool-kids-philosopher). Someone needs to tell this guy that facts based on “simple common sense” are not facts and certainly not truth or legitimate intellectual argumentation and discourse.
Nodi: Apparently facts don’t care about your feelings. They only care about Shapiro’s.
Litsa: Moreover, “simple common sense” is not a good compass to dictate policies that are racist and promote the racial profiling of Muslim Americans and aim at surveilling innocent people in mosques. To those who defend the right of Shapiro to speak at UBC in the name of the idea that universities are public spaces of open dialogue…I also have beef with that. Many conservatives are using the idea of the right to speak as a convenient foil to promote reactionary, bigoted pseudo-science, and Shapiro does that when he denies the right to exist to trans people and argues that trans folk are mentally ill or schizophrenic. At the same time, countless liberals are indulging in their moral superiority as the unrivalled passive subjects of history, who are content to be tolerant of anything as long as they do not actually have to do something. Even supposed leftists here at UBC are defending the institutional promotion of racist Islamophobes, anti-poor, misogynist hacks in the name of purportedly avoiding future censorship of the left.
This abstract rights discourse has so-called progressives belittling those who have taken a committed stance and engaged in direct action against institutions of higher learning such as UBC that willingly functions tonight as an echo chamber for fascism, racism, misogyny and economic oppression.
But universities are not neutral spaces. All you need to do is have a look at the history of universities as institutions. Universities have often fostered so called intellectual ideas that are deeply reactionary and racist. For example, classist, eugenicist and racist theories such as Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism promoted the innate inferiority of major sectors of the world population—the poor, women, the indigenous, subalterns, and many others. These were ideas and “intellectual theories” once widely taught at universities and considered credible discourses. If this has changed over time, at least in part, it is not due to tolerance of free speech and allowing bigots such as Shapiro to talk here tonight. And it is certainly not because scientific racism and other violent ideologies were sanctioned and promoted by institutions of higher learning in the name of a supposed right to free speech. It was through the direct action of people who recognized that universities are power brokers in the struggle to define legitimate discourse, and who actively defended the position that racist ideology and speech—like other non- scientific forms of structural oppression or ingrained cultural bigotry—does not qualify as free speech.
Free speech and the right to freedom of speech do not float in a pure moral vacuum above and beyond the soiled political struggles of the here-and-now of marginalized communities constantly struggling for their right to be heard and to exist. The right to express one’s views is not the right to have a university such as UBC approve of them by providing a megaphone to them.
It is not coincidental that the free speech club and the recent clamouring by far right demagogues and pundits for free speech at institutions such as UBC has particularly reached hysterical proportions after the political gains of marginalized communities having their voices finally been heard on campuses. The more these previously powerless communities – women, LGBTQ, Indigenous students and faculty of colour – became vocal and gained some access at the university, the more strident the conservative voices became. I’d like to remind you that First Nations Studies was instituted at UBC just a couple of decades ago. Or GRSJ was established as recently as 2012. Just dig in to see the history of the Pride Collective at UBC or the Sexual Assault Support Centre and you will see that these are fairly recent developments. Why is that? The free speech club at UBC and all the free speech clamouring is a reaction to these political gains of people of color, of women and LGBTQ+ at the university. The free speech club and all the hype about free speech at universities is nothing but the ultimate spasmodic attempts of conservatives to shut down marginalized communities and return us to a university where the only voices and experiences being heard and works being studied were those of white, straight, wealthy men and their accolades.
I refuse to hear Ben Shapiro’s voice! It belongs to the dustbin of an oppressive history of how institutions of higher learning catered to his ilk while promoting pseudo-intellectual theories and scientific racism that advocated the inferiority of marginalized people. But most of all, I refuse to hear Ben Shapiro and defend his right to speak because fascist speech is not speech: it is hatred and bigotry. And I will resist any other bigot whose words are designed to encourage violence against oppressed people and refuse to see their humanity. And as Alex Myers, a trans activist, recently said: “I don’t know what shape my resistance will take, but I know I’ll be joined by thousands of people I’ve worked with, talked to, and educated over the past decades.” (Alex Myers).
As an anti-racist educator, it is my moral imperative to resist fascism in words or in deeds for as Chris Hedges has famously said: “I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”
Thank you.
**Special thanks to M.A. Murphy for working on the transcript.
