The First Amendment has been getting a workout in recent weeks on two college campuses – the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — where students are learning that free speech is a messy business.
The two cases, one involving a columnist at UNC and the other a political cartoonist at UF, have inflamed minority groups – Muslims and blacks, respectively – provoking protests and debate.
That’s the good news; protest and debate are the currency of free speech.
What’s not such good news is that the UNC columnist was fired, and the Florida cartoonist has been condemned and threatened. Both students have been virtually abandoned by university officials, some of whom apparently are more concerned about burnishing their multiculti self-images than in supporting an increasingly embattled founding principle.
Jillian Brandes, a former columnist for UNC’s Daily Tar Heel, wrote a column making a case for racial profiling in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that began hyperbolically: “I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.”
Then she proceeded to quote several Arab students and a professor who said they wouldn’t mind being searched.
Some subsequently claimed their remarks had been taken out of context, an unprecedented development in journalism. Brandes was fired.
One could make a strong argument that Brandes’ column was silly, amateurish, lacking in taste, strident and ineffective. But people have a clear and protected right to be both silly and amateurish.
Brandes’ editor claimed that he fired her for “journalistic malpractice,” for taking quotes out of context, not in response to pressure.
I can only say that in 25 years with newspapers, I’ve never known anyone to be fired when a story’s subjects didn’t like the way quotes were used.
In Gainesville, Fla., cartoonist Andy Marlette drew an image that has angered some black groups. Marlette is the nephew of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and author Doug Marlette, whose talent as an equal-opportunity offender apparently seeped into the family gene pool.
Marlette the Younger’s cartoon in the Independent Florida Alligator was a commentary on rapper Kanye West’s remarks following Hurricane Katrina that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Marlette drew a cartoon of West holding an oversized playing card labeled “The Race Card,” with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying, “Nigga Please!”
The N-word makes me cringe … especially every time I hear Kanye West say it. His songs, including his current hit, “Gold Digger,” are liberally seasoned with the word, often couched in violence and obscenity.
But when I imagine the immaculate and proper Condi Rice saying it, especially to a “brotha” who has made a fortune playing the bad boy, it makes me laugh.
Which is to say Marlette’s cartoon hit the mark. It was sophisticated, irreverent and funny. His use of West’s own language to parody the rapper’s political statement was, in fact, the art of the cartoon.
Yet certain campus groups and administrators were outraged. This, even though the same student government that pulled ads from the Alligator is paying West to drop the N-bomb in concert at the university in a few days.
It’s hardly surprising that students don’t understand that the First Amendment, which protects Marlette’s and Brandes’ right to voice unpopular opinions, also protects West’s “music,” as well as their own right to protest.
It’s disturbing, however, when faculty and administrators’ understanding is little better.
The painful irony is that minorities are historically the first to suffer when free speech goes.
Not so long ago, blacks were lynched in this country for trying to voice their opinions at the polls.
Which is why African Americans and now Arab Americans troubled by the specter of discrimination should be the loudest voices supporting the freedoms that permit even speech they find offensive.
It’s a messy job, but everybody’s got to do it.
c 2005, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
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