ETSU witnessed a sickening and unforgettable display of racism on Wednesday, Sep. 28, 2016. Freshman Tristan Rettke donned a gorilla mask, handed bananas to extremely polite Black Lives Matter protesters and taunted them with words such as, “I identify as a gorilla. I look like you.”
Although Rettke was found guilty of disrupting a meeting in last month’s trial, he received the verdict of not guilty to the charge of civil rights intimidation, for which he was arrested.
Our professor of political science Colin Glennon reminds us, “Historically… it’s tough for prosecutors to get convictions of those types of violations.” A basic reason for this, Glennon says, is that “juries really like the First Amendment.”
In evaluating whether we should agree with the jury, we need to asess whether Rettke’s actions constituted a violation of Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-309, subsection (b)(1)-(2). Accordingly, he would be guilty of civil rights intimidation by injuring, threatening to injure or coercing someone either because that person is exercising civil rights or to keep that person from doing so. However, Rettke didn’t injure or threaten to injure anyone. The prosecution tried to prove that he intended to coerce the protesters from engaging in their right, with Tennessee’s definition of “coercion” including “[e]xpos[ing] any person to hatred, contempt, or ridicule.”
Tennessee’s definition of “coercion” is too broad and conflicts with the First Amendment, as attested by The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which declared Texas’ identical definition of “coercion” to be “constitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment.” As for intimidation, Armstrong v. Ellington established precedent for striking down intimidation laws in favor of the First Amendment. Although Rettke intended “to provoke the protesters,” as ACLU of Tennessee President Hedy Weinberg stated, “Even this kind of contemptible racist speech is protected by the First Amendment.”
Expressing racism isn’t against the law, but we recognize it as wrong. As ETSU history professor Daryl Carter asserted, “Even if you’re working from the premise that the First Amendment allows a certain kind of speech, it does not make it OK morally.” Then what is the fundamental issue?
One pioneer of modern progressive thought is Charles Darwin, predicting in “The Descent of Man” that “the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races.” In so doing, the biological distance between humans and our nearest relatives would supposedly increase so that gap would be between “the Caucasians and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [aborigine] and the gorilla.” Claiming that blacks and aborigines are closer to animals than whites is egregious racism, which wouldn’t stop with Darwin himself.
For example, the Scopes Trial of 1925 centered on an evolutionary textbook claiming “the Caucasians… represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” are “the highest type of all [the races].” Even evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould admitted, “biological arguments for racism… increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”
Although Darwinists are not necessarily racist, both the worldview’s inherent racism and Rettke’s consistency with it are inescapable, albeit I am unaware of his personal convictions for his racist action.
In an opposing worldview in which God creates people with moral obligations, there is place for absolute morality, and there is reason to condemn racism. God has made all people in His image, and we are to respect the image of God in every person and love our neighbors as ourselves. Although not everyone claiming to be a Christian is consistent with this principle, that does not affect the worldview itself. Everyone’s life is of equal value because, as the book of Acts says, God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth.” That is why what Rettke did was so wrong, and that is why we are justified in condemning his actions even when the laws of our land do not.
