Censorship and Race

Definition: Classification of human beings into groupings based on their real or perceived relationships and physical commonalities

Significance: Race has historically inspired a variety of censorship efforts, both by racially supremacist political regimes and by modern opponents of speech that promotes racial hatred

For two centuries conflict regarding race has occupied a central place in American society, and this conflict has been mirrored in many other countries of the world. Challenges to racial supremacy have frequently faced official censorship. Where such challenges have prevailed, they have in turn often aimed their own censorship efforts at racist speech.

Censorship in Service of Racial Supremacy

Societies organized around a principle of racial supremacy have routinely sought to suppress speech threatening to the racist regimes. In the United States, for example, the pre-Civil War South greeted abolitionist attacks on the institution of slavery with profound alarm. Southern authorities frequently persuaded local post office masters to treat abolitionist materials as incendiary and therefore unfit for distribution through the mails. A century later, after slavery had been abolished and Jim Crow segregationism had taken root in the South, civil rights protests faced a variety of censorship efforts in Southern states. In actions ranging from the dismissal of university faculty who spoke disapprovingly of segregation to violence inflicted on African American demonstrators and Northern “agitators,” Southern authorities endeavored to preserve Jim Crow against its increasingly vocal opponents.

For example, at the University of Mississippi, opposition to racial segregation during the 1960s was officially censored by state officials. In the fall of 1963 Professor James W. Silver, chair of the university’s department of history, delivered an address to the Southern Historical Association titled “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” opposing the doctrines of white supremacy and racial segregation. In the public furor that followed this speech, state legislators demanded Silver’s dismissal and attempted to ban any further public speaking on his part. Ultimately, the state board responsible for the university charged Silver with promoting racial tension and violence. To avoid further conflict, Silver accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Notre Dame and then consented to retire from the University of Mississippi rather than return there. Three years later the same state board took further steps to suppress antisegregationist speech. After the university’s chancellor invited Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to speak at the university in March of 1966 and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Aaron Henry gave a speech at the University’s law school, the board passed an order requiring all Mississippi college presidents to deliver to it in advance the names of proposed speakers before issuing any speaking invitation.

Similar patterns of racial censorship have exhibited themselves elsewhere around the globe. For example, prior to South Africa’s democratic revolution in the early 1990s, its apartheid regime suppressed anti-apartheid protests on a variety of fronts. South African critics of official segregation such as Nelson Mandela were jailed or killed, and international critics found their diatribes against apartheid officially banned from circulation. For example, when the black American singer and songwriter Stevie Wonder dedicated to Nelson Mandela an Academy Award won in 1985 for his song, “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” the government-controlled South African Broadcast Corporation banned his songs from its broadcast stations.

Hate Speech Codes

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a global erosion of legally sanctioned racial segregation and oppression in favor of egalitarian ideals. In 1954, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ended legally enforced racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. Over the following decade Congress enacted sweeping legislation that prohibited racial discrimination in a variety of contexts, including restaurants, hotels, and educational institutions. However, the burgeoning consensus against racism and increasing social distaste for expressions of racist sentiments ultimately collided with free speech principles. Opponents of racism have frequently argued that racially derogatory speech should not escape censure by cloaking itself in the mantle of free expression. Armed with egalitarian zeal, opponents of racist speech have succeeded in producing a variety of “hate speech” codes, especially on university campuses. These codes provide for sanctions against speakers who utter racist comments, and typically include similar sanctions for speech by persons insulting one another on the basis of gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Campus hate speech codes have often been accompanied by a general vigilance against expression deemed racially insulting.

Hate Speech and the Supreme Court

Hate speech codes implemented by government bodies or public institutions such as state universities must survive scrutiny under the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause. The U.S. Supreme Court has never construed this clause to provide absolute protection of speech, and has, in fact, recognized certain categories of speech that either receive no protection at all under the First Amendment or lesser degrees of protection than accorded to other forms of speech. For example, the Court in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) found that “fighting words”—that is, insulting words likely to provoke public violence—were outside the protection of the First Amendment. Advocates of codes punishing racist speech have sometimes relied on Chaplinsky’s “fighting words” doctrine to justify restrictions on racist speech.

In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), however, the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to advocates of hate speech codes. The case involved an ordinance passed by the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, that banned symbols, graffiti, and other forms of expression likely to offend others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender. The city relied on this ordinance to prosecute, for disorderly conduct, several teenagers who burned a cross in the yard of an African American family. The Supreme Court held that the ordinance violated freedom of speech. The Court concluded that the “fighting words” doctrine could not be used to single out particular viewpoints—in this case, a racist viewpoint—for criminal sanction, even if government might generally ban all fighting words. Since the First Amendment protects speech only against official sanction, private schools and universities have been able to retain their hate speech codes, even though R.A.V. probably prevents governments or public institutions from adopting codes that single out particular kinds of fighting words—such as racist comments—for punishment.

Racism and Literature

The same impulse that has produced hate speech codes has also energized attempts to censor literature thought to glorify racist sentiments or to demean racial minorities. For example, Mark Twain’s classic tale of adventure along the Mississippi River, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), incurred twentieth-century protests for its copious use of the racially derogatory term “nigger” and uncomplimentary aspects of its portrayal of Huckleberry Finn’s African American companion, Jim. Enemies of anti-Semitism have targeted for protest works no less famous than Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist , for its characterization of the Jewish thief Fagin, and William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , whose Shylock seems to some readers a form of the vicious stereotyping of Jews at the heart of anti-Semitism.

Not all attempts to suppress a consciousness of race in literature have come from critics of racism. Occasionally, African American authors or works about African American characters have been objects of censorship efforts. Typically, however, criticism of such authors or works has not appealed directly to issues of race, but has leveled condemnation at a perceived moral coarseness in the author or work. Maya Angelou’s autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , for example, has been a frequent target of censorship attempts for its sexually explicit descriptions, its purportedly offensive language, and what some readers have viewed as its religious irreverence. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has earned similar opposition to its inclusion in public school curricula for its graphic sexual depictions. Occasionally, however, the subject of racism has drawn complaints of its own. The 1958 children’s book by Garth Williams titled The Rabbits’ Wedding , about the courtship of a white rabbit and a black rabbit, drew fierce public protest and was banned from a variety of bookstores and libraries for the offense of glorifying miscegenation, even if the “miscegenation” clothed itself in the soft fur of bunnies. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education voted to implement a history textbook that glossed over the US history of slavery, as well as censoring other negative aspects of American history.

The American Nazis and Skokie

One of the more combustible intersections between the US constitutional commitment to racial equality and its commitment to free expression seemed poised to occur in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago in 1977. Of the town’s population of seventy thousand people, forty thousand were Jewish, five thousand of whom were survivors of the Holocaust in Europe. In March of 1977, the president of the National Socialist Party of America announced that the party intended to hold a demonstration in Skokie. The participants, he informed the town, would wear uniforms similar to those worn by Nazi party members under Adolf Hitler, and would wear arm bands or emblems of swastikas. Skokie officials filed suit to prevent the march, claiming that the marchers intended to incite hatred toward Jews and that the First Amendment should not shield this effort to promulgate anti-Semitic racism. In a running battle across various trial and appellate courts, Skokie’s attempts to block the marchers, both through court action and by a hastily adopted series of ordinances, was ultimately rebuffed. In a curious climax to the legal warfare, however, the National Socialist Party of America eventually canceled the planned demonstration in Skokie in favor of one in Chicago.

Social Media and Censorship

With the rise of social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in the 2000s, the issue of Internet censorship has become prominent. Many believe that either hate speech or that which is racially insensitive can reign unchecked on the such platforms. Facebook has a hate-speech code that allows its administrators to censor speech or images they deem to be inciting hatred toward a specific group. Opponents of this type of policy consider it to be a restriction of free speech—albeit speech that may be racist, misogynistic, or homophobic—and note that such speech is often regulated by the social-media communities that interact with it. For example, a racist hashtag or tweet may be appropriated by the group toward which it is directed and used to publicly shame the original poster.

Bibliography

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Fernandez, Manny, and Christine Hauser. "Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy." New York Times. New York Times, 5 Oct. 2015. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.

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