Friday, December 08, 2017
Black hate-speech censored
The outrage du jour is a newspaper column entitled “Your DNA is an Abomination” published by a student newspaper at Texas State University.
The column was taken down from the newspaper’s website. It should not have been. How can the rest of us assess its arguments absent an authoritative version of the writing? The student body president has called for defunding the student newspaper. He should not be advocating punishing speech he does not like. A few hundred people have signed an online petition calling for the paper to be defunded.
Texas State President Denise M. Trauth has said the column was “racist” and said its themes were “abhorrent.” So far so good. She is responding to speech with more speech. But she also said, “I expect student editors to exercise good judgment in determining the content that they print.” That is a sensible view but also could be taken as a threat.
The author apparently wrote:
"Ontologically speaking, white death will mean liberation for all. To you good-hearted liberals, apathetic nihilists and right-wing extremists: accept this death as the first step toward defining yourself as something other than the oppressor. Until then, remember this: I hate you because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die".
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5 comments:
Some student who is not yet an adult wrote some garbled nonsense. No big deal.
Liberal collage student news papers are little more then smaller versions of Pravda run by the usial mindless liberal zombies
Is the author of the opinion that historical cultures in Asia, Africa, Polynesia, South America, Korea, and Japan and the Middle East no longer exist? Of course, if he is speaking only of stone age hunter-gatherer societies he may or may not have a point. But historically speaking those societies tended over time to turn to agricultural and settled societies.
Most likely, however, he/she is looking only at the conquest and settlement of North America. That indicates a limited vision of the world both today and in the past.
His/her writing should not have been censored. It should have been left in view for futher discussion.
Personally, I would welcome the opportunity to have a conversation with him/her.
The writer of this report (not the racist writer) gives the impression that all written opinions should be published. Any editor of any publishing apparatus, whether a newspaper, tv station, or website, has the obligation to be the gatekeeper of what he publishes. You might see that as the role of the Letters To The Editor Page in newspapers, and perhaps that's where this particular piece belonged. However, having worked in newspaper, I know that even for Letters there are standards and some things simply aren't allowed. It isn't censorship if an editor decides a particular piece doesn't fit his publication for whatever reason. So, I have no problem with someone refusing to publish something from the outset. However, they apparently did choose to publish the opinion piece in question. The removal of the piece after publication certainly appears to be censorship. And he is correct in at least implying that we shouldn't censor even the most horrendous ideas. Allowing them to be seen and heard in the light of day is the only way for us to see their authors for who and what they really are, though this still shouldn't be construed as a requirement on publications to run everything ever sent to them. Like so many other things, there's a fine line.
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