Last week officials at Tucson Unified School District walked into classrooms and took books away from the students. The reason? Books which promote “resentment toward a race or class of people” are not permitted.
While comparisons are being made to Nazi Germany, I am thinking instead about the books they didn’t take. The ones that evidently do not promote resentment between races. History books with the proper information about slavery, boarding schools, internment camps, borders and war. Who wrote those books?
Free Speech is something we Americans all agree on, right? The free expression of ideas, thoughts, and opinions is a basic human right, as given as oxygen…the necessary air of critical reasoning, dialogue and debate.
Yet Free Speech is also invoked by white people who don’t want to critically examine the content of their own discourse.
For example, if a white writer includes racial stereotypes in her writing or one-dimensional racial characters, whether out of ignorance or laziness or simply because it “feels” right to her, she can invoke Free Speech as a protection against being accountable for the consequences of her work.
No one likes censorship, so those who might object that stereotypes perpetuate racism or limit the conversation to a one-sided monologue in support of white supremacy will probably back off when the Free Speech banner is raised viagra libre.
Yet I have this nagging notion in my belly that free speech is really about privilege and entitlement. White people get more free speech than people of color. So at its heart, the ban in Arizona isn’t about free speech (although that would make it simpler). The ban is about the oppression of brown people by white people, about white control of the words, the culture, the conversation around history and race.
What can I, a white person, learn from Arizona? It is so tempting to feel self-righteously outraged. I can send a petition to the school governing board. (By the way, please DO sign the petition.) But my outraged petition-signing might just reinforce my sense of rightness, the illusion that I am somehow “above” the system.
So instead of being lulled into complacency by outrage, I want to ask myself (and you):
Would the Tucson Unified School District remove my writing? If my book was in their classroom, would it count as threatening? Are my words so harmless to the white regime that they would remain?
How does my writing perpetuate racism? What racial stereotypes are embedded within my work that I can’t see? How often do I choose what is easy or seems right rather than what is complex, uncomfortable, unsettling?
I want to call out to white writers everywhere and ask them these questions: Are you, a writer who “happens to be white,” accountable for the ways that racism is unconsciously perpetuated in your work? What and who keeps you accountable?
What are you doing with all the free speech you possess?