The University of Houston has offered the latest example of how free speech is being rapidly eradicated on our campuses. Rohini Sethi, vice president of the university’s student government association, was given a 50-day suspension from her student government post for saying “all lives matter” on social media. She has now been told that the suspension will be lifted after she publicly apologized and agreed to attend cultural events.
Sethi originally wrote “#ForgetBlackLivesMatter; more like AllLivesMatter.” This was done in response to the murder of five police officers. She was immediately denounced as racist and various students claimed that she had created a hostile environment by stating her viewpoint. Student government President Shane Smith responded with the draconian measures.
Now, Sethi will be allowed to return after a type of public confession that seemed more appropriate to a reeducation camp than an American campus. Sethi issued a joint statement with Smith that said that “I have chosen to take these steps on my own because of the division I’ve created among our student body,. I may have the right to post what I did, but I still should not have. My words at the time didn’t accurately convey my feeling and cause many students to lose their faith in me to advocate for them. I will always continue to learn and be ready to discuss these issues.”
So she has the right to speak but will be sanctioned if she does?
Smith is qouted in the Washington Post as saying:
“Her post and subsequent actions were very divisive. It caused some in our student body to become very upset with her. They lost faith in her ability to represent them because they felt that she did not understand or respect the struggles in their lives.”
Smith actually apologized to those who wanted more of a sanction, writing “For those that are disappointed by the change, this is a compromise based in the reality of the situation. My stance on racial injustice has always been clear. For all involved, this is truly the best outcome.” No, I do not believe it is the best outcome. The best outcome would be to respect the right of all students to speak freely.
We have previously discussed (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) the erosion of free speech on college and university campuses as students and faculty are punished for expressing views deemed offensive to any group. In the meantime, we have also seen protests by Black Lives Matter and other groups that silence other students with little response from university administrators.
The controversy of University of Houston shows how schools are now instilling speech regulation as an accepted part of academic environments. The result is a new generation of students taught that they must conform to majoritarian or official views if they want to be educated or avoid sanctions. The primary responsibility for this rollback on free speech rests with the faculty and administrators of our schools, who have often supported such notion of speech as “microaggressions” or hostile acts under school codes.
While Sethi originally stood by her comments, she has now been brought to heel under a de facto speech code. None of this has anything to do with the merits of the rivaling views on the use of “All Lives Matter.” It deals with the right of students to engage in an open debate on such issues. I recently spoke with a student at Missouri (groundzero for the controversy over Melissa Click), for example, who told me that he no longer felt that he could even raise concerns over the demands of “Black Lives Matter” at his school. Despite his support for measures to fight inequality and racism, he said that students no longer felt that they could question even the list of demands being made by the group. This is someone who supports the effort to reform aspects of his school but still fears speaking about the issues. He noted that his faculty has also been silenced in the aftermath of the controversy. His experience is not unique as faculty and staff have succeeded in chilling the speech of those with questions or opposing views on our campuses.
Autumn:
“I would just like to point out that not all BLM people are racist or wish to limit free speech.
Like any other organization it has been infiltrated by bad actors.”
I agree with you, with one caveat. The actual founders of BLM are quite extreme, wanting to disband the police and free all black prisoners. So it’s not that an altruistic movement was infiltrated by bad actors; it was founded by them.
That said, there are good and decent people in the movement who just want to be treated fairly. (See the mother in the yellow shirt who dragged her teenage son away from throwing rocks at police.)
I’ll be the first one to open with this:
This is an extension of the Israeli handbook on claims of anti-Semitism of any one criticizes Israel.
Criticize a unique ethnic group, then you are considered racist and harmful to the institution.
We can’t do anything that projects an aura or atmosphere of historical hatred regardless the costs to the idea of independent thought or speech in deference to the pseudo victim and their own unassailable status as victim.
The entire premise is so stupid, and the irony of its occurrence on a university is staggery.
Most of us take “Black Lives Matter” to mean “Black Lives Matter Just as Much as White Lives”. Which means the same as “All Lives Matter.” However, the founders of BLM have made statements such as the police should be abolished, and black people in jail are political prisoners and should all be freed. And of course we are all aware of the “Kill the Pigs” chant variants. This, in effect, makes their slogan actually mean “Black Lives Matter More Than Anyone Else’s.” Whenever anyone contorts logic to make “All Lives Matter” racist, they are in effect supporting this slogan that black lives matter more.
I am currently reading a very interesting essay by Thomas Sowell called “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.” In it, he describes how the counter productive culture of the ghetto can actually be traced to the British Isles. Immigrants from the British borderlands (called borderers) as well as Scottish Highlanders and the Celtic Fringe settled the South, while other parts of Great Britain and Europe settled New England and elsewhere. There were extreme differences in the cultures of these regions. This was before Great Britain was really unified. In these areas, life was even more brutal and short than elsewhere. Some warlord could end your life at a moment. There was no fair play. Disease. They were still throwing their chamberpots into the street over a hundred years after the practice had been abandoned elsewhere. There was no point to provident planning. Why bother? You’d probably be dead next year anyway. So there was rampant casual sex at a time that the rest of Europe was fiercely protective of reputation. People were absurdly quick to offense and violence. Education was not valued. Great physical effort was expended hunting, fishing, dancing, or fighting, but not in actual work. These immigrants held on to their culture long after it had died out in Europe, creating the “no accounts” of the South. This is why almost every single bridge in the South was built by Northerners or more recent European settlers. Butter was almost nonexistent in the South, even though they had 40% of the cattle, because they still clung to the borderer’s habit of letting their cattle fend for themselves in the winter, where they would come back half starved in spring, and dry, and would require until late summer to put weight on. Plus, making butter too a lot of effort. Although the South eventually abandoned this counter productive culture, for a very long time, education, debate, and culture were strictly the province of the elites. Even the idioms claimed as black culture “I be”, “ain’t”, “dat” can actually be traced to the British Isles. (Change the accent and the cool kids start sounding like pirates!) He writes in great detail about the counter productive nature that had immigrated with the borderers, and his description of lynching of other whites and the gouging out of eyes in rough and tumble fighting is truly sobering. These people killed each other over absolutely nothing. Now gang members shoot up the neighborhood because someone “disrespected” them. 30% of the steamboats blew up, killing passengers, because they liked to force the captains to race on the river, and would force the safety valves shut to get more pressure and speed.
After the end of slavery, New England basically descended in the thousands to teach the children of freed slaves, imparting their own industrious culture to many. In one of the most victorious Stand and Deliver moments of all time, in 1871 Georgia put together a board of visitors to review the exams at Atlanta University. Their motive was to confirm the inferiority of blacks. However, the students displayed a thorough understanding of Greek, Latin, and geometry, a classical education. In intellectual fencing, they parried, feinted, and thrust, until they got former slave holder, Joseph Brown, the chairman of the board of visitors, to confess “we were impressed with the fallacy of the popular idea…that the members of the African race are not capable of a high grade of intellectual culture.” Those students, freed slaves, were kings and queens that day.
What Sowell also found ironic is that after the Civil War, there was a mass desperate migration of black men searching on foot across multiple states for the families torn from them by slavery and the war. Now they casually abandon their children at the rate of over 90% in some cities.
However, there was still a segment of the black population who had absorbed that counter productive culture of the British borders. That culture made sense at its time and point of origin, but it no longer made any sense here. It merely put people in their own way. The true crisis came when intellectual white Liberalism encouraged this culture to be prolonged as something to be proud of, and when they contributed to the disintegration of the black family. Liberal welfare policies caused the rate of unwed motherhood to skyrocket, as well as the abandonment of children by their fathers. Liberals claim this is the legacy of slavery, but Sowell points out that this did not start until more than 100 years had passed after slavery. Black fathers used to walk thousands of miles in all kinds of weather, barefoot, to get to their wives and kids. You couldn’t pry them apart with a crowbar. The murder rate of blacks on blacks was declining until the 1960s, when it exploded. Blacks are still murdered at a per capita rate far higher than any other minority. It is very dangerous to be black in some areas, but the killer in something like 98% of the cases is another black person. The loud and emotional oratorical style of activists and preachers can also be traced to the British borderlands. The absurd tendency for violence, the hypersensitivity to “disrespect”, can also be directly traced to the “rough and tumble” borderers who would bite each others noses off and gouge out eyes if they were “disrespected”, even by their best friend. And they had society’s approval then, just as ghetto society approves it now. And there is one more legacy of the borderlands prior to the 18th century – a lack of clear logic. They were infamous for lacking all reason, and basing actions on impulse and emotion. Kind of like the ridiculous argument that “all lives matter” is racist, and that “kill the pigs” is a perfectly acceptable way to behave.
So this is entirely ridiculous. Do the BLM people want to keep emulating the poor white trash hillbillies, or do they want to emulate the New Englanders who poured into the South in droves to help the children of slaves have equal access to education? How many intellectual kings and queens today squander their potential because white intellectual liberals keep enabling the existence of counter productive hillbilly and criminal culture that should have died out long ago? How many musicians glorify criminal anti-social behavior? How many activists, both black and white, hurl racist taunts at blacks who don’t vote the way they want them to? Why are conscientious black students still bullied by their peers? Much of the South recovered from this anachronistic remnant culture, to the point that it created a vibrant literary heritage. Counterproductive behavior was relegated to the “no accounts.” If we want the ghetto to thrive, then we have to stop enabling these throwback attitudes that have nothing absolutely to do with black pride, and have more to do with the legacy of freed slaves becoming immured in a harmful foreign culture. We need to emulate programs that work, like Harlem Children’s Zone, give kids safe places to study and play, but we also need the black community to fight this pressure to stand in your own way. Most of the black community abandoned this way of thinking over a hundred years ago. Let’s make it universal.
While I disagree with any sanctions against her for her posting, it would have been a FAR better solution to have a discussion in the student council as to why saying all lives matter is a not a good response to black lives matter. The US had the fiction that all citizens were equal under the law for most of my youth. Congress DID pass laws restricting freedom of speech and sentenced people to PRISON for what they said and how they voted. The problem we have is the LIE that all lives matter since it is manifestly NOT the case. Black lives are worth far less than white when it comes to the use of deadly force. When that goes away, THEN saying all lives matter will be a truth that ALL can rejoice in and agree with.
The fact is that blue on blue killings which involved off duty cops doing their job, 90% of the dead cops were BLACK. Simply seeing a black man with a gun is and was sufficient evidence to shoot and kill the black cop. So saying that all lives matter, while true as a goal and philosophic statement, does not address the FACT that this is not the case today.
Sethi was given a “50 day suspension from her student government post.” Again, she was suspended from her STUDENT GOVERNMENT POST. She agreed to publicly apologize for writing “all lives matter” on her Facebookoage in order to end the suspension and get her student government position back. That was her choice. She CHOSE student government politics over her principles and first amendment rights. As I stated earlier, I would have told the SBA President to shove it, but that’s me.
Colleges, universities have now de facto become reeducation camps. Shameful.
I never thought that I would live to see the day where, in the US, the simple and mere utterance of the phrase–ALL LIVES MATTER–would be met with such insanity, hostility and threats of violence. A world turned upside down, right before our very eyes, by thugs and malcontents, in what appears to be an instant.
I happened to notice a yard sign the other day, as I was driving through my predominantly white and upscale neighborhood, declaring that BLACK LIVES MATTER. For a moment–just a brief moment–I entertained the thought of placing a yard sign on my lawn–one declaring that ALL LIVES MATTER. I immediately banished the thought. Why? Out of fear that my home would be vandalized. Out of fear that my vehicle would have its tires slashed. Out of fear that my own, personal safety, would be in jeopardy, for publicly announcing the sanctity of all lives. We read this article and gnash our teeth about the person who decided to alter her comments to maintain some semblance of safety and security. How dare she fold, so easily, to her principles! Why didn’t she stand up, like a modern-day David to Goliath, and tell them to shove it! We have all been silenced, in one way or another. Welcome to the new reality, fostered and encouraged by Obama and his minions.
@isaacb
You said, “What we also have is an affront to the sensibilities of Blacks and their plight as is illustrated by police profiling and discrimination. She put it forth in such a way to diminish the plight of Blacks. ‘Forget Black lives matter….’”
Oh bother! If blacks want to diminish their plights, they should quit popping out illegitimate kids to beat the band, STFU in school and learn and do their homework, and quit all their stupid whining. Plus, stop committing crimes and resisting arrest. And stop shooting each other and killing each other over fried chicken, bbq ribs, and drugs!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
What is wrong with All Lives Matter? it means, black life matter and white life matter and yellow life matter and red life matter ,so where is the problem?
What’s wrong with it is that it suggests that there is no special value to be appended to a mascot group of the Anointed. What’s grossly amusing about this is that the nonsense incorporated into the student council president’s position is favored (per survey research) by about 10% of non-black respondents and perhaps 30% of black respondents. I.e. our single best guess is that north of 60% of blacks reject the chauvinism incorporated into the statement.
Black Lives Matter has always been 1 part undocumented shopping, 1 part sorosphere rent-a-crowd, and 1 part Alinskyite shuck and jive. The people involved with it merit no attention whatsoever (bar that you get from a fire hose).
This woman was sanctioned by the twits on the student council, not by the deans. The student council president and his confederates merit considerable contempt. She doesn’t work for them or answer to them. She ought to turn in her resignation and tell them to stick an M-80 where the sun don’t shine.
BLM has become a racist power group.
If I were starting my legal career today I would go into employment law. Can you imagine all the grievances that will be filed when these precious snowflakes hit the workforce? OMG, employment attorneys are going to be busy!!
I think that who created this problem is RACIST.
FWIW: The University of Houston racial makeup:
http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-houston/student-life/diversit
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
What is wrong with All Lives Matter? it means, black life matter and white life matter and yellow life matter and red life matter ,so where is the problem?
White kids are becoming a bunch of Mary’s no heart, no courage. Stand up for yourself and your beliefs. Please somebody bring back the draft. I wish one of these kids would have the nuggets to tell these people “Eat Me”!.
Justice, LOL! Yes, there will be pools. But only wading pools so as not to be dangerous.
Will the re-education camps have pools? I find this appalling and in the long run destructive. If I was a graduate I would make sure I never made another donation!
The students are consumers and pay substantial tuition to these institutions. If they don’t like the social climate, they should take their tuition dollars elsewhere. I don’t have much respect for Ms. Sethi’s willingness to forego her rights and dignity in order to play in the student government sandbox at the University of Houston. I would have told them to shove it, and transferred to a different university.