I was walking along last week when I noticed a flyer posted by Anti-Racist Action. Seeing Ruth Simmons' picture on the flyer made me curious, so I stopped to read what the group had to say. The gist of the flyer's content was as follows:
Just because Ruth Simmons and Mark Porter, the new chief of the Department of Public Safety, are black doesn't mean that they aren't racist, and it's the same situation with Condoleezza Rice. Just as Simmons and Porter are implementing a racist arming policy among campus police officers, so too is Condoleezza Rice helping to implement the Bush administration's racist policies in Israel. Fight Israeli white supremacy. Come to Anti-Racist Action meetings.
I stared at the flyer for several seconds, trying to make sense of it. What was racist about the arming policy? Why did they classify Israel that way? Were they really comparing our leaders to Bush? All that I knew was that I was deeply offended - as a Jew, as a liberal and as a Ruth Simmons fan. I was so offended, in fact, that I took down the flyer.
But here's the catch: Even as I was doing it, I knew that my actions were wrong.
The revelation didn't fully hit me until I threw the paper out. I thought to myself along the way to the trash can that my actions were keeping ignorance at bay, but I realize now that I was the ignorant one. No matter how much I may disagree with a group, it is not, nor will it ever be my job to silence discourse. As terrifying as I may find someone's ideology, the prospect of a vanished First Amendment is even worse.
This piece is not meant to be explicitly about ARA; that's another six or seven columns worth of material. Think also about the posters of half-naked homosexual couples plastered across the campus for all of last week, or on the lettering above the Stuart Theater that advertised a show called "F*cking A" and stayed up, even during Parents' Weekend. Signs like this are, other than the open curriculum and the pass/fail option, the single greatest reason that I am proud to be a student at Brown - not because gay sex or profanity excite me personally, but rather because they prove to me the existence of a place where I can speak my mind, and where I can have my comfort zone stretched in turn.
It's this second part, I think, that people have trouble with; it's certainly given me difficulty. The blessing and the curse of a liberal institution, paradoxically, is that we sometimes have to be receptive to viewpoints that we consider more conservative than our own - and heck, frequently more radical. Beliefs aren't legitimized until they're tested, and without debate we're all just straw men - or, in keeping with the PC movement, strawpeople. In response to movements for intellectual diversity, I echo our president: Bring them on.
So if I think that you're a racist, I can say it, and if you think that I'm an idiot, you can tell me to my face. The bottom line is that, as odious as I may find ARA, or any group like them, I have a necessary obligation to respond to my feelings in a way that only open-minded people can. We cannot fight our battles through destruction; we must learn to fight them through words.
Aaron Cutler '08 may not agree with what you say, but he will defend unto the death your right to say it. And he has never, ever plagiarized Voltaire.
