Baraboo: More Speech is the Answer

Something’s rotten in Baraboo.

In 2018 some male students at the junior prom had their picture taken while making a Nazi salute. Two years later the school district paid out over $860,000 to the family of a student who had been harassed because of her race. And at last spring’s high school graduation, a father of one of the graduates, who is white, rushed the stage to prevent the school superintendent, who is Black, from shaking his daughter’s hand. What caused that last incident is still unclear and some close to it say it had nothing to do with race, but that kind of behavior is unacceptable no matter the motivation.

It’s not something in the water up there; it’s something in the culture, and that needs to be addressed.

But the way NOT to address it is with a speech code. One possibly well-motivated, but definitely wrong, member of the Baraboo School Board is proposing a sweeping new policy to punish speech. No doubt, there’s a real problem that needs attention in Baraboo, but this is no solution.

According to a recent story in the Wisconsin State Journal,

The policy, drafted by school board member Amy DeLong, states that “hate speech is not protected speech” and that it has “a harmful social, physical, psychological, and academic impact on our school community.” It urges staff to “immediately intervene” if they witness speech that “attacks, threatens, degrades, or insults a person or group based on their race, color, national origin, ancestry, creed, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or gender variance.”

Actions punishable under the proposed policy include using language such as racial slurs, gestures, displaying or writing material deemed hateful, and online communications of a similar nature.

The proposed policy also calls for avoiding educational materials or lessons that contain speech deemed hateful, imploring staff not to read slurs out loud from educational texts and not to allow students to read them out loud in class.

Then, in a passage, right out of Ibram X. Kendi, the policy states:

“The idea of ‘a pass’ to say a slur because it is in a text, ignores the systemic pass that insulates some identities from degradation, which in return, reinforces the privilege of those groups.”

Yowza. That’s very 2021. It’s precisely this kind of stuff that has fed the legitimate backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Luckily, there are national groups out there filling the void left by the ACLU, which long ago switched from being the nation’s leading defender of free speech to just another insufferably woke nonprofit. Again, to quote the WSJ story:

In a statement, Jack Whitten, a spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said the policy “is completely at odds with the First Amendment and Supreme Court precedent.”

“Students have free speech rights inside and outside the classroom,” he said.

Student speech cannot be restricted unless it would “substantially” disrupt school and classroom operations, Whitten said, adding that references to the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and advocacy from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students could be punished under the policy.

The claim that “hate speech is not protected speech” is also false, Whitten said.

But there is a bright spot in all this. Baraboo School Board member Joey Rivas emerged as an articulate advocate for free speech. At a board meeting last month he said he does not condone hate speech but opposed the proposed policy. Instead, he said students need to be educated on how to avoid expressing hateful ideas — he might also have added that they should be educated on not having them in the first place.

“Hate speech has no place in a society striving for equality, understanding and unity,” Rivas said. “However, as Americans, we must also recognize an important reality. The First Amendment of our Constitution protects free speech, even when it is offensive, hateful and unpopular.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that speech cannot be punished or silenced based solely on its content, unless it incites violence or is libelous, he said.

“This protection is not an endorsement of hateful language, but a safeguard for liberty itself,” Rivas said. “Restricting speech, even reprehensible speech, opens the door for silencing dissent and undermining democracy.”

But while the Constitution protects hate speech, he said, it does not obligate people to tolerate it, and the district has “the power to confront it, to educate against it, and to cultivate a culture where every person feels respected and valued.”

I can’t add much to Rivas’ eloquent statement. Let’s acknowledge three things. First, the racist stuff that’s been going on in Baraboo, and in far too many other places, is wrong and it should be called out. Second, the response cannot be to suppress speech. But third, the answer is to create a culture in which people rid themselves of hatefulness — not just its expression, but the thing itself.

Because simply punishing hateful speech (which will too often be in the eye of the beholder anyway) only covers up the root of the problem, which is less a matter of speech and much more a matter of what’s in a person’s soul.