Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >LBO-talkers defending Horowitz' "right" to place an ad ("free speech
> >= money to advertise") are not unlike Medea Benjamin & Co.
> >protecting the corporate windows of Nike, etc. from festive &
> >youthful anarchist window-smashers.
>
> Huh? Smashing windows is a kind of symbolic speech, and Benjamin
> wanted cops to put a stop to it. How's that a parallel?
>
So is stealing or destroying copies of a newspaper symbolic speech. It seems that the mafority of those posting on LBO believe that the symbolic speech of Horowitz should be protected while the symbolic speech of the Brown students is to be condemned. On the basis of my experiences going back to when I myself was merely a standby liberal (i.e. racist) the hard core of racism (as a form of consciousness that corresponds to and rationalizes the objective oppression of African Americans) is not hate speech or Bell Curve ranters but the deeply embedded feeeling (in blacks as well as whites) that no black activity is fully legitimate until it is ratified by the opinion of the white public. (Joseph Kraft noted several decades ago that "public" [as opposed to "people" or "nation"] was in journalese what "upper middle class" is in sociological jargon.) It was this attitude that made it necessary for SNCC to expel its white members.
Incidentally, one of the weaknesses -- perhaps _the_ weakness -- of free speech as a metaphysical doctrine is the simple impossibility of defining where "speech" ends and something else begins. Horowitz did not really intend his ad to be read -- he intended it as a rallying cry for white supremacy. What it provoked, fortunately, was a series of actions and statements of black solidarity. White reaction to those acts and statements help us define where, at this time, the political dividing lines exist in the U.S.
Carrol