A Klu Klux Klan figure on display at the
University of Iowa (UI) has sparked some hot debate over free speech, as they
do. Growing up in Cincinnati, the KKK Christmas
cross downtown was an annual source of brouhaha. But
Cincy’s KKK display diverges in one major way from the 7-foot
sculpted klansman that showed up on a main area of the UI campus
December 5: the latter figure was intended as a statement
against racism.
Created by Serhat Tanyolacar, a UI visiting professor and
printmaking fellow, the klansman sculpture was decoupaged in
newspaper coverage of racial tension and violence throughout the
past 100 years. The piece was meant to highlight how America’s
history of race-based violence isn’t really history and “facilitate
a dialgoue,” as Tanyolacar told university paper The
Gazette.
But no matter: After several hours, UI officials decided that
the display was “deeply offensive” and needed to be removed. “The
University of Iowa considers all forms of racism abhorrent and is
deeply committed to the principles of inclusion and acceptance,” a
school memo said, referring to the statue as a form of hate speech.
Associate journalism professor Lyombe Eko told the campus independent paper that the area where
the display went up was a designated public forum, and “in such
areas, the university may not practice viewpoint discrimination …
No matter how abhorrent it might be to segments of the university
community, the work of art is protected by the First
Amendment. The University of Iowa can only impose time, place,
and manner restrictions on Professor Tanyolacar [the artist], not
ban his art on the basis of its content.”
David Ryfe, director of UI’s School of Journalism and
Mass Communication at UI, has different ideas, however. “If it was
up to me, and me alone,” he told The Daily Iowan, “I
would follow the lead of every European nation and ban this type of
speech.”
There’s a sort of axiom among many journalists that if you want
a career in journalism, you shouldn’t go to journalism school. And
if the head of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism is any
indication, that advice holds true as ever today.
While Ryfe admitted that UI likely made a viewpoint-based
distinction, he also pointed out that “there are exceptions, and
“this happened on a university campus for one thing.” But as
the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
points out, “speech is not rendered unprotected merely by the
fact that it occurs on a public university campus.” The U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that “the mere dissemination
of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state
university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of
‘conventions of decency.'”
To me, this case provides a good reference point for why we shouldn’t curtail freedom of expression
even when it comes from despicable groups like the Klu Klux Klan.
When you start casting for exceptions to the First Amendment, you
never know what kind of other speech—perhaps speech designed to
address the very problems you’re fighting against—will get caught
up in the net.
Unfortunately, the kids and faculty at UI seem to have learned a
different lesson: reacting to the statue as art or as a political
statement was a reflection of cluelessness, insensitivy, and white
privilege. Nic Arp, UI’s director of strategic communications,
inititally referred to the statue as “public art” in a tweet that
has since been deleted. Arp told The Gazette he now
knows that doing so was “incredibly offensive” and a function of
him “respond(ing) to it first and foremost as a piece of art and
not in the way an African American might—as a very real and scary
symbol.”
Tweeting under the hashtag #BlackHawkeyes,
UI students and others have been blasting Tanyolacar’s sculpture
and the university for initially allowing it. “This person was
willing to sacrifice the mental health of all the Black students
here for his own gain,”read one such tweet. Yes, his own
gain like making a statement about the ongoing terror of
racism-based violence. Treachorous.
The university said Tanyolacar is not facing any disciplinary
action, but he will be making a formal apology.
h/t Thaddeus Russell
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