Imagine walking your normal route from class to the Atrium. As you enter the Brickyard, you are greeted by the sight of racially charged signs, torches and angry men yelling offensive chants. Some colleges know this sight or similar scenes all too well. One of our Triangle counterparts just barely avoided this fate.
On Feb. 21, a “Rally for Nationalism” was expected to occur on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill. A counter-protest run by students and faculty was quickly established in response to the impending nationalist rally; however, the nationalist rally did not materialize.
While this episode of political mishap on college campuses was avoided at UNC, it still revives the conversation of where the line is between free speech and hate speech, and what kinds of speech should be permissible on campus.
Hate speech is defined by the American Bar Association as “speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability or other traits.” This perfectly encapsulates the essence of what racially-motivated rallies are trying to achieve.
Free speech is and should always be an inalienable right to citizens of the U.S., but we must also realize that getting an education without fear of being emotionally traumatized should also be an inalienable right. This is exactly what happened to University of Virginia students last year when white supremacists tried to disguise their domestic terrorism under the veil of free speech.
These types of protests can weigh on a person’s mental health in the long- and short-term. The short-term problems are ones that we all accept and realize such as feeling unsafe on your own campus and having strong feelings of discomfort. Less known are the lasting effects that these violent protests can have on a person.
A recent study of Ferguson, Missouri protests has shown that people who are subjected to violent protests have the potential of “developing features of an acute stress disorder.” While college is a stressful environment, students should not have to be worried about developing stress disorders from encounters with literal fascists and supremacists.
Events that are able to cause this level of emotional damage to students just trying to receive an education should in no way be tolerable by universities. In the case of UVA, many students felt like their university failed them because of the administration’s refusal to remove the protesters from the campus. Some students believed that the protests warranted immediate changes in the university policies that would ban these types of rallies from occurring again on campus.
While I do believe that the ideas these rallies are trying to spread are abhorrent, I still respect the right for these ideas to be spoken about in a civilized manner. It is not the actual content of these rallies that makes them frowned upon, but the violent atmosphere that surrounds these protests which causes the harm.
Speakers who hold odious beliefs should be entitled to the same rights as speakers with societally accepted beliefs. Far-right speaker and former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka spoke at UNC in November 2017. Gorka’s appearance was much different than the protests we have grown accustomed to. At his speech, no lives were put into jeopardy and no emotional trauma was inflicted on students.
Peaceful discourse should be the gold standard for people who wish to spread massively controversial opinions on college campuses, and the bare minimum for what universities are willing to tolerate in speech like this that blurs the lines between free and hateful. Otherwise, our universities are betraying their highest priority, creating a productive educational environment for us: their students.
