The Opponents of Free Speech Are Gaining Ground. Here’s How We Can Fight Back

Free speech used to be held up as one of the core American institutions. It was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights for a reason: while other countries have also adopted free speech, it is a fundamentally American tradition.

More than that, free speech is essential on its own terms. It is the single best way for humans to make progress. None of us are perfect, and none of us know the full truth. Therefore we all need to engage in the marketplace of ideas in order to find the truth and develop the best path forward.

But free speech has been under attack for decades.

Herbert Marcuse

One of the earliest—and most influential—critics was Herbert Marcuse, a college professor and the father of the New Left. In an essay called Repressive Tolerance published in 1969, Marcuse recommended removing rights (including the right to free speech) from conservatives. Marcuse didn’t see the world in terms of human beings who all have equal worth; he saw the world in terms of power. Those with power should be forcibly silenced (at least, the ones he disagreed with) so that those at the bottom could have more freedom. For Marcuse, if a majority is being repressed, what is needed is “repression and indoctrination” of the powerful so that the weak get the power they deserve.

In recent years, Marcuse-style attacks on free speech have filtered down from academic institutions into the mainstream.

Subjective Rules Focused On Impact (Real Or Claimed)

Ilya Shapiro, adjunct law professor at George Washington University and the University of Mississippi, provides a case study on the new rules around who can speak and what they can say. Early in 2022 Georgetown Law School hired him to teach. When President Biden said he would only nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, Shapiro expressed dismay at this form of blatant affirmative action. At the voicing of this heterodox view, the sky fell down on him.

Georgetown swiftly placed Shapiro on administrative leave, where he languished for months without knowing whether or not he’d be fired. An administrative investigation into the offending Tweets lasted 122 days.

Georgetown finally reinstated Shapiro, but only on the technicality that he hadn’t officially started at Georgetown at the time he sent his tweets. The Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action (IDEAA) said that his comments were “objectively offensive” and that saying something similar in future may be enough to get him fired.

Even more disturbingly, the IDEAA adopted a blatantly subjective standard for deciding whether or not speech by faculty would be punishable. “The University’s anti-harassment policy does not require that a respondent intend to denigrate,” according to the report. “Instead, the Policy requires consideration of the ‘purpose or effect’ of a respondent’s conduct.”

As Shapiro puts it: “That people were offended, or claim to have been, is enough for me to have broken the rules.”

This punishment of heterodox speech isn’t an isolated incident. A 2017 survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that over a third of Democratic responders said that a business executive should be fired if they “believe psychological differences explain why there are more male engineers.” A substantial number of respondents thus advocated stripping someone of their job for the crime of saying what many psychologists know to be true.

Walking On Eggshells

The new cultural norms around free speech aren’t just a problem for right-wingers. In an in-depth explainer on cancel culture, Julian explains the scope of the problem:

"Heterodox Academy surveyed 445 academics about the state of free inquiry on campus, asking them, 'Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?'

One of the hypothetical consequences Heterodox Academy listed was, 'my career would be hurt.' How many academics said they would be 'very concerned' or 'extremely concerned' about this consequence? 53.43%.

To put it another way: over half of academics on campus worried that expressing non-orthodox opinions on controversial topics could be dangerous to their careers.

We see the same self-censoring phenomenon among college students. In 2021, College Pulse surveyed 37,000 students at 159 colleges. They found that 80% of students self-censor to at least some degree. 48% of undergraduates reported feeling, 'somewhat uncomfortable' or 'very uncomfortable' expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.

In a panel on free speech and cancel culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen said, 'I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship.'"

It’s not just students and professors. In an article titled “America Has A Free Speech Problem,” the New York Times editorial board noted that 55 percent of Americans have held their tongue in the past year because they were concerned about “retaliation or harsh criticism.”

Extremists on both sides of the aisle increasingly wield their power to shame or shun Americans who speak their minds or have the temerity to voice their opinions in public. This problem is most prominent on social media, but is spilling into offline conversations as well. Citizens of a free country should not live in fear that a woke or far-right mob will come for them because they express an idea that isn’t sufficiently in vogue.

Pretending That Speech Is Violence

The very concept of free speech is increasingly associated with violence. When former vice president Mike Pence planned to speak at the University of Virginia, the student newspaper Cavalier Daily published a furious editorial saying that Pence shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Why not? “Speech that threatens the lives of those on Grounds is unjustifiable.” It takes a lot of mental contusions to conclude that letting Pence give his opinion could threaten anyone’s life.

It’s not just students. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “When is speech violence?”

According to Barrett, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”

She continued: “That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.”

The fact that psychologists are lending the veneer of science to the idea that speech is violence should be deeply troubling to every American.

Why Is Free Speech Essential?

When we break down the core institution of free speech, we lose a lot of what made America so successful in the first place. Robust norms of free speech helped people build the emotional and mental resilience to cope with ideas they disagreed with. It helped us build bonds with people who believed different things, because we were able to listen to and understand their position.

Free speech also enabled multiple parties to argue from competing worldviews and find a solution that was better than what any party had formulated going into the discussion.

The silver lining is this: Americans increasingly recognize that free speech is a value whose preservation is essential. The New York Times editorial board notes that “84 percent of adults said it is a, ‘very serious’ or ‘somewhat serious’ problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.”

What Can You Do?

As a strong and integrous person, what can you do to limit the impact of the degradation of free speech on your own life?

First, speak up about what you know to be true—even if no-one else is speaking up, even if there are risks to you. Develop the courage to call a spade a spade. If you see insanity—in your workplace, in politics, in your home—call it out openly and honestly. You’ll sleep better at night. You’ll also become stronger through the act of speaking out. Speaking takes courage, but it also creates courage.

Second, seek out people who disagree with you. Listen to them. Go further; try to be persuaded by them. Skewer your sacred cows and let go of your ideology. Neither one is serving you.

Third, banish forever (if you haven’t yet) the infantile notion that words are violence. This notion is profoundly damaging, because it makes you weak. If mere disagreement can hurt you, after all, then so can everything else in life. So will everything else in your life. Instead, embrace the adage of the Stoics: other people are responsible for their actions, you are responsible for your response. Once you embrace the idea that mere words—whether vicious or merely heterodox—cannot hurt you, you are on the path to emotional strength and groundedness.

Fourth, don’t let yourself become a “tribe of one.” It’s easy, in this environment of chilled speech, to always feel scared to speak up. Find a group of friends who encourage you to speak your truth, and who speak their truth in return to you. Find people who aren’t afraid to share heterodox ideas and to challenge your sacred cows, nor to have their own challenged in return.

Find a group you’d trust to have your back in a firefight, and who will love you and expect you to have theirs in turn.

This article was republished with permission from The Undaunted Man.

Julian Adorney

Julian is a former political op-ed writer and current nonprofit marketer. His work has been featured in FEE, National Review, Playboy, and Lawrence Reed's economics anthology Excuse Me, Professor.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Opponents of Free Speech Are Gaining Ground. Here’s How We Can Fight Back

How America Made Me White

It took me a couple of seconds to get Stephen Colbert’s joke line—“I don’t see race”—when I first heard it.

In the USA, the joke works because no one can seriously imagine everyone not seeing race.

But when I first heard it, I had to work that out because I was born and raised in the UK … and I never saw race.

That’s not because I am more evolved than any American or more “woke” or more of anything at all. It’s just that I was brought up in a culture and a manner in which skin color was something one paid about as much attention to as hair color. Colbert’s joke simply wouldn’t work in the England of my generation.

Two Englishmen in New York

I emigrated to the States 14 years ago and within a year had moved to Harlem, where I lived for five years.

While there, I met a gentleman at a party across the water in Hoboken, and we hit it off. His name was Jesse. We found we had a lot in common in how we saw the world, which was made all the more of a basis for a friendship by the fact that we had very little in common in how we came into it.

We were both Brits so had all the cultural affinity that comes with that, but he had grown up in Camberwell, which, in his day, was to London as the Bronx was to New York before it became safe. In contrast, I had spent my teenage years in an old manor house that had been converted to a private school to which I won a scholarship. He “got out” of Camberwell to become a music producer, while I very much “stayed in” education in beautiful buildings and became a student at Cambridge University.

We started hanging out at his place and mine, and places in between, sharing the experiences of being immigrants to America and being obvious outsiders in the New York neighborhoods where we lived. As part of all that, we talked a little bit about the American obsession—for that is how it felt to us—with race.

I was a white boy living in Harlem and so stood out like a sore thumb when I’d go to pick up the A train on 125th Street.

Jesse lived in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, and also stood out like a sore thumb when he’d go to pick up the A train. But not because of his skin color. You see, Jesse is as Jamaican and black as all his neighbors were. But he attracted more attention in Brooklyn than I ever did in Harlem because his T-shirts were all Beatles and Bowie—not a rapper in sight—and his blazer was, well, a blazer.

He used to get quite the kick as he’d approach the cops on the street corner near his A train stop at Utica Ave. and watch their countenances change as the Beatles and the blazer came into their view. He might even top off the encounter with an “Afternoon, mate” at close approach if he was feeling particularly cheeky.

But being the Beatles brother in Brooklyn wasn’t as much fun when he was out with his white wife: at those times, the glares let him know that his skin color mattered.

It turns out that, in America, when you’re around people who think you should behave a certain way because you look a certain way, choosing the wrong color is much less acceptable than being the wrong color.

Not Far from Ebenezer Baptist, Segregation

A year ago, I attended Netroots, which is perhaps the largest annual progressive political conference in the nation.

The opening ceremony was held in a huge hall with well over 1,000 people in attendance—perhaps double that.



After many speakers had shared messages of unity, the stage was given to a small group that identified as Black Lives Matter. They took up regularly spaced positions across the whole stage in a rather formal arrangement.

I can’t remember everything they said, but I shall never forget the ominous line from one of them that made my blood run cold.

She told us, the audience, that they would be holding meetings at the conference from which people not of color would be excluded and that those not invited “needed to understand why they weren’t invited.”

By the time they were done, the sentiment clearly delivered was, to me at least, “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

I’d been active in American politics for about seven years at that point, but that moment was the first that I felt threatened—apparently because of the amount of melanin in my skin, which is not a variable that has ever caused me to take a stand for or against anyone.

The audience was applauding the giving up of a very basic, progressive principle: don’t treat people differently based on an immutable characteristic.

What shook me to the core was to be told that if I didn’t concede that principle, I was someone’s enemy.

No. I won’t get comfortable with your racial segregation. And no, I’m not your enemy, whatever you tell me. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been anyone’s enemy. Or are you just trying to tell me that you’re going to make me your enemy by enforcing my segregation—my otherization?

I was shocked but determined not to generalize from a single experience from the words of a few people at a single event to a whole conference—or a movement, or a country.

That would just be silly.

A Very Limited Perspective

One fundamental difference between my adoptive country, the USA, and my home country, England, is what seems to be the absence of “proportionality” as a principle in law enforcement.

As a big proponent of civil rights, I have long been disturbed by the apparent acceptance in America of an all-bets-are-off approach to dealing with people who are deemed to have transgressed a line. In other parts of the world, the violence associated with enforcement and punishment is much more constrained, it seems to me, to be proportionate to the violation.

Accordingly, while at the conference, I was keen to attend a panel on police violence and a wonderful program that involved (from memory) bailing young men who had been imprisoned for non-violent crimes out of prison for Fathers Day. The panel included a judge, a young man who had been imprisoned for a non-violent crime, a mayor, and a civil rights activist.

After extremely moving presentations from all of them, I got to ask the first question from the floor.

I prefaced it with the observation that “proportionality” seemed not to be an important value in American culture—especially when it comes to law enforcement. Moral determinations in America, I ventured, seemed more binary than in my home country of the UK.

My question then went something like this:

Help me understand the thinking of the culture of law enforcement in this country. Specifically, how can a cop arrest a young man for a victimless crime, such as jaywalking or spitting on a sidewalk (the "crime" that had resulted in the imprisonment of one of the young panelists) knowing that the legal process is likely to end up with the young man in a cage—and the cop not think that he’s doing anything other than an act of violence against him?

The civil rights activist on the panel most clearly accepted the premise of the question and provided me in some ways the most satisfying answer; so afterward, we had a private conversation, which lasted for the better part of two hours.

My new acquaintance gave me the rest of the answer to my question—the bit that, I suppose, he couldn’t give me in public. The real reason why the typical cop goes to work thinking it’s okay to do violence to young black men is, and I quote, “white supremacist colonialism.”

I was confused by this new suggestion that the average cop scarfing down his Cheerios before work is looking forward to another day of building an empire in which people with white skin get to control people with other skin in some form of vassaldom, so I asked him to elaborate. He didn’t give me any causal link between this abstraction and the cop getting ready for work, but he said something interesting nonetheless: an indifference to violence arises from an absence of “historical redress.”

Something of an amateur historian as well as a trained scientist, I am a lover of big general ideas with a power to explain myriad specific human phenomena, so I was genuinely interested. He began to compare and contrast cultures in which groups that had been oppressed had a historic moment of violent uprising against their oppressors with those that had not, explaining that the violence we see meted out against young black men by white cops in the States is a direct result of the fact that black people hadn’t had their “historical redress.” His examples of successful redress were mostly violent. They all involved the violation of the rights of innocent people, as far as I could tell.

Most of the first half of the ensuing conversation was me listening hard for any causation between the absence of this historical general event and the minds of cops, or anyone else, today.

I gave the gentleman as many benefits of as many doubts as I could; as many “for the sake of arguments” and “can you help me understands…?” I never got my answer, but he did explain that police violence followed directly from the British crown subjugating black people on instruction from the Pope and that the first part of the solution to cop-on-black violence was, therefore, reparations to be paid by the British Crown—specifically, Prince William. Takings from other people with young Bill’s skin color would follow, presumably.

The problem (and I’m not sure if it was for me or for him) was that, being an educated Brit who has developed a significant interest in history these last few years, I do know something of the history of my native land. And I knew that the claims my conversational partner was making about the relationship between the British Crown and the Holy See were not only wrong but impossible for so many reasons following Britain’s turning away from the Holy Roman church under Henry VIII. But I really did want to hear whatever facts he had that I didn’t know. After all, there’s an infinity of fascinating history that I’ve not yet discovered.

So I would indicate, in the most qualified and tentative way that I could, where my understanding of history differed from his, and I’d ask him time and time again what his sources were or how a particular claim was consistent with a well known historical fact. And whenever I did so, I got the same condescending answer. It was more of a refrain:

“That’s a very limited perspective,” he’d say. Time and time again.

He’d say that even if I wasn’t offering a perspective but asking for a clarification, or just letting him know what I believed to be the case, or asking him to point out where my understanding was wrong. And after the refrain, he would continue the conspiratorial narrative between the British Crown and the Holy Roman Empire, utterly lacking in any specific evidentiary facts.

And every now and then, he’d come back to the need for this historical redress, at a price to be paid by people who were hundreds of years away from the white supremacist colonialist story he was telling.

It made no sense at the time.

It would take a friend to help me make sense of it a few weeks after my return home.

Going Down

In the hotel elevator on the last day of the conference, I witnessed a campaign worker for Stacey Abrams, a Democrat running for governor in the state of Georgia, hand out fliers for her candidate, “a person of color.” The older woman who took her flier thanked her for it. Then another lady, bunched tight in the elevator with the rest of us, asked the older woman if she also knew about the other Stacey, Stacey Evans, also Democrat, also running for governor. “No,” she responded. “What is she like?”

“She’s a great Democrat with a solid progressive record.” A list of some of her achievements followed.

The older woman asked, “Is she a person color?”

“No,” replied her fellow conference-goer.

“Then I shall vote for Abrams.”

Stephen Colbert wouldn’t have noticed, of course, but this time I did: the lady who had just made her choice for governor had the same skin color as I.

Punch More People

The elevator ride prepared me strangely for the happy group of guys and gals who caught my eye in the bar off the lobby, where I got out.

One of their number was distributing his latest creations—t-shirts sporting the slogan “Punch More Nazis.” As someone who is English only because his Austrian Jewish grandfather fled from Hitler, I figured I had a fair basis to inquire, and so I sat down with them all and chatted. A friendly quarter of an hour passed, but I never found out who these Nazis, who need more punching, were.



The ones that murdered my great-grandfather in Dachau were, after all, long dead, thanks in small part to his son, the Austrian Jew, who joined the British army as soon as he turned 18 to fight his own countrymen who were responsible for killing his dad.

Despite that history, my granddad kept his German accent and his German name, which is now mine. And why shouldn’t he have? My granddad was never defined by any of the groups to which he belonged, even when one of them was engaged in organized mass murder against another.

Like so many actual Nazi-punchers of his generation, he never talked about any of it—except to say one thing: “Remember, the Nazis were socialists.” I couldn’t help wondering in that bar in Atlanta if that advisory might have been of any interest to those new acquaintances who were looking for more Nazis to punch.

I also wondered if Stephen Colbert could have seen the t-shirts—what with their being white on black ‘n’ all.

Target on My Back

The plural of anecdote isn’t data, and more to the point, the singular of data isn’t anecdote. I took my experience in Netroots in that vein.

Not long after returning to my home city, I shared my experiences with a friend called Geoffrey. Geoffrey is also something of an amateur historian, so I thought he’d appreciate the bizarre two-hour conversation that I had had about historical redress and the spooky implication of the justification of force to deliver it.

I was, of course, expecting a surprised reaction; but what I got only a few sentences into explaining this strange alternative history in which centuries of British royals were acting as vassals of the Holy See to enslave black people, was a lot of knowing nodding and smiling.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That’s one of the standard narratives. I used to hear that one a lot as a kid. You people don’t realize it, but I’m telling you, there’s a target on your back.”

You see, Geoffrey—like Jesse and the historically-creative civil rights activist—is also of the high-melanin persuasion. He explained about how growing up in a community of folks with the same skin tone, for that was the determining factor, he used to hear this narrative justification (among others) for the coming battle against people with my skin tone by people with his skin tone.

“A target on my back.” It’s almost absurd. I’d never have believed it if I’d not attended one of the most progressive conferences in America and heard a few people assert—and hundreds applaud—differential treatment by virtue of color, and if, as well, I didn’t have a friend who’d grown up with many like them and let me in on that secret. For a “secret” is exactly what he told me it was.

You Can Force People to Play, But You Can’t Force Them to Lose

The folks in Jesse’s neighborhood liked the novelty of having in their midst one of their own—a black Jamaican who nevertheless had a foreign passport and a funny accent. In an act of neighborly solidarity, no doubt, they kindly invited him to join them for a regular local event to discuss the issues facing their community.

Jesse listened to their grievances, for grievance is what the meeting turned out to be about. Jesse, a black man who had been brought up by his single mother in Camberwell, had never heard anything quite like it.

He’d not have said anything if he’d not been called on specifically at the end. But he was, so he did. Someone asked him what he thought of what he’d witnessed. He told them his truth: that he thought their problem wasn’t their problem. Their actual problem, he thought, was what they were doing right there—a faulty self-diagnosis of victimhood. It wasn’t the physical segregation of those who died long ago that had as much impact on them as the mental segregation of those in the room.

His evidence? “England,” he told them, “had slavery too, but we don’t do this”—and he felt just fine in his skin and his dreads.

Does that story prove anything? No. No more than my anecdote from Netroots.

But Einstein did point out that you can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created the problem.

So why would anyone think that any problem could be solved by the same attitude that created it, regardless of the justification?

There are plenty of corollaries to choose from. You can’t defeat racism with racism just by changing the target, hate with hate just by changing the target, bigotry with bigotry just by changing the target, or victimization with victimization just by changing the target—even to oneself.

I don’t need a movement to make me aware of my privilege. I certainly don’t need a skin color. Before I moved to America, I was always deeply aware, delighted, and humbled by the huge privileges I’ve enjoyed. They include having enough to eat, a roof over my head, parents who loved me and made me secure both physically as a child and emotionally as an adult, and a wonderful education. They also include living in a part of the world where I have the freedom to speak my truth and pursue the best version of myself without fear.

I am all too aware of all of it. But the only way I can leave any of it “at the door” is if, just as the BLM folks at Netroots would have it, I’m left at the door.

If you want my help to build a country where more people can enjoy more of the privileges I enjoy every day, just ask me. Don’t threaten me. I’m already in; not out of guilt or because a group that you’ve defined me into owes something to a group you’ve defined me out of.

Rather, I’m in because there’s only one group, and we’re all in it.

In fact, the way to guarantee that good people won’t build that world is to tell them that they have to because they owe something to folks whom they took nothing from in a room that they’re not invited into.

That game has a name—and a hell of a history. The Nazis played it. The Communists played it. And every day, in much smaller ways, it’s being played all over America.

It’s nasty. And I won’t play it.

The Nazis who played it in the 1930s and 40s kept very good records. That’s how I know exactly when, where and how the game ended for my great-grandfather, Maximilian Koerner, in 1938. There he is, third from the bottom in this record retrieved just yards away from the ovens where they burnt his body in the concentration camp at Dachau.

The Nazis’ justification for it was, as it always is, redress for past wrongs, which required material compensation from a supposedly privileged group.

And it was all perfectly moral, you see, because the Nazis weren’t punching Jews because of their physical characteristics: those characteristics were just a way to spot who belonged in the privileged, and therefore the guilty, group.

Yet, today in America, there are plenty of people trying to force others to play this game again, despite all the lessons of history. They shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking they can guilt everyone else into playing to lose. Some, like the old lady in the elevator, may do so—but she’s the exception, not the rule.

When you make people play a game like that, and they work out what its organizers think losing should look like, if they’ve got any sense, they’ll play to win.

Before I came to America, I didn’t see color. Now, alas, I do.

Apparently, I’m white. America told me.

Source: How America Made Me White - Foundation for Economic Education

There Are Racist Emblems, but Chief Wahoo Isn’t One of Them

There Are Racist Emblems, but Chief Wahoo Isn’t One of Them

 

“Everything about the Indians is awesome except their very racist logo ,” proclaimed a USA Today headline last Monday. Cleveland’s baseball team was at that point 18 victories into an amazing winning streak that would stretch to 22 — an American League record and the longest winning streak in major league baseball in more than a century. But baseball writer Ted Berg devoted only a few sentences to the Indians’ brilliant performance before moving to his main subject: “the extremely racist logo they insist on wearing on their caps.”

On any list of knee-jerk PC verities, the “obvious” racism of Chief Wahoo — the cartoon character that has been the Indians logo for seven decades — would be near the top. I get why people make that claim, but I’m going to argue that they’re wrong. Chief Wahoo is not in any way an emblem of bigotry or racial contempt. And those who censoriously insist it is are unwittingly downplaying the ugliness of genuinely racist images.

Origins of the Image

Chief Wahoo was created in 1946 at the request of Bill Veeck, the legendary baseball impresario who was then the Indians’ owner. Veeck hired a designer to come up with an emblem that “would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm.” (A few months later, Veeck would make a far more famous hire: He acquired Larry Doby, a star centerfielder from the Negro Leagues, bringing him to the Indians as the first black player in the American League.)

During the decades when the Indians were one of the worst-performing teams in baseball — decades that included my Cleveland childhood in the 1960s and 1970s — Chief Wahoo was pretty much the only thing about the Tribe that conveyed “pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm.” On the few occasions when I went to games at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium, the vast downtown arena where the Indians used to play, I loved seeing the 28-foot-tall likeness of Chief Wahoo at bat, illuminated at night and towering over Gate D.

For decades, Chief Wahoo has been reviled as (to cite just a few headlines) “ ridiculous and offensive,” “ the most offensive image in sports,” “the grinning face of racism,” and “a national embarrassment .” On the culture-war battlefield nowadays, few activities are more popular than taking offense and playing the race card, so it isn’t surprising that bashing Chief Wahoo is almost as trendy as trashing the name of the NFL’s Washington Redskins.
On the “Redskins” controversy, I'm happy to stand with the 90% of Native Americans who, in a 2016 Washington Post poll, said that the team’s name doesn’t bother them. They doubtless recognized what anyone not pumped up on racial indignation recognizes: No sports team adopts a name or symbol in order to bring contempt upon itself. Apart from handles that are merely whimsical (Red Sox, Jazz, Mighty Ducks) or geographical (76ers, Maple Leafs, Rockies), team names typically suggest traits associated with heroes and winners: the speed of jets, the ferocity of bears, the aggressiveness of predators, the tenacity of cowboys.

That explains the abundance of Indian-themed team names in American sports at every level. Braves, Warriors, Blackhawks, Redskins, Indians — they are nods to a common view of native tribes as brave, tough, noble, and intimidating. If that’s a stereotype, it is a flattering one. It may not be historically accurate, but it could hardly be less of an example of invidious racism.

Looking for a Reason to Be Angry

But Chief Wahoo doesn’t even reflect a stereotype. It doesn’t symbolize any view of American Indians. Nothing about the Cleveland team’s logo pigeonholes or defines Native Americans: It evokes no shibboleth or hackneyed prejudice, it plays into no popular notion or misimpression about Indians, good, bad, or neutral.

And that’s just the point that the Chief-Wahoo-is-racist crowd consistently and passionately get wrong.

Screeds against the Indians’ logo are frequently accompanied by this 2001 advertisement from the National Congress of American Indians:



The ad’s message is harshly unforgiving: Of course the logo of Chief Wahoo, with its toothy grin and feather, is racist, it says: as racist as a caricature of a buck-toothed, squinting Chinese man, or of a hook-nosed, bearded Jew.
But those comparisons are fallacious. Images of near-sighted, smirking Chinese and of devious Jews with huge noses are all-too-familiar slurs — nasty tropes of anti-Asian and anti-Semitic mockery, just as the image of a grinning, watermelon-chomping Sambo is a trope of anti-black mockery. But there is no negative stereotype of wide-eyed, laughing Indians. Chief Wahoo doesn’t reflect contempt for Indians any more than Bugs Bunny reflects contempt for rabbits or than the Boston Celtics logo reflects contempt for the Irish.

Chief Wahoo is not and never has been the “grinning face of racism.” Like Fred Flintstone, Dudley Do-Right, or the bat-swinging, tonsured monk of the San Diego Padres, he is a cheerful, playful cartoon character, nothing more. The Chief Wahoo logo doesn’t hint at any bigoted subtext. Demonizing it as a racist emblem may feel good to those who enjoy parading their liberal sensitivity, but it does nothing to combat actual bigotry or promote tolerance.

Baseball is only a game. In the greater scheme of things, it makes little difference whether the Indians (who clinched the AL Central Division championship on Sunday) win or lose. But it makes a lot of difference to our culture and public discourse whether false accusations of racism are promoted or resisted. Chief Wahoo is innocent and harmless. Critics should save their ire for something that matters.


Jeff Jacoby


Jeff Jacoby has been a columnist for The Boston Globe since 1994. He has degrees from George Washington University and from Boston University Law School. Before entering journalism, he (briefly) practiced law at the prominent firm of Baker & Hostetler, worked on several political campaigns in Massachusetts, and was an assistant to Dr. John Silber, the president of Boston University. In 1999, Jeff became the first recipient of the Breindel Prize, a major award for excellence in opinion journalism. In 2014, he was included in the “Forward 50,” a list of the most influential American Jews.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.