By Will Brown
A bank teller had a gun put to her head. In a moment of stress she uttered language she would later come to regret.
A yuppie at a Kenny Chesney concert had a cell phone camera
stuffed in his face. In a moment of stress he uttered language that he would
come to regret.
Both people, both millionaires, are white Southerners who used the n-word. One was born in Albany, Georgia and became a celebrity chef. The other was born in Oklahoma, reared in Clearwater, Florida and makes his money as a professional football player.
The First Amendment gives Americans the freedom of speech. It does not protect people from the consequences of their speech.
In an age of gotcha journalism, around-the-clock news cycles and ever-present surveillance it’s doubtful few things can be uttered in private anymore. It means if someone is a bigot, homophobe, Anti-Semite, xenophobic or some other poisonous elixir of ignorance it will eventually be unveiled.
In some ways groupthink is just as insidious as the venom spouted by Paula Deen and Riley Cooper because individuals are led to believe what they are told, and do not come to their own conclusions.
Groupthink tells people the n-word is not an appropriate word to use; whereas, an individual would know why the n-word is not an appropriate word to use. It may not seem like a significant difference, but with most of us receiving our information from a screen — whether it’s television, computer or smartphone — we sometimes do not bother to get the context of a situation. It’s easier to just believe someone said an epithet, not understand what led them to say it in the first place.
The Nashville-based First Amendment Center appropriately had a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote on its homepage as its quote of the day Wednesday: “Speech is power: Speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense and into your good sense.”
This is not to excuse Cooper, or anyone else who uses ignorant language. But before people pick up their politically correct pitch forks, we should at least examine why some speech is insensitive, rather than taking anyone’s word for it.
Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb
