Opening remarks by Jonathan Lightfoot at Hofstra’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law for panel on “Reflections On Charlottesville: Revisiting Hate Speech And The First Amendment”

Good afternoon Hofstra Law and guests! My name is Dr. Jonathan Lightfoot and I proudly wear 2 hats here at the university. One is as faculty in the School of Education, which as of last year became part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the other as the founding director of the Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice. Let me begin by thanking Ellen for inviting me to participate on this esteemed panel of legal scholars, Professors Eric Freedman and Barbara Stark. I consider it an honor! I believe law professors and education professors have a lot in common. We both have chosen careers devoted to preparing young people to make great and important contributions to society. You train lawyers to fight injustice and I train educators to fight ignorance. I often remind my students that ignorance of the law is not a defense. We have all heard the famous line “Those who can, DO and those who can’t, TEACH”. Well, I think we should reject such an idiom because we both find teaching a noble profession and a great confluence of art and science. We do not teach because we can’t DO, we teach because we believe it to be a noble calling of the highest order, despite the potentially lucrative lure of private industry and private practice.  

I believe every good sermon or speech should make at least 3 good points. So, I’ll quickly identify the 3 points I want to make in my brief opening remarks:

1.     Historically, schools have been at the forefront of social progress and change. Amidst much criticism and little fanfare, we do our best to fulfill the mandate set forth by our founding father of education, Thomas Jefferson, who famously proclaimed, ‘the success of a democracy depends on an educated citizenry’. A democracy that fails to educate its citizens is doomed to fail.

2.     The United States is a grand experiment, the product of Western European expansion to Africa to capture, disperse and enslave human beings for profit under a new system of chattel slavery, which is the worst form of human enslavement because it seeks to strip the person of his or her humanity and reduce them to the level of capital equipment. Until America acknowledges this original unholy alliance between capitalism and racism, it will continue to run on the treadmill of progress, running fast but going nowhere. In 1998 the American Anthropological Association officially stated that “race” is a social construct invented by European colonists during the 18^th century to create hierarchy among people based on phenotype. Unfortunately, we have built a society on the myth of “race”. It is a scientifically baseless, incoherent, and illogical construct that continues to sow discord and division among the one and only human “race”. We are all cousins with a common African ancestor. However, whereas “race” is myth; racism is real. The sooner we address this fundamental truth in our schools and society, the closer we will get to speaking more love and less hate to one another. In 1903 WEB DuBois prophesied that the problem of the 20^th century would be the problem of the color line (read racism). He should know that the problem has continued well into the 21^st century too, with no solution in sight.  

3.     Hate speech operates from the “ism” playbook. The messaging, the intimidation, the fear, and anger are all ideologically bound to notions of white supremacy, nationalism, patriarchy and privilege. Malcolm X reminded us that capitalism depends on racism, one requires the other. In fact, capitalism creates and is sustained by racism and many other “isms” such as classism, sexism, ableism and any number of other structural and systemic power relationships characterized by institutionally sanctioned superior and inferior human connections. Our so-called president’s response to Charlottesville is yet another example of his typical narcissistic, egomaniacal, racist, entitled and cavalier response to national crises. Lovers of freedom and democracy should be outraged at his attempt to place white supremacists and Neo-Nazi fascists on the same moral and ethical plane as those who came to publicly defend liberty and justice for ALL Americans regardless of skin color, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. His combative, vulgar and abusive speech, lack of empathy and vindictive behavior are all indicative of a serious mental disorder. He is mentally unfit for presidential leadership and we are all at increased risk for destruction. His tweets and public discourse normalizes hate speech and behavior and in effect tells the KKK it is alright to take off their hoods, come out of the closet and speak their truth to white power in the public square. I have less blame for him than I do for the gerrymandered Electoral College system, a relic from American slavery that allowed him to assume the presidency, despite having lost the popular vote. And lest the people who voted for this sick man think they should not too be held accountable for the trouble we are in now or think that I have let you off the hook by blaming our electoral system for our current precarious state, not a chance. Shame on you! The jury is still out on whether we should judge someone morally for their political stance.

My specific area of educational expertise is social and cultural foundations of education. We credit education scholars such as John Dewey, George Counts and Harold Rugg for articulating our conceptual framework. They did much of their work while at Columbia University Teachers College during the 1920s and 1930s leading up to and throughout the Great Depression. They promoted the idea that schools should be critically connected to society and not be a rubber stamp for growing corporate interests. Counts proposed that teachers "dare build a new social order". He explained that only through schooling could students be educated for a life in a world transformed by massive changes in science, industry, and technology. He insisted that responsible educators "cannot evade the responsibility of participating actively in the task of reconstituting the democratic tradition and of thus working positively toward a new society."

The progressive educational agenda is being carried on by more contemporary scholars such as Henry Giroux, who argued in Teachers as Intellectuals for teachers to reclaim their dignity while promoting an education that is more humane, just, equitable and sustainable. Education for social transformation is built upon a critique of the technicist functional approach. It challenges indoctrination masquerading as education and demands a true education that enlightens and empowers. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo define literacy as “reading the WORD and the WORLD”, which reveals how the dominant culture works and uses this understanding as a roadmap towards change and freedom from oppression.  

I encourage my students to develop their critical literacy skills and build a solid foundation for their professional educational practice by learning to read the world from historical, philosophical, sociological and political perspectives. Our study of history should help establish our orientation and point us in the right direction. Becoming lovers of wisdom (philosophers) helps us to guide our thinking and hopefully our behavior. Our educational system is designed to produce more analytic thinkers and not enough prophetic thinkers. We’re good at using logical analysis to determine the appearance and reality of our problems but fail miserably when tasked with finding solutions to problems that require the prophetic application of ethics, morals, discernment and hope. In short, analytic thinking can tell us what is or what appears to be, but prophetic thinking can tell us what should be and what is possible. Unending wars appear to be our reality but peace should be what is possible. Our sociologists can help us understand what motivates human behavior in social settings such as our growing use of hate speech, bullying and violence in virtual and physical spaces. One of the many rude awakenings I learned as an adult was that hate speech; bullying and violence did not stop when I graduated school and entered the “real world” with other adults.

And finally, we look at education as a political arena. Many career politicians got their start as teachers (President Lyndon Johnson) and others sought their first elected positions as school board members. We understand the politics of education along a spectrum from right to left and somewhere in the middle. To the right of the political spectrum is the conservative position and is characterized by individualism, survival of the fittest, competition, limited government, meritocracy and above all the belief that so called free market capitalism is the best form of economic organization for our democratic society. Somewhere in the middle and to the left of the conservative position is where the liberals commiserate. They too are characterized by much of the same principles and values as are the conservatives, with a few exceptions. They tend to be more open to bigger government, more collaboration and a weakness for the oppressed, up to a point. Again, fundamental to the liberal position too is the belief that so called free market capitalism is the best form of economic organization for our democratic society, but with the caveat of more regulation and oversight. Yes, the market can be brutal and unforgiving, thus the need for careful monitoring.

To the far left of the political spectrum is where the radicals hang out. They tend to disagree with the fundamental politics of both the conservatives and the liberals as they do not believe that so called free market capitalism is the best form of economic organization for our democratic society. Although they agree this American style capitalism has been wildly profitable, they take issue with the scandalous and growing rift between the rich and the poor. It is shameful that the richest most powerful country in the world has as much hunger, homelessness, poverty, mass incarceration, violence and other social ills to the degree that it has. Apparently, freedom ain’t free. We boast the most freedoms, yet we lead the world in mass incarceration. It is a bitter irony that 5% of the world’s population has 25% of the world’s prison population. Radicals argue for democratic socialism to remedy much of the social ills that plague American society. They ultimately blame so called free market capitalism for social inequality as manifest by racism, classism, and sexism. American hegemony favors the rich (legitimate or otherwise) and blames the poor for their plight. The latest example being when our so-called president insinuated that Puerto Rican Americans on the island of Puerto Rico were lazy and then blamed them for the suffering they now experience as victims of a devastating hurricane.

I think the best example of teamwork between educators and lawyers occurred with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision when Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that ‘Separation was inherently unequal’, which nullified 58 years of Jim Crow segregation initiated after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Brown case, along with the 1955 lynching murder of Emmett Till and the 1956 Montgomery Alabama bus boycott stirred the nation’s conscious and will for change. Schools were the catalyst for economic, cultural, legal and social change. The modern American Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to force America to own up to its hypocrisy, racism and militarism.

Certainly, the founding fathers knew the power of the spoken word. Such knowledge is embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Yehuda Berg says, “Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.”

As followers of the Judeo-Christian Bible, the founding fathers relied on select scriptures to guide their thinking, writing and behavior. Our first school curriculum used the Bible to teach reading, spelling, character and obedience. Two Bible verses come to mind in this discussion of language as it applies to free speech and hate speech:

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

If words are of God and God is love, then our words should be lovely. And if God is good, then our words should be good. 

Proverbs 18:21King James Version (KJV)

²¹ Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

My attempt at an exegesis of this text is that those who love life will embrace speech that affirms, uplifts and gives life. They use the power of their tongues to speak life into our sick and dying world. Alternatively, the fruits of those who sow discord, sinfulness and hate is death. For truly wages of sin are death and destruction, which hateful sinners reap unto themselves and those unfortunate enough to fall in their path.

I think those who cross the line from free speech to hate speech are fully aware of the power of their vitriol. The recent events in Charlottesville are reminders that robust American protection of free speech is cancerous. The extent to which we should revisit our approach to hate speech should be commensurate with our individual and collective levels of tolerance for discord, death and destruction caused by racists, anti-Semites and other haters. Haters are gonna’ hate but true progressive education can have great impact to soften hearts and open minds. In tandem, expert legal intervention can adjudicate hate speech connected to illegal behavior. Time does not permit me to fully develop my second and third points in my opening remarks but I welcome questions that will allow me to address them later in our session.