Freedom of Speech Doesn’t Mean Freedom from Consequences

Or: Why I love watching racists get their comeuppance

I love watching racists lose their jobs. It’s kind of a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine.

There is something incredibly pleasing about watching somebody run their mouth and pay the price for it. Like when a celebrity has a drunken, unhinged rant, followed by the loss of a major role or a change in public opinion, it’s hard to look away.

Don’t get me wrong, I do feel guilty that they’ve lost their means of supporting themselves and their families, but when you do something publicly, unabashedly racist, you’re going to pay the price. (Probably. Maybe. Not as much as I’d like.)

And, obviously, I don’t think it’s the wrong choice on the part of employers. Having an employee with their name in the news for a racist tirade is a good way to lose business, and I understand why most employers don’t want to deal with that.

Ultimately, even in the era of fake news, Blue Lives Matter, and red MAGA hats, racism is still wrong, and people would do well to remember that. Unfortunately, in the era of fake news, Blue Lives Matter, and red MAGA hats, racists are emboldened to speak their minds in the public forum instead of hiding under rocks as they should.

People who call themselves “free speech advocates” would likely disagree with me. Suppressing free speech in the public forum is detrimental to the public discourse, they say. Squashing opinions removes valuable input from the public square.

And, they have a point. Sort of, anyway.

They are right that squashing constructive speech in a public forum leads to the suppression of ideas and regression of society. There should always be room for more constructive dialogue in the public forum.

The problem is that racism is inherently destructive. It treats whole classes of people as lesser, relegating them to lower tiers of power and value. Defending racism, whether individual or systemic, is not a tenable position in modern discourse. It should be squashed, as it adds nothing of value to the conversation.

Feel free to rage at me in the comments, but racism is wrong, and defending it is wrong, period. Racism and its defender have no value and no leg to stand on in the modern world.

Which brings me to part two of this article: when racists lose their jobs.

White people calling the cops on black people for doing everyday things has become a meme. It’s an unfortunate sign of our times that white people will, inevitably, call 911 on a black person birdwatching, or swimming at a pool, or barbecuing, or simply being present on the campus of a university they attend.

I’m not going to get too far into the weeds of the weaponization of the police, a group that is steeped in systematic racism, as many people more intelligent than I have been there. Instead, I’d like to get into the repercussions that the perpetrators of racist tirades (sometimes) face: losing their jobs. (Or, if they’re multimillionaire talking heads on FOX, their sponsors.)

Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on a birdwatcher in Central Park, is a great example of this. The man she called the police on, Christian Cooper (no relation), had asked her to put her dog on a leash, as it was running free in a section of the park where leashes were required. She called the cops, he recorded it.

While the details of the encounter before Mr. Cooper started recording the incident are somewhat unclear, the video shows a relatively calm Mr. Cooper being threatened by Ms. Cooper, who was restraining her still-unleashed dog while telling the cops to send someone immediately.

Whether she felt threatened or not, Ms. Cooper still apparently felt safe enough to stand her ground and call the police while being recorded. Whether she was consciously aware of it or not, in some way she knew that the police were more likely to take her side than his due, at least in part, to the aforementioned systemic racism. Whether she knew it or not, she was placing his life in danger, due to the tendency for cops to shoot unarmed black men with little to no warning.

When the story went viral, she lost her job and had to surrender her dog. Googling her name brings up millions of hits leading with numerous news articles detailing the incident. It’s fair to say that her reputation is ruined.

Maybe I’m a bit of a sadist, maybe it’s the steady diet of Disney movies I watched as a kid (and adult), maybe it’s just good old fashioned schadenfreude, but watching somebody do something shitty and get their comeuppance makes me happy. It reminds me that, even in Trump’s America, racism still doesn’t fly very far.

The things we do have consequences, you see, and we must pay the consequences when we do or say stupid things. She is paying the consequences of threatening an innocent birdwatcher. She gambled her reputation against his life and lost.

Again, the so-called “free speech activists” would likely throw a fit at this. “She had every right to call the cops,” they would say. “She felt threatened! She’s entitled to her opinions!”

To address those points: she had no right to call the cops because Mr. Cooper wasn’t doing anything threatening. If she felt threatened, why did she stand her ground and threaten Mr. Cooper right back instead of running? Why did she hurl attacks at him and threaten police intervention while he stood by peacefully and did nothing? Who was really threatened in that situation?

As for being entitled to her opinion, of course, she’s entitled to her opinion, but she is not entitled to be free of consequences for that opinion.

We live in a world where anyone can gain a platform on social media and reach millions of people. And, when websites like Twitter take down posts for being racist or encouraging violence or any number of other things, people claim that they’re trampling on free speech.

Let me quote you the First Amendment, in case you’ve forgotten your civics lessons:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That’s freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly, all summed up neatly in a few lines. I will direct your attention to the first five words there:

Congress shall make no law

All of those freedoms I just mentioned — freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly — are to prevent congress from making laws to limit them. Congress cannot limit your free expression — whether that’s waving a Confederate flag or burning an American one.

Do you know who can limit your free speech? Private companies like Facebook and Twitter. Do you know what the First Amendment doesn’t protect? You, from the consequences of your actions in public society. Again, we live in a world where anyone can become “internet famous.” There is nothing preventing people on the internet from dragging your name through the mud for something you got caught on video doing. As long as they’re not breaking any libel laws, the op-eds will flow.

Lots of people don’t like this. Many are disgusted that one slip-up can be on the internet and around the world before the dawn of the next day. Anything could ruin your reputation if someone catches it on camera! That’s not fair!

Honestly, I think it’s perfectly fair. It costs you zero dollars to be a decent, non-racist person, but you want to get offended when someone posts a video of you being a racist piece of shit to Twitter? It’s almost like we live in a world where everyone carries a camera in their pocket that can stream any event live to thousands of watchers!

Honestly, that’s part of the reason that I’m glad that these people get their comeuppance. Some people like to argue that the world wasn’t this racist 20 years ago. I think it was exactly this racist, it’s just that now every Karen threatening to call the police on a black person runs the risk of having their face all over social media within the hour. And oh man, they don’t like it, not one single bit.

Contrary to popular belief, racism didn’t end with the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, nor did it end with the election of Barack Obama. It’s always been there, percolating in middle America, enshrined in our systems of government and policing, displaying itself in daily microaggressions and the occasional newsworthy event.

The difference is that now, every daily microaggression can be a newsworthy event. The Rodney King video started a ball rolling, capturing the everyday racism that black people in America face. Now that cameras are built into the phones we carry everywhere, and now that those cameras can be connected to the internet to livestream shitty white people, those shitty white people are starting to panic.

“I don’t want my reputation ruined by one video!” they scream, ignoring the fact that normal people don’t go on racist tirades. “I don’t want to lose my job because of my opinion!” they yell, ignoring the fact that their opinion is that non-white people are objectively lesser than white people, which is monstrous and vile.

So yes, I laugh whenever a shitty white person loses their job for doing something racist. The country is starting to see the racism that black people face from shitty white people every single day of their lives, and many people are having their eyes opened to the actual levels of racism in America.

We are starting to see that racism isn’t some abstract thing that happens to other people, it happens every day and is perpetrated by our neighbors and friends. And we, by and large, don’t like that. So, when some random white person accosts a black person just living their life, and it happens to get caught on video, we, as a country, react poorly.

So, whenever a shitty white person exercises their freedom of speech and gets the backlash, I find it amusing. For too long, white people have taken “freedom of speech” to mean “freedom to say whatever I want without consequences.” They are now finding out that is no longer true.

To that, I say: good. Call out the racists. Get them on video, screencap their posts, take them to task. Show them that having free speech doesn’t mean they can say whatever they want without repercussions. Drive them back to the holes that they crawled out of, and make them pay for their words and actions.

Let’s show the world that we don’t tolerate racists in this country.