Government

Cancel Culture Is Real. And It's White.

It sure would be a bad PR move for the Liberty and Public Discussion™ group to miss this opportunity.

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Kids wearing BLM clothing at school? Clearly disruptive. Kids carrying a Confederate flag and yelling racial slurs? Probably just trying to present an even-handed account of history. Black kids getting threats from a public school for planning to protest? Yeah, that’s cancel culture.

And before you say I’m overreacting, the school threatened disciplinary action for even having a flyer of the school protest. This is not just bad administrating or crappy pedagogy, this is facially unconstitutional under Tinker v. Des Moines (or whatever remains of it at least). And it’s made even wilder after consideration that only the Black students were reprimanded for planning to use their First Amendment right — the White and Latino students who helped the Black kids plan the protest faced no consequences at all. I don’t know if this arises to a due process claim in addition to a First Amendment one, but something is clearly rotten in the state of Georgia. Contrast this with the recent Yale debacle where subsets of right-leaning media were up in arms over membership in FedSoc being conflated with racism. There was clear fallout at a private institution. Surely, this public school’s actions fall within the reach of the First Amendment.

I hope that the Black students will sue the school for infringing upon their First Amemendment rights. Litgiation can be costly though. Based on the Federalist Society’s “About Us” section, I’d say they’re the right ones to foot the bill:

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order.  It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.  The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.

So what of it? There is already enough controversy surrounding the organization’s association with white supremacist rhetoric and partisanship at the highest levels. We know that FedSoc members have had no problem defending hate speech. They are also on record hosting the work of a constitutional law and civil liberties scholar who claims that hate speech should be fought with free speech. Will they also have the gall to defend the First Amendment when its wielders are Black students? Let’s see what they do.

Black Students Suspended For Protesting Racist White Students In Georgia [BoingBoing.net]
Yale Law Shows Commitment To Diversity With Boilerplate Apology To Minorities [Earlier]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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