The Hard Spoken Reality
At Middlebury College, hundreds protested the speaker Charles Murray because of what they believe to be his racist views on economics. In Murray’s book The Bell Curve, he asserts that the difference in economic standing between races is caused by a difference in intellect and that one race is intellectually inferior to the other. One would expect this blatant racism to cause a backlash and protests, however, over 20 years after the book was written in 1994, there are still rampant protests of Charles Murray; protests which have only intensified in the past year due to the election of Donald J Trump.
At Claremont McKenna College, students protested Heather Mac Donald, a strong advocate of a more aggressive stance on crime, including police tactics that opponents say crack down too harshly on black men and perpetuate a war on the police.
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Free speech must be protected, and that means all free speech, whether it is the controversial speaker, the radical protesters or the extremist counter-protestors. All of their rights to free speech must be protected so long as no physical violence and unrest is incited — meaning that we all will have to hear things that we don’t agree, speeches that infuriate us and tear us down from speakers we loathe, but we must learn from what they say. We must learn their perspective as well as our own. It was Robert Kennedy, after the death of Martin Luther King Jr, who said, “And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” The things people say will always hurt us, but it is our job to find that wisdom and make peace instead of silencing our opponents in an endless