Shout loud for censorship

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, rates universities on their commitment to free speech. Green is good, yellow is cause for concern, and Princeton earns a “Code Red.” It is the lowest score that FIRE gives.

I have never actually seen the University encroach on free speech. I do not expect it will ever need to, because students are censoring speech better than the University could. Take Urban Congo. On Saturday, April 4, the group put on a performance that some people did not like. Those people shouted on social media and on these very pages of the Daily Princetonian. By Monday, April 7, the group had disbanded.

I want us to take pause at its demise. The percussion group eschewed traditional instruments for objects like “wet floor” signs — that is, the kind of objects you would see in an urban environment. They juxtaposed their urban edge with the loincloths they wore, a dress far removed from the modern city. The resulting display was pleasantly anachronistic and, to some, intolerably offensive.

It was not quite clear just who was supposed to be offended by the performance. A ‘Prince’ column published the next day reported that the group was “deemed inappropriate by many, citing disrespect for multiple African and Native American cultures.” If these vastly different cultures can both find offense, then Urban Congo’s performances did not target any one group in particular. Yes, “Congo” is the name of a river in Africa, but no, naming your group after a river does not constitute racism. Anthropologists say that all humans lived in Africa 60,000 years ago, so I thought that the name, like the loincloths, was a nod to a lineage we all share. This is what my ancestors would have done with a “wet floor” sign, I imagined.

Maybe I was wrong about the name — as frequent readers know, I am wrong a lot. Maybe the group’s fiercest critics are correct and the “Congo” in “Urban Congo” refers to one of two African countries. If true, the percussion group borrowed from a particular culture, which has stirred up talk of “cultural appropriation.” It is a negative term whose usage spiked in 1985. Before that, the mixing of cultures in America was called the melting pot, and it was a good thing.

I am not saying that Urban Congo was good. But neither was it “the heart of darkness,” as Nicolas Wu ’18 accuses in his April 7 column. He calls on the University to examine clubs more stringently before approving them, in order to suppress anything considered objectionable. The Merriam-Webster definition of “censoring,” by the way, is “to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.”

I do not know when it became trendy to beg for censorship, but this rhetoric should stop. We must not sacrifice our own First Amendment rights to avoid offense, because folks, no one has the right not to be offended.

This doesn’t mean we should be jerks. I argued in a Jan. 4 column that we should make a conscious effort to understand how others feel. I still believe that, but loving your neighbor is a personal responsibility. Silencing offensive speech, on the other hand, solves nothing that can’t be solved by growing thicker skin.

I hope I am not irking the people who feel victimized by Urban Congo. I may not understand why you took offense, but I understand that you did, and I recognize that those feelings are valid. I have offered my perception of the group not to denounce you, but to show that other valid feelings exist also. Ideally, we would have resolved our different feelings with constructive dialogue. What is cultural appropriation, and why is it bad? What is art, and when is it good to blend cultures and caricatures? We did not determine the answer to these questions, and if our calls for censorship are heard, we will never be able to do so.

The faculty recently updated “Rights, Rules, Responsibilities” to affirm students’ right to free speech. Now we should affirm this right for ourselves. If students sidestep dialogue and shame others into conformity, then our ability to speak freely is little more than a paper promise.

Newby Parton is a freshman fromMcMinnville, Tenn. He can be reached at newby@princeton.edu.