I am writing to respond to the opinion pieces in the Gazettte by ACLU attorney Bill Newman (“As a bulwark, we need the flag,” Dec. 3-4) and Amber Cano-Martin (“At issue, bullying of Hampshire College,” Dec. 7).
While I agree with Newman that we ought to find ways to defend the U.S flag as a symbol of “equality, democracy and liberty” as he puts it, I would argue that we can only do that if we defend at the same time not only the First Amendment rights of those who question whether the flag is a symbol worth defending, but also educational institutions’ rights to do conflict resolution around this issue.
The Hampshire College student who burned the flag was likely protesting any number of egregious examples in U.S. history of those in power’s constant trampling on the rights of the less powerful, starting with settlers who took over Native American land and used the U.S. government to commit genocide and to enact constantly broken treaties, continuing to this day in the case of the Dakota Access pipeline which threatens Sioux water rights.
U.S. racial injustice also has involved African slavery , the follow-up Jim Crow and Northern segregation systems, and contemporary institutional racism in the criminal justice system in which a disproportionate number of black and brown people are shot and mishandled by mostly white officers in the arrest process.
Newman would surely defend the Hampshire student’s right to burn the flag as an example of free speech that is constitutionally protected.
But he then waffles on his defense of free speech by questioning whether Hampshire College, a private college, is in fact “embracing the paradigm of free speech” by taking down the flag to facilitate campus discussion over the disputed nature of what the flag symbolically stands for. What counts as a proper “paradigm of free speech” with a contested symbol is an educational judgment call in this context.
Jonathan Lash, as the head educator at Hampshire College, has more authority than Newman in deciding what educational process to use to promote conflict resolution among student views.
In publicly critiquing Lash’s use of that speech, Newman ignores the political effect of his own speech, which in the context lends support to what Cano-Martin correctly describes as the “bullying of a private institution of higher learning, Hampshire College, by vicious forces.”
As she points out, these have included racist and sexist threats via social media, by pro-flag protesters, and Fox News. Local opportunistic politicians like Mayor Sarno of Springfield use their so-called patriotic honoring of the flag and critique of Hampshire as a way to hide their own lack of patriotism as public officials: in Sarno’s case, his inaction on economic and political justice issues of affordable housing and police injustice in his own city.
Why didn’t Newman condemn these uses of overt political pressure, hate speech, and political obfuscation to try to restrict the political debate that Lash was facilitating on campus?
I agree with Cano-Martin that Newman got this one wrong. As a progressive myself I have changed my own views from the time I was in Cuba in the 1970s with some other Americans helping construct public housing, when because of my concerns about the Vietnam War and civil rights violations, I refused to stand when the Cubans displayed our and their flag and played both national anthems.
I since have come to agree with Bill that we should use the flag as patriots in peace, civil rights and other protest movements. For years I have had a July 4th party where I feature a U.S. flag with a peace sign on it.
But in this context I think progressives, especially educators, need to protect the freedom of educational institutions to find their own ways to have a democratic debate on the pros and cons of the U.S. flag and what it symbolizes, without being subject to the shutdown of that process by those who want to insist that it means only the things they want it to mean.
Ann Ferguson, of Leverett, is a retired professor of philosophy and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.