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Institutional Speech in Schools

On October 11, one day before Indigenous Peoples’ Day (federally designated as Columbus Day), California signed into law the first state-wide ban in the country of the use of Red***ns as a mascot. Though well-intentioned, this bill will only affect four schools, and many others will get to keep their racist mascots. Among the schools unaffected is Napa High School, whose mascot for the past 118 years has been the Indians. After the bill passed, a movement grew in Napa to change the mascot — which engendered a virulent opposite reaction as well. Browsing the 322 Facebook comments on the news article shows many people defending the mascot passionately, even violently, claiming some mix of tradition and nostalgia. It is quite reminiscent of the “heritage not hate” argument recently voiced in the debate over Confederate symbols in its supposition that those two things can be separated.

Yet, unless the California state legislature passes another bill banning all racist mascots, the Napa High Indians will, for the moment, live on. This will not be the first time that a racist anachronism lives past its due date; indeed, teams like the Washington Red***ns and the Cleveland Indians still hold their names, despite vocal backlash. It is, after all, each team’s freedom of speech to represent themselves how they choose.

This kind of speech, however, is not ordinary speech. Some, as in the case of the Napa Indians or a national baseball team, is in fact sanctioned by an institution. When speech is propagated by an institutional power, that body is flexing its embedded power to elevate certain speech, ideas, and ideologies, and, in the process, it diminishes others.

Schools are one of the primary spaces for institutionalized speech. Curricula constitute a particularly potent example; what the government has decided to include in the education of its citizenry is perhaps one of the most important and powerful forms of speech that exist in the United States. Curricula come from private organizations and textbook companies, as well as the Department of Education, but changes to lessons at the institutional level come from political influence, with the government having an incredibly powerful monopoly over educational speech. When lessons, subjects, or topics are added that the public does not like, there are ways that the public can voice its objection. In one recent example of this, a McGraw-Hill textbook called Africans brought to southern plantations “workers” rather than acknowledging the reality of slavery. After outcries, the publisher committed to changing the working. This is a public check on institutionalized speech: Neither individuals nor institutions have the right to unlimited, unabridged speech.

Educational institutions, whether public or private, are made up almost entirely of various forms of speech. Learning is speech: Reading and writing is speech: Discussion is speech: Academia, as a whole, is speech. In promoting speech, therefore, schools must be vigilant and precise in determining the ideas to which they will give institutional power. This idea was first espoused in Supreme Court’s decision of Bethel School District v. Fraser in which the Court ruled that “the purpose of public education in America is to teach fundamental values,” which must “include consideration of the political sensibilities of other students.” This curtails an unabridged right to institutional speech — and especially that coming from schools.

The problem is that speech has the potential for immense harm. There is no question that schools have misused and abused their powers of expression, and they need to be fervently checked by the people in their communities. When Napa High uses the Indian as its mascot, this speech makes the campus unsafe for native students. It inculcates among a vulnerable and impressionable population the notion that using racial stereotypes is acceptable and in fact encouraged. This mascot calls into being something that does not exist — the strong, stoic, mythic Indian chief — and then claims ownership over this tangible untruth. It teaches a false history through a myopic and incorrect narrative of indigenous people in California. Under the guise of free speech and free exchange of ideas one must ask: How many times can a lie be spoken until it becomes a truth in the minds of the community?

Undoing the culture of limitless institutionally sanctioned speech, however, is quite troublesome. Indeed, built into America’s founding is an intimate tie between freedom of speech and identity. This connection between speech and identity trickles down into even the smallest cases. At Napa High School, for example, the motto is “Once an Indian, always an Indian.” In the backlash to the petition to change the mascot, traditionalists who claim this identity invoked this aphorism to bolster their argument: Changing the mascot would, in effect, change how they perceive their identity. On the same Facebook post, people have commented saying things like “proud to be a Napa High Indian,” “leave my Indian alone,” and “erasing our history.” They have adopted an identity because of this institutionalized speech that, to them, is fundamental to their conception of self. This is what is meant by the power that institutionalized speech can have: It can call into being identity formations that should not exist.

This same affront to identity is found in the letters written to The Brown Daily Herald in the aftermath of the racist articles published — and later unpublished — in the first week of October. One author calls freedom of speech “the most sacred liberal idea”; another calls for “unqualified” engagement with all the various forms of speech, however problematic or damaging they may be. A letter from five professors claimed that curtailing “free expression” threatens the very “soul and character of a liberal and open university.” This notion — that freedom of speech is sacred and fundamental, truly at the heart of how we must interact with the world — is fine in theory, but, in practice, it amplifies the voices of those with institutional power and diminishes those without it. By framing freedom of speech as a constitutive element of identity, people can act personally offended when it is checked. This connection between speech and identity limits the ability to critique ideas and shuts down all criticism of the platform these ideas come through as well.

This is not to say that freedom of speech isn’t important; it is still one of the pillars on which this country was built. But it doesn’t define us, and we shouldn’t let it. Furthermore, we should be vigilant of the kind of speech our institutions and, especially our schools, sanction. When speech carries institutional weight behind it, it can be powerful, dangerous, and totaling. Institutions, and schools in particular, have a higher responsibility to promote speech that isn’t systematically harmful — they must foster ideas, creativity, learning, and engagement without creating environments where many are forced to repeatedly and tirelessly proclaim their importance as human beings.

About the Author

Joshua Bronk is a staff writer for the Brown Political Review.

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