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Free Speech vs. Racial Respect? Why Not Both?

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Two important principles are clashing on university campuses these days from Yale to Missouri and beyond. On one side we have the principle of free expression. On the other, the principle that minority students -- and their allies -- should have "safe spaces," protected from "micro-aggressions" and other tone-deaf insults.

You can see the problem already, can't you?

Freedom from being offended is a noble goal but it's not always possible, partly because we all have vastly different ideas about what offends us.

Those issues came to a head on the University of Missouri campus when a media studies professor bullied a student photographer in videos that quickly went viral.

In the video, Melissa Click -- an assistant professor in the university's Communication Department, of all places, -- tells reporters to leave the quad that black student protesters had occupied and she loudly calls for "muscle" to force the move.

Since I was not there, I called someone who was. I called Ashley Holt, a Mizzou senior broadcast journalism major and president of the university's chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. Holt covered the clash for local station KOMU-TV.

 

In the clash between press freedom and providing students of color with a "safe space" free of offense, I asked, which would she choose? I expected the sort of free-speech-above-all-else advocacy that I usually express. Holt had a different view.

"My personal choice was to respect the space," she said.

Amid the confusion and heated emotions of the moment, she said, it became very difficult to cover the news without further enflaming the crowd. So, rather than become "part of the story" she was sent to cover, she and most of the other journalists pulled farther back to give the protesters' emotions a chance to cool.

"I was there to get a story," she said, "but not to be a part of the story."

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(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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