Arizona high school student's racism even offends Arizona

I haven’t had a Bass in years. It has gotten hard to find where I live. Cheers!

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Brewery now owned by Coors, brand by Budweiser. Blech. I used to go to some good beer festivals in their home town, though.

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http://www.rsdb.org/slur/nipper

Dang, looks like you’re right. Apparently just about every possible interpretation of ni**er is a racial slur, at least two of which were unknown to me before today. (“Nibber?” Who knew?)

So, everyone gets extra* homework because of the T-shirt wearers’ actions? This might actually help the student body police itself in the future.

*It may not genuinely add to the students’ workload, but they’ll likely think of it that way.

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In the defense of your position, washpo has this to say.

Americanbar has a nuanced approach

http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/initiatives_awards/students_in_action/debate_hate.html

The ncac, which is likely to agree with your position in general, still lays out that the civil rights act of 64 and title IX give legal rights for public entities to test and define hateful speech.

So, as the apocryphal story about Churchill says, we aren’t arguing about whether or not you are what you are, but the degree.

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Here’s a joke: how many well paid teachers does it take to hold a school spirit event?

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That’s a new one for me too. Though, how racist is it if no one knows about it.

Case in point, Neo Nazis wearing “88” for Heil Hitler, but you can find 88 as both a number on printed fashion T-shirts and many different spot jerseys. So really, it is a racist statement for the handful of people who assign it that power, and for everyone else it’s a number.

I swear too sometime Urban dictionary has entries that people just make shit up and no one has ever used the term/done what is described.

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Man, I have tried so hard to get terms into urban dictionary. I always get shot down.

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The discussion was shifted from whether the Morse Court addressed a hate speech exception to whether SCOTUS should recognize a hate speech exception.

Different questions. Mari Matsuda and others have written on the latter question.

Bayern?

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I plan to put a time capsule in my casket. Thinking of including some “popular slang” of the time that I made up.

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Well, we are discussing a limited set of circumstances, speech within the confines of a school.

I’ve been sort of toying around with this idea I got from your reference to the Morse case.
The limit on his free speech was upheld specifically because his speech act was seen as promoting something which the mission of school was seen as ideally opposing, drug use.

Wouldn’t your example of Morse therefore strengthen the argument for a limit on the behaviour of people who wish to employ hateful speech within the confines, the limited set of circumstances, of the school?

Not to assume that you are arguing that (the judgement in) Morse is right, perhaps you mean to imply that the ruling was not right and, in fact, an unjust limitation on his free speech?

Do you mean that the government, embodied in the school, shouldn’t be excluding the pupils for a day for using injurious speech within the classroom?

Given the element of the Morse scenario that I highlighted, there is obviously some legal precedent for taking into account the schools mission whilst considering these scenarios. However, the more important consideration would seem to be the hate-speech, the injurious, threatening, racist language employed by the students within that specific set of circumstances.

Now, we could argue about what dangers were posed by the injurious speech and whether this, in a place which it appears is not of those most tolerant, raised the likelihood of a threat of specific injurious actions from occurring as a result of it, but I think that there is also something to be said about this idea that the mission of the school should be taken into consideration, as per Morse, in limiting the practice of free speech.

Now, quite how these ideas become properly entrained within the intersection of the likelihood of incitement to injury and the schools mission I cannot say. Perhaps you have another case to which I could refer? IANAL :smile:

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It is a tough line to walk. And I appreciate everyone that approaches the subject civilly, whether I agree with their opinion.

Washpo, who published an oped than defended the US method of hands off approaches to hate speech also published an article about how Germany is resisting it.

I don’t want to play a lawyer. In real life or on TV. So I think Wheaton’s Law, which is really a corollary for the Golden Rule is apt.

And now I think it is time for kitten pics.

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Total fistbump on that. “This glacked Honda Subaru was totally on fleek to the Uranus!”

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And lastly, before I go search for images for the Butts thread…

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I’ve reached the maximum number of likes today, and must wait 1 hour before trying again.

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This is a great reference. Eugene Volokh is a very good constitutional scholar and has spent much of his career looking at the First Amendment.

The Title IX issues are interesting, and I agree that they will need to be worked out and eventually aligned with the First Amendment. There’s currently a lot happening around this in universities, and it’s very contentious. My hope is that the courts come down on the side of free speech, and explicitly preclude Title IX from impacting constitutionally protected speech. But not everyone agrees, and some university administrators think Title IX trumps the constitution (see Administrator Joins OCR in Forgetting the Constitution’s Supremacy | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression).

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I lean towards no, because the same rule about punishing injurious speech could be used by a principal to suspend the student with the “I’m a Lesbian” t-shirt or some other speech that I wouldn’t want punished. Each might create a disturbance to someone in a high school somewhere, and as a result the tool of punishing speech that creates a disturbance is not something I would support.

I guess our mutual misunderstanding is I am working to normalize terms like “I am a lesbian”. And I advocate that " n*" is hateful. I support legislation and case law that supports those positions.

The first is an affirmation of what you are, the second is a superficial denigration of what you (not you of course) think people are. I support exceptions to speech around those boundaries.

Does my stance make sense, even if you disagree with it?

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It makes complete sense. I disagree with it though, even though I support the NC student and am opposed to the speech of the students from Arizona. My issue is that I don’t trust the government to draw a line, with protected speech on one side and unprotected speech on the other side. I don’t think they can apply it fairly, and it would be used as a weapon against the unpopular. If you want to give a school administrator the power to punish students with which you disagree, these same administrators can and will use it against students with which you agree.

I’m do wonder about your statement “I support legislation and case law that supports those positions.” I agree with the two sentences immediately prior, but am unsure what legislation supporting the position that racist speech is hurtful would imply. Are you saying that you support legislation that says “racist speech is hateful” (could be constitutionally OK), or are you supporting legislation that says “racist speech is hateful and should be punished” (probably wouldn’t pass constitutionally muster)?