Growing up as a brown kid in the United States, you learn a lot. First, you learn what it means to be a minority. Second, you unlearn everything about your culture that your parents try so hard to teach you as you force yourself to assimilate as quietly and naturally as possible within white American culture. After that, you grow up to learn that you have been robbed of your precious traditional identity that the same people who looked at you strangely for are now gleefully appropriating. And if you were forced to move back because yours, like several other immigrant parents in the early 2000s, realized after about ten years of forced patriotism, that they want to ‘move back home’ you find out that you are stuck in this weird limbo of trying to re-learn everything about being desi while your Indian peers overtly try to emulate the west. Like every other first generation immigrant child that ends up moving back to your home country, you are too American for India, and far too Indian to be truly American and more than ever, you are simply confused about what you really believe in.
However,
something that being in the minority teaches you (apart from looking back at
your childhood ten years later and realizing with horror that you were the
victim of very blatant and also shadily encased racism – which, now that you
think about it, explains a lot) is, perspective. You, better than any of your
white and brown peers understand oppression and social justice in a more nuanced,
fine and of course, first hand manner. Are you thankful for it? Yes. Are you
now faced with the self-inflicted burden of fighting for every single oppressed
group that suffers at the hands of a self-appointed, bigoted authority? Also
yes.
So, how
do you even start on your anti-capitalist, social justice warrior, desi-feminist
journey? You go to law school, you use your newfound understanding of
constitutional law and justice and you speak out.
Collective
sighs fill the class as you raise your hand every time a question on gender is
asked. You are branded ‘reverse racist’ because of your perpetual contention
with white America (and if you use your freedom of speech to explain how
reverse racism isn’t a real thing, everyone uses theirs to call you wrong). ‘I
can say whatever I want, it’s in the constitution’ your opponent argues,
forcing you to actually reconsider your approach to this argument. I mean, he’s
right isn’t he? But you recall how a six year old white boy used the same line
in elementary to make fun of the other Indian kids that dared to wear bindis in
public school, and it doesn’t seem so right anymore.
So what
is it really? Who and what is free speech meant for? To give standup comics the
right to make rape jokes? To give children the ability to be freely racist, as
long as their words do not affect their actions? Truthfully, I don’t know and
I’m not even sure that will ever have a solid answer. Which begs the question,
what does freedom of expression truly mean and where do its limits lie? Does
true free speech even have any limits?
Free
speech has always been the subject of heated debate. In 1633, Galileo disobeyed
the church to perpetuate his claim that the Earth revolved around the sun.
Religious fundamentalists in 1859 unsuccessfully tried to silence Charles
Darwin when he came out with his theory on natural selection. The ancient
Greeks recognized the existence of free speech long before anyone else around
350 BC when Aristotle insulted the jury at his trial. The right of free speech
has been around even before it was enshrined in any legal document, deriving
its authority from the people who dared to speak up and those who dared to
believe. Free speech is an essential element to a free existence, let alone a
democracy.
The
importance of this right isn’t what the argument is about, because the minute
you enter that debate, you’ve already lost. But like most rights, it isn’t
absolute. The parameters the state has put up - sedition, hate speech, threat
to national security - are fairly clear.
It’s on things like satire, decency and humor where the lines between free
speech and ‘toxic talk’ start to blur.
Four
months ago when the Charlie Hebdo tragedy struck, the citizens of Paris took
the streets brandishing signs that read ‘Je Suis Charlie’, displaying their
solidarity and showing that no act of terror will take away their freedom of
speech (of course, thousands were being massacred in North Nigeria but no one
cared enough and the white supremacist media didn’t even bother adequately
reporting it). But as with any tragedy that hits the white, western world -
social media immediately erupted (metaphorically) in flames. The idea that
‘free speech was under threat’ enthused everyone to jump onto the ‘Je Suis
Charlie’ bandwagon. It was ‘#trending’ on twitter, Jared Leto proudly slipped
it into his Golden Globes acceptance speech and every other remotely aware
young adult was quick to defend the satirical magazine half because the youth
are always looking for an excuse to rebel and half because, ‘If we don’t have
free speech, we have nothing’.
Perhaps,
it is my experience as living as a person of color in a white-majority country,
because of which I have learnt the importance of culture and religion and its
impact on identity in a manner that not many people (especially those, who have
all their lives, lived as a majority) have had the experience of having. The
universal white supremacist belief (that you unknowingly buy into and
perpetuate) stems from the colonial era and every nation of color knows only
too well the ‘white man’s burden’ to bring us to civilization and under this
dictate to us which parts of our culture are okay to display publicly, what
constitutes ‘terrorist’ activity and even what is satire/acceptable to joke
about. But we’d be lying if we said that we were ever only the victims of such subjugation. The
hierarchy of oppression is a strange thing because for whatever reason, no one
ever seems to understand from experience how it is the worst thing to be at the
bottom of this structurally unequal society, they continue to oppress whoever
else they possibly can. I mean sure no non-white country ever started the
trans-atlantic slave trade but none of us are any strangers to creating barriers
that stop certain groups from having full access to their ‘equal rights’. Yes
India, I’m looking at you.
Years
before colonization, we had our very own homegrown system of oppression based
on caste. And almost 70 years later when our constitution has specific
provisions to tackle this particular issue, this oppression isn’t gone, it’s
just taken on different forms, often at times being harder to detect even for
the ones actually being oppressed.
The Jim
Crow era has long since passed but why did the white protesters who broke
Baltimore’s curfew on February 10th get multiple warnings by cops
who “did not want to arrest anybody” when right after that, a black man walking
by with his hands in the air was pepper-sprayed violently dragged across the
street?
There
are people who have the ability to enforce these rights, and there are others
that face barriers to having full access to these same rights, even though they
might be from the same economic and social background. Very often it is either
the past their past (history of castism/racism) or the discrimination they face
today (islamophobia) that makes them the victim of a deep rooted inequality
that is beyond any sort of legal issue. Think about it, it is not a coincidence
that the people who most often have a contention with equality under the law
are also people that are the recipients of universal bigotry.
Let me
explain, Je ne suis pas Charlie. I am
not Charlie. I don’t even want to be
Charlie. And this in no way means that I condone acts of violence as a response
to hurt sentiments. It just means that Charlie Hebdo is a racist, homophobic,
bigoted magazine that used the defense of ‘freedom of speech’ to defend its
racist, homophobic and bigoted cartoons. Never did it use its platform to push
for social or political change in France - a country where the Muslim community
has been abused and ignored for ages. While it claimed to be a left wing
magazine that supposedly questioned the actions of the right wing, more often
than not it looked like they were laughing alongside them. Besides, the idea
behind governments implementing a provision for freedom of speech was not to
give people the right to say terrible things to everyone else without any
repercussions. Just as satire isn’t about belittling the oppressed (people of color),
it is about challenging the power (a point which Charlie Hebdo blatantly
ignored).
So just
like the argument, ‘I am entitled to my own opinion’, the argument ‘I have a
right to say whatever I want’ is problematic not only because it is untrue, but
also because it is a statement used by oppressors and bigots to perpetuate
their backward and oppressive thinking. We also often let them get away with
using this excuse, which ultimately defeats the purpose of ‘changing mindset’
that the Indian public so fervently speaks of when discussing solutions to long
running problems.
It also
takes away from the idea that with the right to free speech comes a high burden
of responsibility to ensure that you use it the right way. What is the purpose
behind the United States allowing a ‘National Draw Muhammad Day’ to be held as
protest against limiting free speech when it was made solely for the purpose of
antagonizing one particular religious group? It isn’t about blasphemy. It’s
about being a decent human being. So instead of asking why people have a
problem with other people exercising their right to express themselves, ask the
question of why the people expressing themselves feel the need to do so by
making another group of people uncomfortable?
While
that is happening in the west, the 2015 World Press Freedom Index ranked India
136 out of 180 countries (then again, disclaimer: survey conducted by majority
white countries who decide how ‘free’ freedom should be). All Indians know how
notorious its government is for clamping down on individual rights to
expression. We can’t even update our Facebook without the potential for being
arrested (slightly thrilling, young teenage rebels would so feel). And when finally
one of us actually uses satire correctly,
to protest against the corrupt government that gave us such a right for this
very purpose, they get thrown in prison (Aseem
Trivedi and how the Indian Government hates people to who are right: a
memoir).
The
Indian Censor Board won’t even release the American version of ‘Gone Girl’
because it has too much sex, but they’ll leave all the violence in it and give
it a great review - because sure, our
citizens can engage in violently harmful acts but god forbid they have
intercourse in a nation built on the Gandhian principles of non-violence.
With
banning the (albeit, highly offensive) All India Bakchod ‘Roast’ on the
internet, and throwing around accusations of sedition like candy on Halloween
night, the Indian government is yet to score points amongst its citizens for
upholding the glorious right to free speech. In India, everything we worship
everything – Gods, celebrities and especially our sanskaars so almost anything becomes blasphemous or ‘indecent’, while France on the other hand, takes
‘secular’ to another level entirely, ignoring the fact that despite it not
thinking so, religion and religious sentiments,
actually do exist.
So where
is this so called ‘line’ between free and hate speech and why haven’t we been able to draw it yet? In the
effort to reach this seemingly unattainable balance, the idea that any act of the government ‘damages’ free speech must be
precluded by questioning whether it is justifiable for society to protect that
type of speech in the first place (instead of asking me why I’m not laughing at
the rape joke, why don’t you explain to me why it’s funny).
The very thought of being held accountable for expressing
yourself in certain ways (i.e., bigotry) immediately paints a very dictatorial
picture, where the right to say anything
at all is removed. The idea that any kind of speech or expression can be
banned is unfathomable for a generation where every single thought about everything is expressed online for the
whole world to see. Which is why today, any sort of limitations on the right to
express yourself through comedy, satire and even artwork is argued to be
unconstitutional.
But, ‘there is a distinction between having the legal right
to say something versus having the moral right not to be held accountable for
it’, as China Meiville puts it. A distinction often overlooked because of how
closely intertwined they are. Being asked not
to say something objectionable, or apologizing for the same does not mean
you are stripped of your legal right to say that thing, therefore, using the defense
‘free speech’ time and again in those situations doesn’t make you demanding of
your legal rights but instead just demands an end to the debate about on the
criticism of what you say.
Ask
different questions – Why do Americans
need to express themselves by drawing Prophet Muhammad, what exactly are they achieving by it? Why does the standup comic necessarily need to incorporate rape
jokes into act to be funny? After all, there are things that are straight up
banned – holocaust denial in England is a criminal offence, and several
countries have made the promotion of Nazism absolutely illegal, despite it
being an ideology that some people actually uphold. And this is great! No one
ever argues that these bans should be lifted. So how does this invisible threshold exist, the one where people have
seemed to unofficially deem Auschwitz jokes during comedic roasts as
‘inappropriate’ but are okay with islamophobic jokes and comedic pieces on ISIS
beheading innocent journalists?
More than rushing to protest any sort of limitation on free
expression because of the idea that you need to defend your rights no matter
what, look at what right you are even defending - the right to be racist? Why
do you even need that right in the first place?
Are we
incapable of drawing a line in a way that protects even those that have
structurally unequal access to free speech? Atheists like Bill Maher will
confidently assert that religion should play no part and free speech is meant
to be absolute. But Pope Francis on the other hand says no right allows people to insult or speak harm of something so
personal and important to others. Implementing either points of view, can be a
slippery slope – as is seen in both western and eastern countries. The right of
free expression and how ‘free’ it truly is, seems to be a metric of progress
and reflect the values and culture of a country, but what about the values and
culture of a country that protects its citizens from the repercussions of being
openly bigoted? What do we ever say about those societies?
India – where actually using your right to free expression
for its designed purpose will get you convicted and right wing political groups
scour the streets to beat up youth that aren’t following their sanskaari values.
BUT, The United States - self-proclaimed ‘land of the free’
where racism is so deep rooted that in 2015, the law enforcement looks like it
is committing black genocide. France -
the birthplace of democratic values is universally known for making it
difficult for Muslims to practice their religion in peace.
Rhia B is a law student at Jindal Global University
Growing up as a brown kid in the United States, you learn a lot. First, you learn what it means to be a minority. Second, you unlearn...
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