(Mark Lewis Taylor is Princeton Seminary’s Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture. Dr. Taylor provided the following essay off notes he used for a lecture this past week.  Hopefully this essay provides for some good groundwork for us to have a meaningful conversation over the coming days – Grant Brooke) 

Prophetic Critique and Free Speech in the Age of Obama 

I understand that we are gathered here today to discuss the relationship between prophetic critique and freedom of speech, because the racist, sexist and generally demeaning pamphlet that appeared on our campus last Fall, The Foreskin, has been defended from alleged “prophetic” criticism by assertions, from some, of a right to free speech. Moreover, recent criticism of racist images linked to President Obama – especially the cartoon of the slain chimpanzee in the New York Post, but also the postcard photo of water-melon patches at today’s White House – have only heated up the issue on our campus. These images also have been defended as “free speech.”

Both of the terms before us, “prophetic word” and “free speech,” are important notions, but each often suggests a caricature that must be questioned. I want to probe below each caricature, and in so doing address the relation between them. Overall, I hope to show, first, that prophetic criticism should not be seen as an opposite to valuing freedom of speech, and, second, that “free speech” is not free from a prophetic criticism of its limits. Let me unfold this more slowly.  

THE PROPHETIC WORD AND RACIST IMAGING

We are asked to reflect, first, on the notion of “the prophetic word.” The term suggests primarily a dramatic language event, delivered by an impassioned critic of bold speech, and most usually by one who is seen as performing an act of “speaking truth to power,” as we say, and also on some matter of injustice suffered by the poor and by the oppressed. This is generally correct, especially the linkage between the prophetic and the needs and perspectives of the poor and oppressed. In the caricature of the prophet, though, what so often gets foregrounded is the figure of a courageous individual, undertaking often biting, direct, contentious discourse.  The striking singularity of Pablo Gargollo’s bronze statue, “The Prophet,” comes to mind.

Missed in caricatures that focus only this singularity, and on prophets’ biting words, is that the prophetic word – exhibited in the Hebrew prophets, in the prophetic voices of Jesus and others in the New Testament, as well as among prophets of our own age – has some other features. What are these? For starters, consider internal anguish. Prophetic speech is voice usually issuing from the lips of an anguished heart and soul. Such a one is often slow to speak, maybe does not even want to speak. There is a spirit of inner contortion and struggle. This is perhaps also imaged in Gargallo’s bronze sculpture, in that he places empty space and circling and jagged pieces of bronze within the prophet’s inner space and being.  

Note also, the prophet’s anguish also involves thinking. Prophets ponder and seek to read the signs of the times. They have usually watched how the scales of justice have tipped, been tipped, and how life is led by many, callously or sensitively. Recall, Jeremiah pondering and challenging the corrupt King Jehoiakim, prompting memory, artfully recalling the better, counter-example of his father, Josiah, who in the past had “remembered the cause of the poor and needy.”(1) Prophets at their best observe the to and fro of nations, and groups, of the powerful and those lacking power. So the prophet is not just a courageous and biting speaker (”of truth to power” and so on), but also one long-suffering, taught by suffering, observing the times and finally- having “seen too much,” perhaps – comes forth with prophetic criticism. Sometimes, too, the prophetic action is not just speech, but is also combined with some artful performance, some alternative meaning-laden gesture: Jeremiah planting a tree on the eve of a foreign empire’s invasion, Jesus telling parables, maybe mixing spittle with dust from the ground, or, driving money-changers out of the temple. Martin Luther King, Jr., too, insisted on creativity and drama in his prophetic witness. Recall the marches, the linked arms, the songs. Especially, the songs. And then, too, there was Gandhi’s penchant for creativity and drama, the “Salt march,” for example.

I prefer to speak then not so much of prophetic word, but of “the prophetic”, “prophetic criticism,” or “the prophetic function,” understanding these as mixes of spoken and performed word, anguished struggle within oneself as well as with others, and involving a discerning reading of the signs of the times. The prophetic, then is an orientation, a sensibility, a criticism in the name of the poor, yes, often impassioned, yes, but also a kind of lived practical wisdom. 

So away with the caricature. It does not lead to effective practice of the prophetic, because it often reduces the prophetic to deployment of quick, often foolishly courageous tongues. It also allows those who are comfortable with unjust structures to parody and dismiss the prophetic. Defenders of those structures of power often isolate themselves from truly discerning prophetic critique by likening the prophetic to quick-speaking, judgmental, sophomoric protests by immature leftists.(2)

Moving beyond the caricatures, then, we can say some more about what constitutes discerning prophetic criticism. Although the prophets usually respond to actions in history, especially events and practices that make for suffering and wrong enacted upon the poor, if it is truly discerning in its critique, it also considers words in history, the ways images function in culture to shape and impact actions. Many Americans tend to dismiss this discerning function of the prophetic as mere “political correctness.” That though is an all too convenient dismissal of the insight that actions and practices are often sustained and given greater impact because of key images circulating in culture. These images are a key part of the “ethos” of unjust structures, and this, too, needs attention from discerning prophetic critique.

Let me pause a minute to clarify this term, “ethos.” By “ethos” I will mean a prevalent cultural tone, often carried in images and vernacular expressions of a social group which structure, both consciously and usually unconsciously, the daily practices and opinions of that group.”(3) The key function of an ethos is to integrate the beliefs of a social group, and to integrate the understanding in beliefs with practices, all in ways that make them last and have strength.(4)

Let us take an example – one current in the news today and bearing on the campus racism that has surfaced in our midst – the cartoon by the New York Post cartoonist, Sean Delonas. This cartoon showed a chimpanzee just shot by police, with one cop observing, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” While conceptual creativity could come up with various interpretations of the dead chimp – as “just a chimp,” or the chimp that was actually shot by police a few weeks ago, or maybe U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or again, maybe all the Democrats and 3 Republicans who voted for the stimulus bill – all this “creativity” overlooks the already circulating meanings that reasonably would tie the chimp to President Obama.

I am among those who see the cartoon as gesturing toward Obama, because its image, of a chimp likened to the writer of Obama’s stimulus bill, trades on the long-standing identification of Blacks with simian and ape-like forms (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, monkeys), and in ways that reinforce, through alleged humor and satire, cultural views of Blacks’ inferiority. This is not a matter of some liberal squeamish political correctness. A political and historical trail of evidence is clear.  

David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University points out that

a quick trip to the Jim Crow Museum will reveal evidence of the long and insulting history of simian representation of Africans and African Americans.  There are postcards that show African Americans as almost indistinguishable from monkeys and apes.  There are prints that show Blacks and monkeys romantically involved.  There are dozens of other objects in the museum that link Africans and Americans of African ancestry to monkeys and apes. . .  In the 1940s, . . . many three-dimensional objects were produced in the United States that tried to link (in a negative way) Blacks to monkeys. . .

In the 21st century the cruel linking of Blacks to simians remains fairly common. For example, porch monkey is a slur against Black people who are believed to be lazy.  A large Black person is sometimes called an ape or gorilla.

But one doesn’t have to delve deep into history to come up with a veritable American tradition of identifying peoples of African descent with apes. No, ape-like or simian images have been applied very recently to Obama and also to his wife, Michelle, well before the Delonas cartoon. The New York Post incident is another stop along the way of this ugly cultural habit.

Early on, for one example, there was the creation and selling of a sock monkey, a kind of stuffed animal figure, named by the marketer, “Obama.” Also, t-shirts have been sold across the South and elsewhere with the words “Obama in O8″ stenciled under an image of a “curious George” type monkey holding a banana. A recent YouTube video called, “Obama Monkey,”  shows a monkey representing a Black woman who is supporting the candidacy of Senator Obama. The linkage has been found also abroad, in Japanese media, where then Senator Obama is depicted as a monkey giving a speech about change. There’s another video on YouTube entitled, “Michelle Obama without Make-Up,” which then racially caricatures her as an ape. (I do not enjoy referencing these links, but since so many are in denial or ignorance, it is worth doing so.)

At U.S. football games, racist chanting, often deploying monkey noises and gestures against Black athletes, has been so frequent as to lead to court cases.(5) And, I am ashamed to report that on our own campus, the last time a Foreskin-type racist incident occurred, in 1997, white students in the Princeton Seminary cafeteria line mimicked an African student, who was a food-server behind the counter, by making monkey gestures and signs at him – supposedly without mal intent, intending to be humorous, and in good camaraderie –  supposedly (I stress).

Discerning prophetic criticism might ponder, further, that in all these cases of racist imaging in the U.S. American ethos, from the most blatant ones to the most purportedly unintentional, there is usually a claim to humor or satire. This means that in the U.S., the tradition of white folks’ humor and satire, especially regarding racial matters, has been sullied, perhaps to the point of irretrievability, until such time as full and ready equality of opportunity has been won in this country (we are, of course, a long way off from that day.(6))  It is almost impossible for us whites to be funny about race and racism, without resurrecting the tones and timbres of past deployments of racist humor, which so often were ways to etch more deeply racist habits and assumptions into the American cultural repertoire.

Perhaps – I emphasize the perhaps – there is a kind of white humor that can work, if it is an obviously sarcastic form spoken by whites against whites, and for white’s liberation from oppressing ways. One sees this, at times, in the speeches and writings of anti-racist white author, Tim Wise.(7) But even Wise uses humor very sparingly, and when doing so walks a razor’s edge between discourse that is racially liberating, and discourse that threatens to raise the ugly beast of racialized humor. Few whites have the skills to walk that razor’s edge, and even if they have the skills, much depends on discerning wisely the context.

Ignorance about this legacy, the belief that cartoonists of The New York Post, or pamphleteers of the Foreskin on a racially tense campus, could foreground humor in a flip and breezy way, is a kind of ignorance that is itself also part of the ethos of racism.

A final, brief word on the prophetic critique of racism’s ethos. Because I have been focusing on racism as a problem of ethos,(8) I have not focused on individuals, either on the writers of the Foreskin, or on the cartoonist Delonas. I do not believe they should be at the center of a redressive drama. The center of a discerningly prophetic drama should be on our entire cultural ethos – the U.S. culture and the ethos pervading this campus. I hold myself, this faculty, and our administration, as those who together bear primary responsibility for taking the actions necessary to redress the ethos that lives from structural conditions. This responsibility is not best exercised simply by taking punitive measures against individuals. We must address matters like representative diversity in our faculty and administration, student recruitment, required courses, special seminars, and so on. All too often, we have acted as if matters of racism are an occasional, aberrant, maybe waning reality, and as if we could do our work in classrooms on theology and ministry by treating racism occasionally, as a kind of optional topic, seen often as only tangentially related to our scholarship and common life. Such a viewpoint leaves us bankrupt for dealing with the powerful ethos of racism in our communities.

“FREE SPEECH” AS DEFENSE

But now I want to comment very briefly on the other notion that often suffers caricature, “free speech.” When even the most discerning among prophets point out the problems of the ethos of racism, the response is often, “I have the right to free speech,” “I did not intend any harm” – maybe even, “But I was trying to do good by my satire!” So, a brief word on “free speech. (Alas, I can hardly do justice to the complex legal and philosophical treatments of this notion.  At another time, we will have to hear from our legal minds on this issue.(9)

The caricature haunting the notion of “freedom of speech” foregrounds an individual, usually a solitary figure, giving voice to her or his opinion, a judgment on some matter of politics, morals, customs, religion. In common parlance, it’s as if what is spoken just comes up out of the inner recesses of a discrete individual – heart, mind or gut. It is this fountain of individual expression that is thought to be guarded by constitutional rights to “freedom of speech.”

Missed in this caricature is the fact that speech really isn’t free. In the first place, the speech that issues from an individual’s lips almost never has its source only in that individual. It comes through those lips but has been formed and rehearsed in that individual’s social life-practice and journey, shaped by cultural currents, flowing in historical groups – and all these together condition an individual’s speaking. Speech is embedded in, mediated by, always related to, these networks. This is true, in an obvious sense, grammatically, in that the words a speaker uses are parsed, conjugated and declined in some language system that extends beyond the speaker. Of even greater import, though, are the social systems in which our speech occurs. The content, style and tone of what individual speakers offer is mediated by group and cultural tradition(s), by the currents of our intersubjective experience, by the ways we have our common life with one another. If nothing else, the fact that we are nurtured by mothers and fathers, provides a social bond, often the first one, which limits and shapes what we often term our free speech.

Individual speech is especially not “free” when it comes to matters of race and racism. To be sure, speech varies, often radically, from individual to individual, as we note when comparing, say, a President Obama with eminent movement leader Malcolm X, a liberal Rachel Maddow with libertarian Patrick Buchanan on cable TV, or, blogger Michelle Malkin with scholar Rey Chow, a Tim Wise and a Rush Limbaugh, a Cornel West and a Shelby Steele, and so on. Those differences in individual speech about race, along with their rights to equal protection when speaking out, should be protected; but neither our respect for their protection nor our noting their individual differences from one another, means that their speech on race and racism is “free.” They are all cases of conditioned speech. This is especially the case in white communities. Culture critic and theologian Thandeka documented how whites inherit through family practice most of their racist proclivities, sometimes vicious, sometimes more benign.(10) William Kunstler, the great human rights defense attorney, who insisted on having lawyers at the defense table when he worked a racially-charged case, commented: “We whites imbibe racism like babes drinking milk at our mother’s breast.”(11)

Overall, the meaning of our speech lies not in our intentions, not in the particularities of individual intentions, stylistic and content differences. Those are at play, but the most powerful meanings are due to the ways speech is embedded in larger cultural matrices. No speech is really free; it is embedded in its originary contexts and group meanings, and embedded, too, in the kind of meaningful impact it sparks in those who hear and interpret that speech.

All this sets the stage for appreciating why, in the legal arena, there are “limits to free speech” alongside the much-touted “protection of free speech.” We know the famous example in which someone speaking loudly the word “fire” in a crowded theater is not protected in that speech-making event. It is a freedom questioned by its destructive consequences. In other less obvious cases, where the lines between appropriately controversial and destructive speech seem less clear, we struggle to discern where to draw the line at which speech begins to have destructive bearing on others, when it might be slanderous or libelous and hence subject to legal sanction. The line may be hard to draw, and we need the courts to help us draw it in tough cases, but that the line is there signals that speech is not free.

So, away with this caricature, too! Let’s move beyond free speech caricatured as an individual fountain emitting words and opinions with no sense of limit. If we care about a public virtue working to eradicate racism, and especially about Christian virtue, we do better to talk of measured speech, a freedom of speech that also measures or gauges the consequences of its utterances in the social body, from which speech comes and to which it returns. In matters of race and racism, especially, speech needs to be measured in terms of its contribution to outcomes or effects. Especially, in a Christian community, I would argue, this approach to our “free speech” is important. We should ask – again, especially if we seek to be discerning in our prophetic criticism – how does our individual speech intersect the wounded fabric of U.S. American social, personal and political life?

Christians and others who seek racial justice will often need to engage in a moral practice that goes well beyond what is legal. “Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s right,” chant some activist friends of mine. When we Christians fail to measure our speech against its real outcomes and effects, and instead make recourse to some allegedly pure intentions within our individual beings (and I am often unclear as to how “pure” these are), then, we reinforce one of the dominant trends of our culture that keeps alive what scholars call the “new racism.”(12) In this racism it is assumed that if persons’ intentions are pure, if they meant no malice, no malice can be found, and they thus cannot be held responsible.

This “new racism” is especially entrenched in U.S. American courts. Today, if one wants to seek court protection for racial discrimination, usually you are going to have to prove racist intent in the group or person being accused. No longer, as in court rulings just a few decades ago, especially during the civil rights movement, can one argue, as effectively, from only harmful effect and outcome to racial discrimination. You have to prove intent, something that almost is impossible to do. As Kimberle Crenshaw and others in critical race theory have shown, this “places almost the entire range of everyday social practices in America . . . beyond the scope of critical examination or legal remediation.”(13)

Christians, above all, who are called to become a “body of Christ,” a “basileia of God,” a new community, they/we, especially, are those whose “new life” is so pervasively social and communal, that we must consider the effects and outcomes of belief and policy in the politics and economics of community life. This is all the more true for Christians living in a U.S. culture, where racism seems so slowly to die.

At their best, we pursue, through daily practice and our organizing work, a moral practice that is higher than what legal practice mandates, especially today given the U.S. courts’ position on proving racial intent. We do this to renew the legal and social orders as well as to be faithful to our visions of all people’s dignity, of moral life and of spirit. We need a moral practice that builds and re-builds new community by examining not so much our personal intentions, but speech’s and action’s outcomes and effects. It is in outcomes and effects that the cancerous powers of racism metastasize. If we fail to go there, staying with intent and intention, we fail to treat the problem. We continue the legacy of destruction. And Christians, in particular, will one more time be “conformed to the world” – one that is racist and destructive of the common good.

In short, I repeat: the drama should not be your intentions or my intentions, whether we are “sensitive” or “insensitive.” (Please no more sensitivity sessions and campus forums for individuals while leaving unexamined social structures’ practices and their outcomes!) The drama should be our adventure together in addressing and redressing the conditions of racism – its ethos, structure, policy and historical tradition. On those conditions we must all work together, to craft the structures that change ethos.

(2) Exemplary of this is the tendency, evident in an essay at the conservative American Thinker web site, to point to quick-speaking, judgmental and sophomoric protests by some students at San Francisco State University (on the matter of Palestinian liberation), and then infer that the same spirit exists among a whole phalanx of liberal, politically correct and judgmental faculty who have a stranglehold on North American higher education and are a group sowing their “hate speech. What a fantasy! But it’s a convenient way to dismiss the more sober, truly prophetic criticism, the effectively critical advocacy of the rights of Palestinian peoples, and opposition to the travesty of justice in the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza that were supported by the previous U.S. administration.  Richard L. Cravatts, “Hate Speech at San Francisco University,” The American Thinker, March 7, 2009.

(3) On “ethos,” compare the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community, the ‘genius’ of an institution or system;” anthropologist David Bidney, “the process of habituation with reference to a given ideal;” Geertz in Interpretation of Cultures, ethos is “the tone, character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects;” and Serena Nanda, in Cultural Anthropology, stressing “ethos” as the “key term dominant in the integrating functions of culture.” All of these are glosses on Aristotle’s view of eithos as a fusion of a certain character of the person with ideals of excellence.

(4) More philosophically, ethos is carried in what philosopher of practice, Theodore Schatzki, refers to as a group’s “teleo-affective structure.” Theodore R. Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Part, PA: Penn State University Press, 2002), 80-2.   

(5) Peter Jepson, Tackling Militant Racism (Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 75-7.

(6) As just one source of evidence for this claim, see sociologist, Joe Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (Routledge, 2007).

(7) See his new book, Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. City Lights Press, 2009. See his several other books as well, e.g. White like Me.

(8) At another time we would need to examine the always intersecting matters of sexist, homophobic, nationalist and elite classist features of systems. I have addressed that interplay more directly in a book, Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis. With a new Preface (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005).

(9) For some sources to inaugurate both philosophical and legal reflection, see Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford University Press, 1994); Christopher M. Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the U.S. PATRIOT Act (Beacon Press, 2008); and Robert Justin Goldstein, Flag Burning and Free Speech: The Case of Texas v. Johnson (University Press of Kansas, 2000).

(10) Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America (Continuum, 2000).

(11) The point, obviously, is not to blame white mothers for white racism, but to indicate how intimate the imbibing of racism is in white family life.

(13) See sociologist Amy Ansell, New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Great Britain (NYU Press, 1997). Planks of the “new” or “modern” racism include: “obvert racism is bad, but mostly over,” “whites no longer see themselves as racist,” “the playing field is now fairly equal,” “racially-focused special programs and services are now unnecessary and unfair to whites,” “If racism occurs, it was unintentional because ‘I am not a racist’ “, and,  ”In order to seek protection from discrimination, one must prove intent to discriminate.” On these planks see Kimberly Holt Barrett and William H. George, “Judicial Colorblindness, Race Neutrality and Modern Racism: How Psychologists Can Help the Courts Understand Race Matters,” in Barrett and George, eds, Race, Culture, Psychology and Law (Sage Publications, 2004), 31-46. See also Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in the United States, by David O. Sears et al (University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the “new racism,” see also sociologist Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Difference, Globalism, Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (Routledge, 2005).

(14) Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), xv.

These remarks were originally delivered at a forum at Princeton Theological Seminary, entitled “Responsibly Engaging the Dialogue between Prophetic Word and Free Speech,” March 3, 2009. The forum was part of a campus wide process to discuss the appearance last Fall of a highly offensive and anonymous student publication, “The Foreskin,” which tried to use humor and satire on racial and sexual issues. Identified authors of the pamphlet and others have used their announced absence of mal intent and rights to “free speech” as defense. 

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