{"id":28644,"date":"2014-11-12T07:56:32","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T12:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28644"},"modified":"2015-03-27T09:29:58","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T13:29:58","slug":"were-just-wild-and-ableist-slur-arent-we","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/12\/were-just-wild-and-ableist-slur-arent-we\/","title":{"rendered":"“We\u2019re just wild and [ableist slur], aren\u2019t we?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Susan Kruth<\/a> on what can happen in the wonderful world of academia when free speech can’t even be used on a panel on free speech<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

So what exactly happened at Smith? Smith President Kathleen McCartney, moderating the panel, asked about the line between free speech and hate speech. Torch<\/em> readers know such a line doesn\u2019t exist. Kaminer said, regarding what\u2019s allowed in the classroom, that there\u2019s a difference between students cursing at each other and students using words in the context of a discussion \u2014 for example, talking about the use of \u201cthe n-word\u201d in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em>. She prompted the audience: \u201cWhen I say, \u2018n-word,\u2019 \u2026 what word do you all hear in your head?\u201d and proceeded to repeat the answer she got from the audience, remarking that \u201cnothing horrible happened\u201d when she did so. Some students, however, not only condemned Kaminer for uttering the word but also argued that McCartney should have intervened.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s student newspaper The Smith Sophian<\/em> later published a transcript of the panel that both prefaces the content with a trigger warning and<\/em> censors a number of potentially explicit words, to the point that, in some cases, it\u2019s not clear at first glance what was said. This censored transcript is therefore itself an excellent example of how censorship hurts dialogue. All instances of \u201cnigger\u201d are written as \u201c[n-word].\u201d Kaminer\u2019s use of the word \u201ccunt\u201d\u2014which she used one time, to clarify a student\u2019s reference to \u201cthe c-word,\u201d was written as \u201c[c-word],\u201d resulting in this line in the transcript:<\/p>\n