Raise Your Voice But Keep Your Head Down

I first met Ward Churchill when I was working at South End Press 25 years ago and he submitted a collection of essays revealing why indigenous people distrust Marxists’ cultural politics. I found Churchill’s insights compelling and became friends with him. I haven’t seen Ward for years, but we often publish a piece by him on ZNet, where I now work. I offer this in case anyone might feel that our ties bias my viewpoint. 

I think the current controversy about Ward Churchill is a manipulative attack on free speech aimed at the whole left. I remember when Ward’s post-9/11 (“controversial”) essay came out. My reaction was to wish he hadn’t written it. Ward took clear and cogent insights about the causes of international hostility to U.S. policies and weighed them down with not so clear and not so cogent non-insights about the general population of the U.S. This kind of mix is always a problem, not least because astute but reactionary readers will try to dismiss the good by pointing to the bad. It doesn’t matter that that is like trying to dismiss Newton’s contributions about gravity on grounds that he believed in alchemy. When attacked with manipulative skill, tangential flaws can be used to under- cut important truths. 

On a larger scale, that’s what people are now trying to do to Ward: dismiss him  as a person and as an employee of a university, over a single essay some key parts of which were, I would agree, worthy of criticism. 

There are two problems that should not be conjoined. One problem is that no person should be seen as only the tangential worst that he or she does, even if there is a complete consensus about the failings, unlike in this case. 

Ward Churchill has over the years contributed a great deal to the comprehension of cultural concerns and possibilities, as well as revealing the dynamics of repression and international relations. Ward is a prodigious writer and an effective speaker and organizer who has fought tirelessly for just causes. 

I don’t agree with Ward’s views on some health and population issues much less on the efficacy of political trash talk about strategies of struggle. But none of that has interfered with my liking Ward and feeling positive about his contributions. Ward Churchill should not be judged solely on a single essay written the day after a gargantuan calamity, whatever anyone may think of that piece. Parts ought to be criticized, yes, but not the person who wrote it. It is the difference between ad hominem and substantive argument. 

But second, there is the little matter of free speech. Criticizing what someone says is not the same as writing them death threats and trying to end their career. The right-wing thugs now plaguing Ward Churchill are stalking horses for more astute folks in the rear. The troops in the field are Ward’s proximate problem, but the powers that be—at the University of Colorado, in the Colorado state government, in major media from Fox to the Wall Street Journal, from ABC to the New York Times , and through to the halls of Washington, DC—are ultimately far more important. 

Are reactionary elites going to coercively remove Ward Churchill from U.S. academia? That needs to be prevented by all of us, including people annoyed at having to wage a free speech fight over words they do not like. Raise your voice. 

Why is it so hard for people on both sides of the left/right divide, to understand free speech means freedom to speak what others do not like and even cannot stand to hear? 

Tolerating what you like is hardly a major achievement. Hitler tolerated what he liked. So did Stalin. Idi Amin did too. So did Genghis Khan, the Shah, and Henry Kissinger. Free speech only becomes an issue when someone says what others don’t want to hear. Ward Churchill did that and so free speech is now an issue. 

T his dynamic is not new, but it is growing bolder. A recent report in the New York Times relayed how teachers in many states in the U.S. are avoiding evolution as a topic in their public school classes. The teachers fear fallout from fundamentalist parents, scared school board members, and politically cowed principals. Ward’s fight and the fight of these teachers are logically of one cloth. The difference is that so far Ward has more guts. 

Ward used to tell me, after a visit, “Keep your head down.” He had seen war at home and abroad and he knew what he was talking about. Now Ward is in another kind of war. I doubt any of these right-wing thugs will come after him bodily. But the harm they can do institutionally is bad enough. Keep your head down. 

Why Ward Churchill? I think Ward would probably say it is because what he is doing is effective. He may even see the attacks on his essay as evidence that it had great dissident merit. I think Ward would be wrong in that. He is being attacked not because he is the strongest possible target, but because he is one of the weakest possible targets. His essay is featured not because it was seriously threatening, but because it is easily ridiculed. Right wingers are hoping Ward has so irritated those who would otherwise defend him that he is left without defenders.