speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Taking Sides
of speech varies with the parties' relative status. Cheekiness in an
inferior can be reproved or ignored; contempt from a superior
reinforces subordination.
The interplay between speaker, target, and audience greatly
complicates meaning. David Hammons, a black artist, painted a
14x16 foot portrait of a white-skinned, blond, blue-eyed Jesse
Jackson, captioned "How Ya Like Me Now?" While white workers
were installing it, two black men attacked the painting with hammers.
The black curator defended the portrait as "an important
image that had to be seen, concentrated upon, talked about. . . .
contemporary art in general is not to be embraced or understood
upon immediate perusal." Jackson had the last word: "I understand
that it was an interpretation. I encourage artistic expression and full
artistic freedom. Sometimes art provokes. Sometimes it angers,
which is a measure of its success. Sometimes it inspires creativity.
Maybe the sledgehammers should have been on display too."
Contrast the Hammons incident with the response when a white
student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago painted the
African American Mayor Harold Washington dressed in a frilly white
bra, panties, garter, and stockings, and called it "Mirth and Girth."
When it was displayed at a private show shortly after the mayor died
of a heart attack, three black Aldermen stormed into the Institute and
ordered the police to confiscate the painting, warning that it "increased
tensions in the African-American community to the point
where violence on the scale of the 1%0's West Side riots was
imminent." 93
The history of a relationship can influence the interpretation of
new messages. Trust can increase tolerance, while prior injuries
rankle. The Crusades, colonialism, and the rancorous Middle Eastern
conflict coloured Muslim reaction to The Satanic Verses. Jewish
memories of the Holocaust underlay fear of the threatened Nazi
demonstration in Skokie as well as anger at Germany's failure to
nominate "Europa, Europa" for an Academy Award and its hospitality
to Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. 94 Absent any prior relationship,
otherwise offensive speech may be risible. Anti-Semitism
thrives in Japan without an ostensible target. Den Fujita, an enormously
successful Osaka businessman whose books "The Jewish
Way of Doing Business" and "How to Blow the Rich Man's Bugle
Like the Jews Do" have sold millions of copies, claims to be a philo-
Semite. "I'm trying to do something good for the Jewish people.
Most Jewish people speak two or three different languages. They're
good at mathematics. The Japanese should learn from that. . . .
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