Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

376 // PATRICIA J.WILLIAMS
symbolized the warmth and community of her happy southern home. This act
produced a strong series of public denunciations from many other students,
Blacks in particular, who described the symbolic significance of the Confederacy
as a white community forged against a backdrop offeree, intimidation, and death
for Blacks. Eventually one Black student hung a sheet with a swastika painted on
it out her window, with the expressed hope that the university would force both
her and the white student to remove such displays. The university did not, and
eventually the Black student removed her flag voluntarily in view of the fact that
it was creating tensions between Black and Jewish students.
While the entire debate surrounding this incident focused predictably on free
speech issues, what seemed strange to me was a repeated and unexamined imbalance
in how the two students' acts were discussed. On the one hand, there was a
ubiquitous assumption that the white student's attribution of meaning to the
Confederate flag was "just hers," so no one else had any "business" complaining
about it. The flag's meaning became a form of private property that she could control
exclusively and despite other assertions of its symbolic power. (Those other
assertions are just "their opinion"; all's fair in the competitive marketplace of
meaning.)
At the same time, there was an assumption that the swastika's meaning was
fixed, transcendent, "universally" understood as evil. The Black student's attempt
to infuse it with "her" contextualized meaning (i.e., that of the translated power
of what the Confederate flag meant to her) was lost in the face of the larger social
consensus of its historical meaning. This larger social consensus is not really fixed,
of course, but its monopoly on the well-educated Harvard community's understanding
is tribute both to the degree of its overarchingly murderous yet coalescing
power in the context of Aryan supremacist movements as well as to our having
learned a great deal of specific history about it. The power of that history
understandably overshadowed not only that Black student's attempt at a narrower
meaning, but also the swastika's meaning in aboriginal American religion or in
Celtic runes.
The question remains, however, how some speech is so automatically put
beyond comment, consigned to the free market of ideas, while other expressions
remain invisibly regulated, even monopolized, by the channels of not merely what
we have learned but what we have not learned. I do not want to be misunderstood:
1 do not question our consensus of the image of genocide embodied in the swastika;
I wonder at the immovability of the comfy, down-home aura attending the
confederate flag—the sense that as long as it makes some people happy, the rest
of us should just butt out. The limits of such reasoning might be clearer if applied
to the swastika: without having to conclude anything about whether to censor it,
the fact remains that we usually don't cut off discussions of Nazism with the conclusion
that it was a way of creating warm and happy communities for the
German bourgeoisie.
Let me be clearer still in this thorny territory: I wish neither to compare nor