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At the New Hanover County Board of Education meeting earlier this month, a man going by “Renegade Cherokee” was called to the podium to speak during the Call to the Audience segment.
A tall Black man with a greying beard, Cherokee wore a black t-shirt with the iconic 1886 photo of Geronimo and three armed Apache warriors, framed by red block lettering reading: HOMELAND SECURITY – FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492.
I’ve seen the image many times before, often on shirts and hoodies worn by Rage Against the Machine fans, and it usually telegraphs a certain kind of politics – the type that would fit well with the anti-racist and anti-imperialist rhetoric you hear in spoken word poetry circles, where Cherokee often performs.
To the extent I was familiar with him, that’s the kind of thing I’d heard him speak out about – and watching the meeting, I wondered if he was about to clash with some of the board members who don’t seem well predisposed to having the nation’s founders called terrorists. Watch out, Pat Bradford, here come some woke truth bombs, I joked to myself.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, Cherokiee launched into an invective against the queer community.
This caught me off guard, I’ll admit. But my colleague Rachel Keith, who has meticulously followed public speakers at school board meetings for many years, was not surprised. She later showed me his October 2023 speech, where he called the LGBTQ community “filth” and “anti-children” and called for the ban of all books relating to queer subject matter “forthwith and most expeditiously.” (He’d also signed up to speak in early 2024 to make a similar request, but didn’t show up during the virtual meeting.)
This time, Cherokee went further – provoking the reaction of the board’s two Democratic members, who sought to cut his comments short, and a defense on constitutional grounds from a Republican board member and the board attorney.
In this week’s column, I’m going to reproduce Cherokee’s entire speech, understanding that it could be upsetting to some, because the limits of protected speech can involve fine-grain word choices that are lost in paraphrase.
I’ll also share some of my conversation with Cherokee, who readily agreed to an interview about both his open hate for the queer community and his thoughts on free speech. Since I’m putting his comments under a microscope, I felt it was necessary to give him a chance to respond to criticism.
I also want to present the attempts to silence Cherokee, as they happened in the moment, and my later conversations about the arguments for and against his right to say what he said, including speaking with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the ACLU, which both champion First Amendment rights, albeit from a more centrist and liberal angle, respectively.
Lastly, I think it’s worth touching on concerns over illiberalism (on both sides of the aisle) that serve as a background for this conversation.
The speech and objections
“Greetings, and salutations. I am a man in deed, form, and word, and I come to you with words designed to abolish this notion that the so-called LGBT community is good for the students of New Hanover County Schools. It is anything but good, and it is a lifestyle of confusion and derision,” Cherokee began, speaking in a loud but measured tone, before he was interrupted by Democratic board member Judy Justice, who called a point of order.
“This is hate speech, absolutely, no doubt about it,” Justice said, eliciting applause from some of the audience members. “And if anybody thinks otherwise, you got a problem. You sir, are an embarrassment to the human race.”
“With a face like yours, I wouldn’t be talking about embarrassment,” Cherokee shot back.
Republican board member David Perry chimed in, saying, “We can disagree with the speaker before us, if we so choose. But simply trying to get him off the Call to the Audience, just because people disagree with his opinion, is not constitutional.”
Republican board Chair Melissa Mason asked Cherokee to maintain decorum and allowed him to continue.
Cherokee picked up where he had stopped, “...is anything but good in this lifestyle of confusion and derision. The so-called LGBT community is the worst sort of bullies. People lead shameful, sinful lives and –”
Justice interjected again, but Mason noted she had already ruled.
Cherokee continued, “...people who lead shameful, sinful lives and wanting to force their vulgar lifestyle on children and crying foul when normal human beings speak against such perfidy and calling us homophobic and wanting to cancel us straights into silence. Anyone who doesn't agree with the so-called LGBT community is deemed persona non grata and faced with economic hardships. I despise the LGBT community because they are trying their best to force the curriculum–”
As some in the crowd reacted vocally to Cherokee’s speech, Democratic board member Tim Merrick called another point of order.
“This is aimed at an entire group of people. It is not factually based. It is hateful, and it is inciting – based on his rhetoric and his tone – it's inciting violence, and it is not permissible under the law of the United States,” Merrick said.
Mason asked for legal counsel, and board attorney Norwood Blanchard noted that Cherokee was far from the only person speaking about general groups of people, comparing it to criticism of Republicans or Democrats voiced by other speakers. He said, more to the point, absent a real disruption or a direct threat, the district would have a hard time defending shutting Cherokee down if the issue went to court. He suggested that “the remedy for bad speech is good speech,” adding that he wasn’t condoning Cherokee’s comments.
Mason then allowed Cherokee to finish his comments.
“They're not natural the least bit, and it's an anathema to intelligent human beings who know that there's nothing more beautiful than a man or woman marrying and having children together to continue the species. Therefore, in the strongest possible terms, I implore this august assembly to ban all references to the so-called LGBT community, to remove all books pertaining to this vile subject from all New Hanover County schools libraries, for it to be against the law for biologically-born males to compete against biological-born females in competitive sports events, to deny so called LGBT teachers and staff to ever be allowed employment in New Hanover County Schools,” Cherokee said.
Justice attempted one more time to call a point of order. Mason didn’t respond, but the microphone captured what sounded like her whispering, “ten seconds.” You could almost feel her white-knuckling it.
Cherokee continued, “and remove all students who openly practice this vile lifestyle done in filth from normal children.”
And he finished by quoting Buju Banton’s 1990s Jamaican dancehall song “Boom bye bye,” saying, “Boom bye bye, inna batty bwoy head, rude bwoy no promote no nasty man, dem haffi dead.” Cherokee had concluded his 2023 comments the same way.
It doesn’t appear anyone on the board caught the reference, but the song is one of the most violent and homophobic recordings I’ve ever heard, with Banton singing about assaulting and murdering gay men by pouring acid on them, setting them on fire, and shooting them in the head.
Cherokee told me later he, “quoted Buju Banton as a protest song against the excesses of the LGBTQ community.” (And I’ll admit, I struggled to remain equanimous, hearing that.)
It’s worth noting Banton faced protests for years, and while he frequently said he wrote the song as a teenager and was not himself homophobic, he continued to perform it. As reported by The Guardian, in 2007, Banton signed onto the “Reggae Compassionate Act,” an agreement to stop using the original lyrics, and joined other high-profile Caribbean artists in agreeing not to make additional homophobic statements or songs. (Banton later denied making any promises, but did eventually stop playing the song and in 2019 officially pulled it from his online catalog.)
Following Cherokee’s comments, Perry suggested a formal statement from the board, “affirm the dignity and the rights of the entire LGBT community in New Hanover County, and especially within our schools.”
And, eventually, the board voted on a watered-down version put forward by Mason, which didn’t actually mention the queer community:
New Hanover County Schools Board of Education would like to reaffirm our commitment to creating a safe and welcoming environment for all students and staff. The commentary made by one speaker during the call to the audience this evening does not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the board and the district. We believe every child and every teacher has value and dignity.
(Several board members noted that the meeting was reaching its time limit, with other important items still left unaddressed, so there wasn't much time to debate or amend the language of Mason's motion.)
As I wrote last week, Perry’s motion may have surprised some people. But he later told me that, while he has clashed with some advocates over his approach to teaching (and recognizing) gender in school, he takes an essentially Libertarian hands-off approach to people’s private lives, saying they have the right to live however they want. He also said that, while he considers free speech a quintessential right, he felt that it extended to the board, as well.
“We have free speech, too,” he told me.
Renegade Cherokee
Renegade Cherokee, also known as Marshall Stewart, presents something of an edge case for me, as a journalist. Ordinarily, we don’t spend a lot of time reporting on private citizens (and I’ve seen reporters face accusations of ‘doxxing’ or ‘punching down’ when they do). Many times, we’ve ignored it when Call to the Audience speakers said things that were factually incorrect, hurtful in various ways, or just plain silly. But, at the same time, speaking at a government meeting puts you on the public record – and, in this case, the school board’s reaction sets a potential precedent.
So, before I wrote about Cherokee at more length, I wanted to at least talk to him. As I told him, I disagreed pretty profoundly with his bigotry against queer people, but just the same, I wanted to understand where that hatred came from, and why he felt so driven to share it with the public and the school board.
Cherokee told me a little about his background, noting that his performing name was a nod to his mother’s indigenous heritage. “Renegade,” he told me, was his way of marking his departure from the Black churches that didn’t share his hardline view on homosexuality, allowing queer people as “speakers on the podium and singers in the choir.”
He acknowledged that what I called his homophobia and categorical hatred of the queer community was a bone of contention in the spoken-word scene.
“So they agree with me on the anti-racism, anti-police brutality and so forth. But then they kind of bump heads with me on the anti-LGBT stance. That's a common thing in this poetry community,” he said.
Cherokee told me, as he’d told the board, that a lot of his desire to speak publicly came from watching other anti-LBGTQ speakers get “bullied” or cancelled” when they objected to what he saw as the “LGBTQ agenda.” He said he felt compelled to speak to the school board because he felt children were particularly vulnerable to the influence of this agenda.
Unsurprisingly, Cherokee cited the Old and New Testaments, landing on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain as proof of God’s violent distaste for homosexuality. I noted that there’s plenty of space for rabbinical debate about this – is it a story admonishing queerness, or is it about being a bad host, or, in the modern American mode of a mob movie, is it about what happens when you disrespect the boss’s emissary? Cherokee was unswayed.
I hadn’t intended to debate Cherokee on his beliefs, much as I disagreed with them, but we did have some civil back-and-forth, during which Cherokee proved himself to be articulate, erudite, and internally consistent in his beliefs.
I asked why he focused on the scriptural admonishments against homosexuality but not, say, those against cheeseburgers and shrimp (that is, the Jewish dietary laws against mixing meat and milk, or consuming shellfish) or mixing fabrics? I admit, this is a classic ‘gotcha move’ that atheists and reformists love to deploy against fundamentalists, but Cherokee took it in stride, saying that he did, in fact, obey those dietary laws, adhere to Shabbat, and observe the High Holy Days.
“The Bible is not buffet style,” he said, firmly.
When I pushed back on his claim that homosexuality is “unnatural,” asking why God would make over 1,000 species that display homosexual behavior, he said he would need to do more research on it – but didn’t lose his composure.
I drilled down on some of his specific word choices – “vile,” “unnatural,” and “filth” – to ask him whether he thought he’d crossed the line with “fighting words” or “incitement to violence,” which aren’t protected by the First Amendment when they’re likely to lead to an immediate breach of the peace. Cherokee said he was just extrapolating from the Bible – adding that he would never personally commit violence.
“So that is why I feel as passionately as I do, because the Scriptures tell us that we are supposed to hate the evil and love the good. So I'm coming from that, from that perspective,” Cherokee said. “Now am I saying that I personally would seek homosexuals to kill on sight? No, I'm not saying that, because I would be in error, because the almighty Hashem is the true judge in all things, I won't go out and attack homosexuals physically. I won't if I see a homosexual walking down the street, or there's a homosexual or lesbian, etc, etc, etc, working at Haris Teeter as a cashier, I'll greet them cordially. I'll speak, we have small talk conversation, and keep it moving. So I'm not. I'm not a brutish individual that would just hurl abuse upon homosexuals on sight.”
Speaking in generalities about groups of people, as opposed to singling out an individual, has long been part of protected speech – as the school board attorneys noted during the meeting. But certainly, as a queer student, hearing Cherokee call you vile and demand you be quarantined away from straight students, or as a queer staff member, hearing Cherokee say you should be barred from employement, you would have every right to feel personally attacked. Even if you didn't have a friend, family member, or colleague who was queer, you'd still have the right to feel offended by this kind of language.
But Cherokee seemed unmoved by this argument, affirming his right to speak his piece.
“No one should want to be dictated to and need to feel less than because someone's feelings got hurt, their feathers got ruffled,” he told me.
I asked Cherokee how the school board should handle conflicting beliefs, noting that many people saw nothing wrong with the “gay lifestyle” and would see him as a bigot.
“I think the school board should have everyone who is pro-LGBT, let them have time to speak, and those who are anti-LGBT, let them have time to speak, and we will all come together and speak upon the issues and come to some type of common ground,” he said. “No one should be made to feel that their opinion isn't valid. If the pro-LGBT people, they feel their opinion is valid. I feel my opinion is valid. So therefore that's common ground. We have freedom of speech, and as long as I don't use fighting words, as long as I don't threaten anybody, anything like that, then we can meet on an even playing field and discuss the matters without vitriol and without emotion.”
Cherokee went further, saying he would support a White supremacist speaking at the Call to the Audience, even if they used racial slurs and trafficked in the worst kind of racist stereotypes. (Cherokee offered some specific examples that I’m going to leave out, perhaps ironically in a column about free speech.)
“So he says what he feels? Let the man speak,” he said. “Because I’m gonna come right behind them.”
Whatever else we disagree on, and there was plenty, we agreed on the importance of free speech. So, finally, I asked him about being interrupted during his Call to the Audience appearance.
“That's fascism at its best. You know, the LGBT community talks about fascism and being discriminated against, and yet, here it is, I'm being discriminated against because I have an unpopular view.”
Defending free speech vs. defending students
Cherokee’s speech is the kind of unrepentant bigotry we don’t hear much of anymore – in part because decades of advocacy shifted both the law and the Overton window on queer rights (although there have been some pretty notable setbacks for trans people lately).
I’m forced to admit, Cherokee isn’t wrong when he suggests that people who are vocally anti-LBGTQ are “deemed persona non grata and faced with economic hardship.” It’s not illegal to be homophobic, but it can be costly. After all, it was millions of dollars in lost concert and sponsorship revenues that pushed artists to sign the Reggae Compassionate Act — probably more than a spontaneous moral epiphany.
If the owner of a local business were to say what Cherokee did, I’d expect to see them boycotted. If a local official said it, I’d expect to see them censured, with their political fortunes diminished significantly. If I had some kind of Phineas Gage brain trauma and started spouting hate speech, I’d fully expect to be fired. The market and the electorate both have strong roles in responding to speech that is hateful, but legal.
But Cherokee seemingly has little concern about economic or political blowback. So what can – and should – the board do to react?
Perry and Blanchard both suggested countering bad speech with good speech – which is, in his way, what Cherokee also suggested (although he’d disagree which is which, I think). One attorney I spoke with on background suggested the board could be well served by keeping newspapers handy and, when a particularly inane or offensive speaker was at the podium, simply opening them up to read, ignoring whatever hate or nonsense was being spewed.
But Merrick and Justice clearly felt something stronger was necessary.
After the meeting, Merrick and I spoke at length about the issue. He discussed, by way of analogy, the contested intent and effect of Trump’s January 6 remarks, and in general, speech that doesn’t directly incite violence, but perhaps raises the ambient temperature, or emboldens people who might themselves have violent desires and aims.
“Where does free speech end and potential violence begin? I’m not a lawyer – but I am an elected official. And so, therefore, all of our government meetings must be open to the public and they must allow First Amendment speech. But at the same time, my job also is to protect 24,000 students. So where does that put me, right? I need to protect the First Amendment and I need to protect the students,” Merrick said.
Merrick said he understood the board attorneys' approach, which was based on potential liability, but said he’d like to see them seek more proactive ways to address hate speech like Cherokee’s without running afoul of the First Amendment.
We talked for a while about whether the “don’t yell fire in a crowded theatre” argument could apply.
“So my concern, seriously, is that his speech might embolden angry, straight White boys. You know that might strike fear into the hearts of educators and students who are gay. We already have a mental health crisis. We don't need more. And at what point can we say, for the sake of our students and our faculty, this sort of unsubstantiated speech – I mean, if you if you can't call fire in a theater, if there's no fire, then how are you allowed to say these are ‘vile’ people that need to be run out of our schools without any basis of fact,” Merrick argued.
For someone who disagrees with Cherokee, you could argue that he is adding to a sense of moral panic – and his suggested remedy, quarantining kids and firing staff, would present an obvious and unacceptable civil rights violation. But from Cherokee’s point of view, and for those who might quietly agree with him, the “fire” is real, and he’s acting accordingly. The question isn’t whether Cherokee’s on the right side of history, but the right side of the First Amendment. For the former, I’d say he’s not, but for the latter, I suspect he is.
Merrick and I discussed how, even if Cherokee’s views were distinctly fringe, they’re part of the real-world bigotry that students will face.
“I'm going to throw something out [there] that probably even argues against my way of seeing this, which is that the world we live in is angry and mean and has no solicitude for one's own fragility. Okay, our society is going to treat queer 10th graders in a very harsh way, more than likely,” Merrick said. “And so if being exposed to it and then being exposed to, as you say, ‘Good speech, better speech,’ will that prepare a young mind for what's out there?”
And, reflectively, Merrick acknowledged that his own arguments against censoring history and diversity, and instead presenting them in context, could apply to hate speech, too – even if it undercut his desire to protect students and staff from hate speech like Cherokee’s.
“I mean, I've been one to say we don't need to coddle our kids and pretend that the world is all straight white. You know, we need to expose them to the fact that homosexuality exists and that, you know, asking our kids to examine what does that mean, and what does our morality say about it, and what is our humanity and compassion say about it? Right? So if I'm willing to make that argument, I suppose I should be willing to say, ‘Wow, hate speech is horrible, and it exists, and now it's our job to absolutely drown it out with more compassion and acceptance,’” Merrick said. “But now, how does that happen on a school board that bans books about racism and takes away protection for LGBTQ out of our policies?”
I’m sure Republican board members would push back on this. And they’d be correct in arguing that what the government can limit in terms of an adult’s free speech during a public meeting is probably not the same as the government’s ability to determine ‘appropriate’ content for a student, at least in a court of law. (I would, however, note that the Republican-controlled board’s attempt to limit flags and ‘displays’was illiberal at best and likely unconstitutional in some ways, according to attorneys from both FIRE and the ACLU that we spoke to).
But in terms of the spirit of free speech, and the idea that we need to be able to hit difficult ideas head-on and discuss them openly, I think Merrick had a point.
I asked Merrick whether he thought that an immediate and forceful denunciation from the board – something stronger and more specific than the milquetoast statement the board eventually agreed to, several hours after Cherokee spoke, during the meeting – would help a student or staff member feel more at ease. And, just as importantly, would it deflate the incitement of a potentially violent person who might feel empowered, even called to act, by Cherokee’s message?
“I do think that the fact that we did speak up right away to mount an objection to the speech is important. It highlights the fact that at least certain members of the board do not believe what's being said. Will that quell this potentially violent young mind who is looking for something to push against? Probably not. And that gets me back to my original thesis, if you will, which is how do I protect 24,000 kids from the potential mental health or physical violence the speech like this can certainly perpetuate,” Merrick said.
I understand that during the meeting, Merrick was reacting in the heat of the moment when he interrupted Cherokee. But his assertion that Cherokee’s speech, however hateful, was “inciting violence, and it is not permissible under the law of the United States," would almost definitely flounder in court. And, if I’m honest, it struck me as an illiberal knee-jerk reaction: perhaps understandable in the moment but problematic if enacted as policy.
So I asked Merrick if he regretted his interjection. He told me that, emotionally, he thought it was the right thing to do, although he added it might have been better to appeal to the attorney rather than directly interrupt. But, in the end, he said he thought it was worth it because it had prompted a more thorough conversation.
“It's a slippery slope to be interrupting our Call to the Audience members, because we do not want to stifle free speech, free expression. It could just as easily go, you know, another way. So I think that it was important that we brought this up, and if the interruption brought it up and brought it to you, the press, brought it to the public to rethink this, even if I need to be chastised for interrupting, I don't regret it,” Merrick said. “I don't regret it. I do recognize that's a very slippery slope.”
That conversation remains open, Merrick told me, though there are no clear answers.
An American paradox
There are few arguments capable of generating quite as much queasiness as those over the First Amendment, particularly free speech. It’s something of a paradox: the First Amendment unifies all Americans by forcing us to confront how much we disagree.
The somber maxim that we’d fight to the death to defend the disagreeable speech of another – it sounds noble and grand in theory. But in practice, it can be deeply unsettling to defend language you find to be hateful and corrosive, even more so when you find yourself the target of that language. For that reason, it is, in my opinion, the strongest acid test of someone’s commitment to a free and open society.
It’s not an accident that the First Amendment is, well, first in the Bill of Rights, or that it’s touted so frequently by people of all political stripes. The broad protections of the First Amendment are so deeply ingrained in the American identity that I think some folks forget they are not universal human rights – and are often momentarily pricked with shock when they’re reminded that other free and open democratic nations don’t have quite the same extensive freedoms. And so, the paradoxes of the First Amendment feel uniquely American.
And, yes, there are important limits to the First Amendment and free speech. There’s the tried and true, “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre,” argument. You don’t get the unlimited right to libel or slander people. And you can’t make “true threats” or “incite violence” – although those things can be harder to pin down than you might think, or want.
“I know it when I see it,” was good enough for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart during the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohioobscenity case, but it doesn’t hold up in a lot of First Amendment cases – saying something sounds or looks like a threat doesn’t always cut it. And when it comes to inciting violence, the near-boundless capacity for language to contain double-meanings and dog whistles while maintaining plausible deniability makes things tricky. Look no further than Merrick’s reference to President Donald Trump’s statements on January 6. What does “fight like hell” mean? Depends on who you ask.
When I talk about the issues posed by Cherokee, and the First Amendment’s protections of free speech in general, I find the conversation gets complicated by a few things.
First, it can be hard to tell who is earnestly weighing the sanctity of the First Amendment against the sanctity of life and liberty – and who is weaponizing that debate, in bad faith, simply to censor speech they don’t like. We’ve seen this with Covid and other public health issues, with the need to ‘protect children,’ and other real and imagined emergencies that beg the question of intent rather than rationale.
I can say, whether your objections to speech are heartfelt or transactional, there’s the same underlying risk of creeping illiberalism.
As Perry told me after the meeting, “liberals have been complaining about Trump and free speech with Harvard, or Palestinian protests or whatever — and rightly so — but we can’t then do the same thing.”
By the same token, I would say that Cherokee's call to limit the free association of queer students and remove books about LGBTQ issues is equally illiberal, and he's a key example of leveraging concerns about the safety of children to exercise censorship and commit civil rights violations.
Second, there’s an academic argument for conflating speech and violence that has made its way into mainstream discourse, proposing that in some ways speech (or even silence) can be violence.
I spent a decade in the ivory tower, and I won’t frog-march you through the whole genealogy of the argument, but here’s the gist: if the end result of both physical violence and language can be the same, which is to say the reduction in people’s sense of safety and the restrictions of their rights, then there is no meaningful difference between those two things.
Take gay marriage, or even open gay relationships, which have been restricted at different times by unspoken social rules, written laws, verbal threats, and physical violence. If the end result of all of these is the same – that gay people lose the right to liberty – then the difference between the method of restriction is immaterial. Or take anti-Semitism, where the rhetoric of blood libel, conspiracy theories, and dehumanizing caricatures paved the way for legal disenfranchisement and ultimately police violence and genocide. You can also see the evolution go the other way, from the horrific and overt physical violence of chattel slavery, rape, and lynchings to the codified disenfranchisement of Jim Crow to the subtler racism of stereotypes, implicit biases, and systemic inequality. In each case, language and violence are serving the same ends and so, for some, they’re treated as philosophically interchangeable.
Some people will reject this as high-falutin' nonsense, pointing to the ‘common sense’ difference between social stigma and prejudice, enforceable but immoral or unconstitutional law, and illegal violence. But I think, if you work through the links in the logical chain, there are very good arguments to be made here.
Unfortunately, not everyone takes the time to do that work, or to have that conversation, teasing out all the nuance and connections. Sometimes, the verbal shortcut – language = violence – is a thought-terminating cliche.
In the context of the First Amendment, which calls on us to paint a bright line between word and deed, the shorthand conflation of language and violence doesn’t work. You have to really work at the argument and, at times, be willing to admit that freedom of speech permits what the heart or the conscience might not.
Lastly, the conversation about censorship has been confused by the muddied distinction between government acts that limit speech and what our largest social media platforms have done. While Meta, Google, and X’s platforms have become de facto public squares, the First Amendment doesn’t apply there, at least not in the broad and robust way it does to speaking in front of a government body.
Although we have seen some significant rollbacks since the beginning of the second Trump administration, in general, social media is much more amenable to arguments about the dangers of speech compared to the courts. While X has become a radioactive dumpster fire of misinformation and bigotry, and Meta has rolled back its own efforts to promote civil discourse, these platforms can still, in principle, remove or shadow-ban comments that, like Cherokee’s speech, are likely protected by the First Amendment.
In fact, many people can recall a time when their own seemingly innocuous or obviously unserious comments have been mistakenly blocked by a social media platform, which was erring on the side of caution.
All of that to say, the common and understandable misperception of social media as being a public space and not a private company (which is, unlike a true public square, monetizing your every word) has set up some faulty expectations about what the First Amendment protects and prohibits. After all, it’s not just that there are places on the Internet where speech is curtailed; there are also places where direct threats and calls for violence are apparently allowed.
To bring it back to the school board meeting, the ACLU and FIRE both said fairly forcefully that Cherokee’s speech was lawful — even if you think it was lawful evil.
“Generally, when the government opens a forum to public speakers, there is pretty broad latitude for allowing speech that some might find offensive. Some restrictions are permissible, such as speaker registration, time limits, and limits on the topics open to discussion. But if a person is speaking on a permissible topic, their speech cannot be restricted simply because others might disagree with their position. Some restrictions on ‘disruptive’ speech have been upheld by courts, but there has to be actual disruption. Again, the speech can't be restricted just because others disagree or find it offensive,” Ivy Johnson, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s North Carolina branch, told me this week.
In short, hate speech is protected speech. That’s true even though Cherokee’s invective, by his own admission, is likely to hurt people’s feelings. And it’s true even though, as Merrick noted, it could be the tipping point for a potentially violent person.
If that makes you uncomfortable, you’re not alone. Believe me, I wish we lived in a world where no one felt the way Cherokee does. But I am glad to live in a world where I have the right to criticize his beliefs, and those who share them. Is that the best possible deal? I don’t know. It’s the deal we have. I think, like Merrick, many of us are still struggling with that.
And, look, the New Hanover County Board of Education is in a genuinely difficult place, and not just because of hate speech. No other local government board holds meetings that are as frequently interrupted by outbursts as the school board. No other meetings attract as much genuine passion, aggravating misbehavior, and heightened rhetoric.
There are lots of reasons for this. There’s a top-down culture of dysfunction, after years of chaotic boards under both Republican and Democratic leadership. There is intentionally disruptive and disrespectful behavior by advocates who sit on both sides of the aisle. There’s also the intentional choice of school boards as the pitched battle site for a host of culture wars, which are fought more ferociously than elsewhere in large part because the well-being of children is at stake — an argument that comes in both earnest and deeply disingenuous varieties.
And, I would be remiss if I didn’t recall that several current board members have poured gasoline on this fire as candidates. I’ll admit to an occasional twinge of Schadenfreude as board members — some of whom once accused staff of “grooming” students or suggested past boards should go in front of a war crimes tribunal over their masking policy — now struggle on the other end of protected but provocative speech.
Hateful or not, you could understand why long-time followers of the school board would think you truly could say anything.
There have also been multiple instances when board members have gavelled or shouted down speakers for petty and likely unconstitutional reasons. The board’s Call to the Audience policy prohibits personal attacks, but the interpretation of that policy has at times, in my opinion, conflated legitimate criticism with “fighting words.”
As Aaron Terr, FIRE’s director of public advocacy, told me this week, “courts have often found that bans on personally directed comments are unconstitutionally vague or overbroad […] These policies restrict more speech than necessary to maintain order at meetings. And it's often unclear what qualifies as a ‘personally directed’ comment — for instance, whether merely mentioning a board member by name is enough to trigger the ban.”
To be fair, the school board does usually allow people to address individual board members. The question is whether their skin is thick enough to take criticism without resorting to unconstitutional measures to curb a speaker’s address.
The issue comes back to a paradox: we are united by our shared commitment to disagreeing, often vehemently.
Is good speech (and good ideas and good information) enough to counter bad speech? I think, in a free and open society, you have to try.
Perhaps we can take a page from Cherokee’s book, and tell the most hateful among us, 'Hey, I’ll be in line to speak right behind you, so go ahead: say anything.'
