Our Battle for Free Speech
These past few years I've been thinking a great deal about the right to free speech and how it relates to my writing, my advocacy, and my position as a state employee. What I keep returning to is a simple but uncomfortable truth: we have never truly had a right to free speech. Instead we are locked in an ongoing battle for that freedom. At the birth of our nation, free speech was not a universal right. It was restricted to the original beneficiaries of the Constitution: land-owning white men. It would be inaccurate (and deeply ignorant) to suggest that people considered non-citizens at the time, such as women, Indigenous peoples, and the enslaved, enjoyed that right in any meaningful way. Their speech was not protected, it was prevented, punished, or erased. As history progressed, we saw a gradual widening of that right, or at least a widening of who it was intended for. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and the eventual granting of citizenship to Indigenous peopl...
